The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (32 page)

Dope
itself was originally a kind of thick sauce called
doop
into which Dutch people would
dip
pieces of bread. The sense transferred over to drugs only when people started smoking a thick and gloopy preparation of opium. Given that Amsterdam’s dope cafes have now become famous throughout the world, it’s a little disappointing that any high you might receive from the original Dutch
doop
would be a placebo effect.

Pleasing Psalms

Placebo
is Latin for
I will please
, and its origins are not medical, but religious.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century a
placebo
has been a medical term for a ‘medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient’. Before this, a
placebo
was any commonplace cure that could be dreamt up by a barely qualified medic. The point was not that that pill would please, but that the doctor would. For long before
placebo
medicines there was
Dr Placebo
.

In 1697, a doctor called Robert Pierce recalled rather bitterly how he was always being beaten to new business by a charming and talentless medic whose name he was either too polite or too scared to write down. He called him instead
Doctor Placebo
, and noted with tragic jealousy that Placebo’s ‘wig was deeper than mine by two curls’.

Whoever the original Dr Placebo was, his nickname was taken up by various other embittered doctors of the eighteenth century, until
placebo doctors
had given
placebo pills
with
placebo effects
.

At this point things get a little misty, because although
placebo
does mean
I will please
, the word was originally associated not with cures, but with funerals. There’s nothing so much fun as a good funeral, and anybody who’s truly fond of a good party will tell you that the death rate is much too low, even though it adds up to 100 per cent in the end. The drink doled out at a wake has a certain morbid lavishness to it that is rarely or never found at christenings.

People probably still do turn up at the funerals of those they never knew, just in order to get their hands on some booze, but the practice was much more common in medieval times. People would put on their best clothes and turn up to the funerals of the rich, taking part in the service in the hope of joining in the wake.

This meant that they would all stand silent while the first nine verses of Psalm 114 were sung. Then, as it was an antiphon, and as they all wanted to seem particularly enthusiastic about the deceased, they would lustily sing the ninth verse back to the presiding priest:

Placebo Domino in regione vivorum

Which means:

I will please the Lord in the land of the living

In the
Ayenbite of Inwit
(‘The Prick of Conscience’) from the mid-fourteenth century, the author observes that ‘the worst flattery is that one that singeth placebo’. Chaucer chimes in by saying that ‘Flatterers [are] the Devil’s chaplains that singeth ever Placebo’.

So the psalm led to the funeral, which led to the flatterers, which led to the flattering doctors, which led to the placebo pill.

This may all seem rather unlikely, and some etymologists are more inclined to go straight to the Latin
I will please
, but the psalms were much more important in the Middle Ages than they are today, and they have given us all sorts of words that we might not expect.
Memento
became famous because it was the first word of Psalm 131:

Memento Domine David et omnis mansuetudinis eius

Lord, remember David and all his afflictions

Even more obscure is the connection between the psalms and the phrase
to pony up
or pay.

Consider that 25 March is the end of the first quarter of the year, and was thus the first pay day for those who were paid quarterly. 25 March was therefore a good day for everybody except employers, and nobody likes them anyway.

People would wake up on 25 March, toddle along to church for Matins, and sing the psalm with avaricious expectation in their heart. The psalm for that day is the fifth division of Psalm 119, which is the longest psalm in the Bible and needs to be broken up into bite-size chunks. The fifth division begins with the words:

Legem pone mihi Domine viam iustificationum tuarum et exquiram eam semper

Legem pone
(‘teach me, O Lord’) therefore became a slang word for a down-payment, because in the psalm-obsessed medieval mind it was the first two words of pay-day. In the centuries since then, the
legem
has been dropped, but that doesn’t mean that the phrase has disappeared. If you have ever been asked to
pony up
, it’s only a corruption of
legem pone
and a reference to the praises of pay.

Biblical Errors

Some people say that the Bible is the revealed word of God, which would imply that God spoke English. There’s even a society in America that believes the King James Version was given to mankind by divine revelation, and it has a big ceremony once a year in which other versions of the Bible are piled up and burnt.

It’s certainly true that the King James Version was a lot more accurate than Myles Coverdale’s attempt of a hundred years before. Myles Coverdale was an early Protestant who believed in principle that the Bible should be translated into English. He decided that, as nobody else seemed to be doing it, he had better get on with the job himself, and he didn’t let the tiny detail that he knew no Latin, Greek or Hebrew get in his way. This is the kind of can-do attitude that is sadly lacking in modern biblical scholarship.

Coverdale did know a bit of German, though, and the Germans, who had invented Protestantism, had already started preparing their own translation. Coverdale threw himself into his work and produced a Psalter that is still used in Church of England services today. It is, though, much more beautiful than it is accurate. For example, he has the line:

The strange children shall fail: and be afraid out of their prisons.

It’s beautiful and mysterious. Who are the strange children? What’s so strange about them? And what on earth are they doing in prison? The answer is that the line should be translated as:

The foreign-born shall obey: and come trembling from their strongholds.

But the best of Coverdale’s mistranslations is about Joseph, whose neck, we are told in Psalm 105, was bound in iron. The problem is that Hebrew uses the same word for
neck
as it does for
soul
. The word is
nefesh
, and it usually means
neck
or
throat
, but it can mean
breath
(because you breathe through your neck), and it can also mean
soul
, because the soul is the breath of life. (You have the same thing in Latin and English with
spirit
and
respiratory
.)

If Coverdale had made only one mistake, English would have been given the phrase,
His soul was put in iron
. But Coverdale was never a man to make one mistake when two would do; so he mixed up the subject and the object and came up with the wonderfully inappropriate and nonsensical:
The iron entered into his soul
.

And yet somehow that phrase works. It may have nothing to do with the original Hebrew, but Coverdale’s phrase was so arresting that it caught on. Nobody cared that it was a mistranslation. It sounded good.

Even if the translation of the Bible gets it right, English-speakers can still get it wrong.
Strait
, these days, is usually used to describe a narrow stretch of water like the
Bering Straits
or the
Straits of Gibraltar
, but, if you think about it, other things can be
strait
.
Straitjackets
are small jackets used to tie up lunatics. People who are too tightly laced-up are
strait-laced
. If a gate is hard to get through, then it’s a
strait
gate
, and the hardest gate to pass through is the gate that leads to heaven:

Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Which is why it’s not
the straight and narrow
but
the strait and narrow
.

Finally,
the salt of the earth
is a biblical phrase that has managed to almost reverse its meaning. These days, the salt of the earth are the common folk, the working men and women, the ordinary Joes on the Clapham omnibus; but if that were the case, then the earth would be much too salty to taste good.

When Jesus invented the phrase
the salt of the earth
, he meant exactly the opposite. The world was filled with sinners and pagans, and the only reason that God didn’t destroy it utterly was that the few people who believed in Him were like salt to earth’s stew.

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under the foot of men.

This is strange, as Jesus was later crucified by a bunch of Roman
salt-men
.

Salt

Nobody is certain where the word
soldier
comes from, but the best guess is that it has to do with salt. Salt was infinitely more valuable in the ancient world than it is today. To the Romans, salt was white, tasty gold. Legionaries were given a special stipend just to buy themselves salt and make their food bearable; this was called the
salarium
and it’s where we get the English word
salary
, which is really just
salt-money
. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder therefore went so far as to theorise that
soldier
itself derived from
sal dare
, meaning
to give salt
. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this theory, but as Pliny the Elder was a little bit of a nutjob, it should probably be taken with a
pinch of salt
, which, like the salt of the earth, makes something easier to swallow.

Mainly, though, salt is not military but culinary. Salt gets into almost every food, and into an awful lot of food words. The Romans put salt into every single one of their sauces and called them
salsa
. The Old French dropped the L and made this
sauce
, and they did the same with Roman
salsicus
, or salted meats, that turned into
saucisses
and then into
sausages
. The Italians and Spanish kept the L and still make
salami
,
26
which they can dip into
salsa
, and the Spanish then invented a saucy dance of the same name.

So necessary is salt to a good meal that we usually put it on the table twice. The Old French used to make do with a
salier
or
salt-box
on the table at mealtimes. The English, who are always trying to work out how the French make such delicious food, stole the invention and took it back home. However, once the
salier
had been removed from France, people quickly forgot the word’s origin and how it should be spelt. So we ended up changing
salier
to
cellar
. Then, just to be clear what was in the cellar, we added
salt
onto the beginning and called it a
salt cellar
, which is, etymologically, a
salt-salier
or
salt-salter
.