The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (5 page)

That’s the same thing that happens to a book when it’s sent to the proofreader. What the proofreader gets is a proof copy, which he pores over trying to fnid misspellings and unnecessary apostrophe’s.

That’s also why an exception really does prove a rule. The exception is what puts a rule to the test. That test may destroy it, or the rule may be tested and survive, but either way the theory has been
proved
.

Similarly, when a new weapon is taken to the proving ground, it’s not just to make sure that it exists. The proving ground is a place where a weapon can be tested to make sure that it’s as deadly as had been hoped.

All of which should explain why the
test
of a good dessert and the
proof of a pudding
is in the eating. It’s the old sense of
prove
.

Mind you, you probably wouldn’t have wanted to
prove
old puddings. A pudding was, originally, the entrails of an animal stuffed with its own meat and grease, boiled and stuck in a cupboard for later. One of the earliest recorded uses of the word is in a medieval recipe from 1450 for Porpoise Pudding:

Puddyng of Porpoise
. Take the Blode of hym, & the grece of hym self, & Oatmeal, & Salt, & Pepir, & Gyngere, & melle [mix] these togetherys wel, & then put this in the Gut of the Porpoise, & then lat it seethe [boil] esyli, & not hard, a good while; & then take hym up, & broyle hym a lytil, & then serve forth.

The proof of porpoise pudding would definitely be in the eating. A pudding was effectively just a very strange (and possibly poisonous) kind of sausage.

Now, before the next link in the chain, can you take a guess as to why glamorous people put sausage poison in their faces?

Sausage Poison in Your Face

The Latin word for sausage was
botulus
, from which English gets two words. One of them is the lovely
botuliform
, which means
sausage-shaped
and is a more useful word than you might think. The other word is
botulism
.

Sausages may taste lovely, but it’s usually best not to ask what’s actually in them. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was a sausage-maker who disposed of the body. In nineteenth-century America, the belief that sausages were usually made out of dog meat was so widespread that they started to be called
hotdogs
, a word that survives to this day. Sausages are stuffed with pork and peril. They don’t usually kill you, but they can.

There was an early nineteenth-century German called Justinus Kerner, who when not writing rather dreary Swabian poetry worked as a doctor. His poetry is now quite justifiably forgotten, but his medical work lives on. Kerner identified a new disease that killed some of his patients. It was a horrible malady that slowly paralysed every part of the body until the victim’s heart stopped and he died. Kerner realised that all his dead patients had been eating cheap meat in sausages, so he decided to call the ailment
botulism
, or
sausage disease
. He also correctly deduced that bad sausages must contain a poison of some sort, which he called
botulinum toxin
.

In 1895 there was a funeral in Belgium. Ham was served to the guests at the wake and three of them dropped down dead. This must have delighted the undertakers, but it also meant that the remaining meat could be rushed to the University of Ghent. The Professor of Bacteria studied the homicidal ham under a microscope and finally identified the culprit, little bacteria that were, appropriately, shaped like sausages and are now called
Clostridium botulinum
.

This was an advance because it meant that Kerner’s botulinum toxin could be manufactured. Now, you might be wondering why anybody would want to manufacture botulinum toxin. It is, after all, a poison. In fact, one microgram of it will cause near-instantaneous death by paralysis. But paralysis can sometimes be a good thing. If, for example, you’re afflicted by facial spasms, then a doctor can inject a tinsy-winsy little dose of botulinum toxin into the affected area. A little, temporary paralysis kicks in, and the spasms are cured. Wonderful.

That, at least, was the original reason for manufacturing botulinum toxin; but very quickly people discovered that if you paralysed somebody’s face it made them look a little bit younger. It also made them look very odd and incapable of expressing emotion, but who cares about that if you can remove a few years’ worth of ageing?

Suddenly sausage poison was chic! The rich and famous couldn’t get enough of sausage poison. It could extend a Hollywood actress’s career by years. Old ladies could look middle-aged again! Injections of Kerner’s sausage poison were like plastic surgery but less painful and less permanent. Sausage poison became the toast of Hollywood.

Of course, it’s not called sausage poison any more. That wouldn’t be very glamorous. It’s not even called botulinum toxin, because everybody knows that toxins are bad for you. Now that botulinum toxin has become chic, it’s changed its name to
Botox
.

So, if Botox is sausage poison and
toxicology
is the study of poison and
intoxication
is poisoning, what does
toxophilite
mean?

Bows and Arrows and Cats

A
toxophilite
is somebody who loves archery. The reason for this is that
toxin
comes from
toxon
, the Greek word for
bow
, and
toxic
comes from
toxikos
, the Greek word for
pertaining to archery
. This is because when the ancient Greeks went to war they always dipped their arrowheads in poison. The two ideas were so connected in the Greek mind that
toxon
became
toxin
.

Archery used to be ubiquitous. That’s why there are so many people called Archer, Fletcher (arrow-maker) and Bowyer (bow-maker) in the phone book. In 1363 Edward III passed a law that required all men over the age of fourteen and under the age of 60 to practise the sport once a week. Obviously, it wasn’t so much a sport back then as a means of killing people. Edward III’s law has never actually been repealed.

So, terms from archery are hidden all over the English language, for example
upshot
. The
upshot
is the shot that decides who has won an archery contest. King Henry VIII’s accounts for 1531 include his sporting losses and:

To the three Cotons, for three sets which the King lost to them in Greenwich Park £20, and for one upshot won of the King.

Tudor archery was not necessarily a pleasant business. There are two theories on the origin of the phrase
enough room to swing a cat
. The first is that the
cat
is a cat-o’-nine-tails and that it’s hard to whip somebody properly in a small room. The other theory is to do with marksmanship.

Hitting a stationary target was just too easy for the Tudors. So the best archers used to test themselves by putting a cat in a bag and hanging the bag from the branch of a tree. The ferocious feline would wriggle about and the sack would swing, and this exercise in animal cruelty provided the discerning archer with a challenge and English with a phrase.

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with
letting the cat out of the bag
. That’s to do with pigs, obviously. In medieval markets piglets were sold in sacks, so that the farmer could carry them home more easily. This was
a
pig in a poke
. A standard con at the time involved switching a valuable piglet for a valueless cat or dog. You were then being
sold a pup
, or, if you discovered the trick, you would
let the cat out of the bag
. Unlikely as that all sounds, there are equivalent phrases in almost every European language.

But to return to archery, all this sagittopotent
3
and toxophilite tosh brings us around to the odd phrase
point blank
.

The
blank
here is not your usual English
blank
, though it’s closely related. The
blank
in
point
blank
is the French
blanc
, which of course means
white
. The term
bullseye
is reasonably new. It was invented only in the nineteenth century. Before that, the white spot bang in the middle of an archery target was called the
white
or
blank
.

The funny thing about archery is that you don’t usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton’s troublesome invention. That’s why
aim high
is another archer’s term; it doesn’t mean that you’ll end up high, or it’s not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

However, there’s one situation in which this rule does not apply: if you are very, very, very, very close to the target. In that case you can aim straight at the
blank point
or white spot in the middle. If you’re that close to the target, you’re at
point blank
range.

3
Good at archery, like Sagittarius, but we’ll come to the Zodiac (or
little zoo
) later.

Black and White

Etymologists have a terrible time distinguishing black from white. You’d think that the two concepts could be kept apart, but that wasn’t how the medieval English thought about things. They were a confusing bunch of people and must have had a terrible time ordering coffee. The
Oxford English Dictionary
itself feebly admits that: ‘In Middle English it is often doubtful whether
blac
,
blak
,
blacke
, means “black, dark,” or “pale, colourless, wan, livid”.’

Chess would have been a confusing game; but on the plus side, racism must have been impractical.

Utterly illogical though all this may sound, there are two good explanations. Unfortunately, nobody is quite sure which one is true. So I shall give you both.

Once upon a time, there was an old Germanic word for
burnt
, which was
black
, or as close to
black
as makes no difference. The confusion arose because the old Germanics couldn’t decide between black and white as to which colour
burning
was. Some old Germans said that when things were
burning
they were bright and shiny, and other old Germans said that when things were
burnt
they turned black.

The result was a hopeless monochrome confusion, until everybody got bored and rode off to sack Rome. The English were left holding
black
, which could mean either
pale
or
dark
, but slowly settled on one usage. The French also imported this useless
black
word. They then put an N in it and later sold it on to the English as
blank
, leaving us with
black
and
blank
as opposites.

The other theory (which is rather less likely, but still good fun) is that there was an old German word
black
which meant
bare
,
void
and
empty
. What do you have if you don’t have any colours?

Well, it’s hard to say really. If you close your eyes you see nothing, which is
black
, but a
blank
piece of paper is, usually,
white
. Under this theory,
blankness
is the original sense and the two colours –
black
and
white
– are simply different interpretations of what
blank
means.