The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language (6 page)

And, just to prove the point even more irritatingly,
bleach
comes from the same root and can mean
to make pale
, or any substance used for making things black. Moreover,
bleak
is probably just a variant of
bleach
and once meant white.

Such linguistic nonsenses are a lot more common than you might reasonably have hoped.
Down
means
up
. Well, okay, it means
hill
, but hills are upward sorts of things, aren’t they? In England there’s a range of hills called the Sussex Downs. This means that you can climb up a down.

Down
, as in
fall down
, was originally
off-down
, meaning
off-the-hill
. So if an Old Englishman fell off the top of a hill he would fall
off-down
. Then lazy Old Englishmen started to drop the word
off
. Rather than saying that they were going
off-down
, they just started going
down
. So we ended up with the perplexing result that the
downs
are
up
above you, and that going
downhill
is really going
downdown
.

But we must get back to
blanks
and lotteries.

Once upon a time, a lottery worked like this. You bought a ticket and wrote your name on it. Then you put it into the name jar. Once all the tickets had been sold, another jar was filled up with an equal number of tickets, on some of which were written the name of a prize.

The chap running the lottery would pull out two tickets, one from the name jar and one from the prize jar. Thus, way back in 1653, the court of King James I was described as:

A kind of Lotterie, where men that venture much may draw a Blank, and such as have little may get the Prize.

Blank lottery tickets were thus the financial opposite of
blank cheques
(if you’re British) and
blank checks
(if you’re American), although as we shall see, the American spelling is older.

Hat Cheque Point Charlie

Almost every word in the English language derives from
shah
.

Once upon a time, Persia was ruled by shahs. Some shahs were happy shahs. Other shahs were crippled or dead. In Persian that meant that they were
shah mat
.
Shah
went into Arabic as, well,
shah
(ain’t etymology fascinating?). That went into Vulgar Latin as
scaccus
. That went into vulgar French (all French is vulgar) as
eschec
with the plural
esches
, and that went into English as
chess
, because a game of chess is a
game of king
, the king being the most important piece on the board. And what happened to
shah mat
? When the king is crippled, a chess player still says
checkmate
.

Chess is played on a chessboard. Chessboards are kind of useful because you can arrange stuff on them. For example, when Henry II wanted to do his accounts he did them on:

a quadrangular surface about ten feet in length, five in breadth, placed before those who sit around it in the manner of a table, and all around it it has an edge about the height of one’s four fingers, lest any thing placed upon it should fall off. There is placed over the top of the escheker, moreover, a cloth bought at the Easter term, not an ordinary one but a black one marked with stripes, the stripes being distant from each other the space of a foot or the breadth of a hand. In the spaces moreover are counters placed according to their values.

Dialogus de Scaccario
,
c. 1180

It looked just like a chessboard and, as Henry II spoke French, it was called the
Escheker
– that’s why the finances of the British government are still controlled by the
Chancellor of the Exchequer
. (The S changed to X through confusion and foolishness.)

But chess and Persian kings don’t stop there. We are nowhere near the endgame. Let us continue unchecked.

You see, when your opponent puts you in
check
, your options become very limited. You have to get out of
check
in one move or it’s
checkmate
and the game is over. From this you get the idea of somebody or something being
held in check
.
Checking
somebody
stops
them doing what they want, and that’s why you can still body-
check
people, and why government is held
in check
by
checks
and balances
.

Check
or
cheque
began to mean somebody who stopped things going wrong. For example, the
Clerk of the Cheque
, whom Pepys mentions in his seventeenth-century diaries, was the chap who kept a separate set of accounts for the royal shipyard. He
checked
fraud and served a good lunch.

I walked and enquired how all matters and businesses go, and by and by to the Clerk of the Cheque’s house, and there eat some of his good Jamaica brawne.

And from that you get the sense of a
check
as something that stops dishonesty. At a
hat-check
, for example, you get a
check
to prove that you’re not stealing somebody else’s hat. Bank
checks
(or
cheques
) were originally introduced as a replacement for promissory notes and got their name because they
checked
fraud.

Bank checks
started out being spelled with a –
ck
on both sides of the Atlantic. But British people, perhaps under the influence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, decided to start calling them cheques. This has a peculiar etymological result. A
blank cheque
is a
cheque
with no
check
on it. Given that blank cheques are found from as early as 1812, it’s a miracle that the first
bouncing
cheque
isn’t recorded in the dictionary until 1927.

And from there you get
check off
(1839) and
check up
(1889). And then the Wright Brothers invented the aeroplane and people would fly around and navigate by distinctive landmarks called
checkpoints
. And then the Second World War broke out and pilots were trained and given an examination or
checkout
. Then shops got
checkouts
and
roadblocks
became
checkpoints
and people went to doctors for
checkups
and guests
checked
out
of hotels and
checked in
at
check
-
ins
wearing a
checked
shirt and all, dear reader,
all
because of crippled shahs from ancient Persia.

All of this has nothing to do with the Czech Republic, which is ruled not by a shah but a president. However, Ivan Lendl’s wife could reasonably be said to have a
Czech mate
.

Sex and Bread

Freud said that everything was secretly sexual. But etymologists know that sex is secretly food.

For example,
mating
with somebody was originally just sharing your food, or
meat
, with them (
meat
meant food of any kind and not just flesh). Likewise, your
companion
is somebody with whom you share your
bread
(from the Latin
panis
).

The Old English word for bread was
hlaf
, from which we get
loaf
; and the Old English division of labour was that women made bread and men guarded it. The woman was therefore the
hlaf-dige
and the man was the
hlaf-ward
.

Hlafward and Hlafdige

Hlaford and Hlafdi

Lavord and Lavedi

Lord and Lady

And Indian bread is in the nude, but to explain that I’m going to have to explain how half the languages in the world began, or at least the best theory on the subject.

Once upon a terribly long time ago, four thousand years before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, there were some fellows living between the Black Sea and the Caspian. Whenever one of them died the others would bury him, or her, in a pit. They were therefore called the Kurgan Pit Burial culture. They also had some distinctive pottery and all the other tedious accoutrements of Neolithic man.

Well,
we
call them the Kurgans. We don’t know what they called themselves. This was in the time before the invention of writing, or even of the internet, so we don’t know what language they spoke, but we can take a very educated guess, and that educated guess is called
Proto-Indo-European
, or PIE for short.

The Kurgans probably invented the chariot, and probably used it to invade their neighbours. However, they did these invasions in a deplorably disorganised manner. Rather than all banding together and attacking in one direction, they split up and attacked hither and thither. Some of them ended up in northern India and some of them ended up in Persia. Some went to the cold, rainy lands around the Baltic, and some of them went to Greece and became Greek. Still others got lost and ended up in Italy and it was, to put it gently, a big mess.

We can tell where they went by digging up their burial pits and their distinctive pottery and whatnot. But their pottery is not what makes them interesting. They also took with them their language – Proto-Indo-European – and spread it all over Europe and Asia.

One would have hoped that this would operate like a reverse Tower of Babel, but it did not. You see, all the different groups developed different accents and these accents became so strong that their languages became mutually incomprehensible. After a few hundred years the Kurgans in northern India wouldn’t have been able to make out what their cousins in Italy were saying. If you want to see this process in action today, visit Glasgow.

So the ancient Indians called their dads
pitar
, and the Greeks called their dads
pater
, and the Romans called them
pater
. The Germans, though, started pronouncing the letter P in a very funny way that made it sound more like an F. So they called their male parent
fater
, and we call him
father
, because English is descended from Old German.

Similarly, the PIE word
seks
became German
sechs
, English
six
, Latin
sextus
, Sanskrit
sas
and Greek
hex
; because the Greeks pronounced their Ss funny.

There are rules of pronunciation like the German P-F and the Greek S-H that mean we can trace all these fundamental words. That’s how we can work back and take an educated guess about what Proto-Indo-European was. However, it isn’t always so simple.