Lordly language

There are few words that carry as much weight in the English language as ‘lord’. Lord is used to describe both God and Jesus Christ in the Bible, where the word is used over seven thousand times. The word also has a myriad temporal meanings – the master, ruler or sovereign of men. The upper chamber of the Houses of Parliament is still called the House of Lords, and newly ennobled male peers take lord as part of their title.

So to find the word’s humblest of etymological origins was a surprise. David Crystal’s new book The Story of English in 100 Words points out that lord comes from loaf. How did the word used to denote ultimate sovereignty derive from a lump of bread?

The Oxford English Dictionary’s thorough history of the word shows its development. It started out in Old English as hláford – a combination of hláf (bread or loaf) and ward (keeper). The hláford was the keeper of bread, or the head of the household who had responsibility to feed his servants (those who eat his bread, or hláfǽta (bread eaters). Eventually shortened to lord (by the 15^th century this spelling was common), it was shorn of its original meaning and elevated in importance.

Other Germanic languages did not follow this etymological development, but share the root in some of their words. So an old German word for ‘employer’ is brotherr, or brot herr – bread-lord (and similarly archaic to the term ‘master and servant’ in English). In Scandinavaen languages ‘meat-mother’ means the mistress of servants (matmoder in Swedish, madmoder in Danish and matmóđir in Icelandic).

Ticket to Vokzal

The Russian word for a main train station is Vokzal (воксал). Say it out loud - does it remind you of anything? Say it in a suitably English accent, and it sounds like Vauxhall. Is this a coincidence, or is there an etymological connection between this minor suburban railway station on the London and South Western Railway and the grand Imperial terminii of Tsarist Russia?

 

The most beguiling story is that Vauxhall Station was the location chosen to show off British technological prowess to a Russian delegation. Just a short trip down river from the Houses of Parliament, it was an ideal location to demonstrate the workings of a railway network with a newly built station. According to this explanation, the Russiansmisinterpreted the place name as a descriptor, and became the generic term for all Russian railway stations. From this root, a number of fabulous embellishments were added. From Tsar Nicholas I being personally responsible for the mistake on his trip to London in 1844 to Russian readers of Bradshaw's timetable mistaking the prominent name Vauxhall as being the correct term describing the terminus of the L&SWR (in the days before the L&SWR had pushed through to Waterloo Station).

 

Unfortunately, whilst this makes the best story, it is almost certainly untrue (not least because Russian Railways predate the establishment of Vauxhall Station by one year). But this does not mean there is no connection between Russian railways and the southern London suburb. For centuries, Vauxhall was synonomous with entertainment. Several acres of gardens, tree-lined walkways and pavillions made up the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. With lanterns, fireworks, music, theatre, hot air balloons and even a 1,000 man re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo, the Pleasure Gardens provided the capital with unrivalled escapism from the mid 17th century.

 

It was so famous that the name 'Vauxhall' was used by similar pleasure grounds around the world. It had entered the Russian language as Vokzal, and pleasure grounds within the estate of the Pavlovsk Palace in St. Petersburg soon bore this name. The first railway in Russia served Imperial interests, running from Saint Petersburg via Tsarskoye Selo (the Tsar's Village) to the Pavlovsk Palace. Its terminus near the Pavlovsk Palace's pleasure grounds soon adopted the name Vokzal, which then went on to provide the generic term for teminii in Russian.

 

There are other interesting etymological explanations. Some have suggested that it derives from the German Volkssaal (people's hall), or the Russian vokalny zal (vocal hall). The latter allegedly deriving from the tradition of great Russian singers being honoured by performances in major railway stations. Neither are particularly convincing, but add more colour and confusion to this mystery.

Shocking vocabulary

Electrocute means, and only means, to put to death by means of a powerful electric current. It should not be used for a mere electric shock. This was a distinction I hadn’t full appreciated until reading Mind the Gaffe – something of a pedant’s handbook.

Its first recorded use in English was on 7 June 1889 when New Jersey’s Trenton Times described how a prisoner had volunteered to be ‘electrocuted’ by “testing the new apparatus for executing by electricity”.

New Jersey was not the first state to trial the electric chair, a dubious honour which instead fell to New York. The State of New York set up a committee to determine a more humane method of execution than hanging. The development of the first electric chair became inextricably linked to the bitter contest between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over electrical standards (the so called ‘war of the currents’). The former had championed direct current (DC) and the latter alternating current (AC).

In the end, the first person to be executed by the electric chair was William Kemmler in New York's Auburn Prison on August 6, 1890. The "state electrician", taking the place of the executioner, was Edwin F. Davis. This first attempt was not a huge success, taking several attempts before the prisoner was finally killed. The New York Herald reported:

“Then from the chair came a sizzling sound, as of [meat] cooking on hand. Following it immediately a billow of smoke came from the body and filled the air of the room with the odor of burning hair.”

Edison had succeeded in ensuring that Westinghouse’s AC standard was used for the electric chair, and must have been delighted that the verb ‘to Westinghouse’ came to be used for electrocution. George Westinghouse was more succinct, noting that “they could have done better with an axe”.

Bad air and miasma

Malaria gets its name from the Italian mala aria (bad air), and was originally associated with the swamps and marshlands of Rome. The word was first recorded in English in 1740, when Horace Walpole wrote: “A horrid thing called the mal'aria, that comes to Rome every summer and kills one”. So ubiquitous was the disease that it acquired a specific name – Roman Fever, where its virulence may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire.

The British were horribly afflicted with both malaria and yellow fever, both prevalent in the tropical and sub-tropical climates of their imperial conquests. Western medical science had not yet differentiated these tropical maladies and concluded that they were transmitted by miasmas - a noxious form of “bad air” that was blamed for many unexplained conditions (for example London’s nineteenth century cholera epidemics).

A sort of moral Coventry - the first boycott

Please visit the new website at www.vaguelyinteresting.co.uk

Towards the end of the 1870s the Irish Party in the UK and Clan na Gael in the USA agreed on a campaign for land reform and tenant farmer protection. The Irish National Land League was formed in October 1879, just as a succession of poor harvests, the reappearance of potato blight and harsh weather brought many subsistence farmers once more to the brink of starvation.

Charles Parnell MP, leader of the Irish Party and president of the Land League set out his stall for non-violent action (or, perhaps more properly, inaction) at a rally in front of 12,000 on 19 September 1880 in Ennis, Co. Clare. His own words are far more eloquent than mine, and this extract from his speech that day clearly outlines the Land League’s plan

“Now, what are you going to do with a tenant who bids for a farm from which his neighbour has been evicted? Now I think I heard somebody say, “Shoot him”, but I wish to point out to you a very much better way, a more Christian, a more charitable way which will give the lost sinner an opportunity of repenting.

When a man takes a farm from which another has been evicted, you must show him on the roadside when you meet him, you must show him at the shop counter, you must show him in the fair and at the market place and even in the house of worship, by leaving him severely alone, by putting him in a sort of moral Coventry, by isolating him from the rest of his kind as if he were a leper of old, you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed.”

The first person to be subjected to this treatment was a land agent for the Earl of Erne who took over a farm in Co. Mayo. His name was Captain Charles Boycott.

His name, transformed into a noun and verb, was widely used in newspaper reporting around the world (even being rendered as boikotto in Japanese) and soon entered the dictionary. 

I forbid

The term ‘veto’ today means the power or right vested in one branch of a government to cancel or postpone the decisions of another branch. It is frequently found in the right of the executive (e.g. a president, governor, monarch etc.) to reject bills passed by the legislature.

It has one of the simplest etymological explanations, deriving directly from the Latin “I forbid”. The process was common in the Roman Republic, when it was known as the intercessio. The intercessio was a power that enabled tribunes to protect the interests of the plebs, and would be invoked by the tribune uttering veto. In the United Kingdom, the House of Lords once held the power to veto legislation passed by the House of Commons, but the Parliament Act 1911 reduced this to a power of delay.

The monarch has the power to veto by withholding the Royal Assent. This was last exercised in 1707 when Queen Anne withheld consent to the Scottish Militia Bill. The technical process of refusing consent was to write La Reyne s'avisera – the Queen will take advice – at the head of the Bill. Since then, all Bills have been granted Royal Assent using the following formulae:

·         La Reyne remercie ses bons sujets, accepte leur benevolence, et ainsi le vault (The Queen thanks her good subjects, accepts their bounty, and wills it so) – for a supply bill;

·         La Reyne le vault (the Queen wills it) – all other public or private bills;

·         Soit fait comme il est desire (let it be as it is desired) – for personal bills.

Bearing the weight of the world

In Greek myths the giant Atlas was punished by Zeus to hold the heavens apart from the earth for eternity. His crime was to side with his brother Titans in their war with the Olympians. A small compensation maybe his modern day fame as the etymological source for the word describing a collection of maps.

Most dictionaries agree that Atlases get their name because they were frequently adorned with an illustration of Atlas carrying the earth. The Farnese Atlas became an iconic image, repeated on many Dutch cartographical collections and thus lending the tortured giant’s name to the whole work.

But this overlooks another figure from classical mythology who also has a claim for naming rights. King Atlas of Mauretania was a wise philosopher, mathematician, astronomer and supposed creator of the first celestial globe. One of the greatest map makers of the age, Geradus Mercator, certainly subscribed to this version. The Mercator-Hondius Atlas of 1605 eschews the Farnese Atlas and, instead, depicts King Atlas flanked by figures represent the continents.

Land of winter

 

Hibernia, the classical Latin name for Ireland, can be loosely translated as the Land of Winter. More poetically, it has been rendered as the island of the eternal winter. And anyone who has stood in a face of a driving Atlantic storm in the far west of the island will understand that description.

Hibernia is a geographical term that is today consigned to the descriptive or poetic. The island of Ireland is rarely referred to by its Latin name and the term is now used in the same way that ‘Anglo’ describes something that is English (e.g. Hiberno-English, Hibernophile).

Greek geographer had labelled it Iouernia (written Ἰουερνία), adapting the old Celtic name Īweriū. The Romans took this root, and noticed its useful similarity to the Latin word hibernus (wintry). Possessing a cooler and wetter climate than that enjoyed to the south, and being a murky, misty and unconquered island the name obviously chimed with the Romans and stuck as Ireland’s Latin name.


And, although sounding entirely dissimilar, this etymology shows the shared roots with the present Irish name for the island - Éire (via the old Irish Ériu). And, far from meaning wintry, this proto-Celtic word is likely to mean the abundant land. One man's winter is another's feast.