Gimlet: A boring tool but not a boring Story

This week we re-open the Endless Knot cocktail bar with the origin of the cocktail Gimlet:

If you haven't seem my previous cocktail videos, by the way, have a look at the cocktail playlist which starts off with the etymology of the word "cocktail" itself. Actually, as far as cocktails go, this one's a twofer, with the classic Gin & Tonic thrown in as well, and even a threefer if you include the Grog. If you want to hear a fuller account of the etymology of the word Grog, have a listen to this episode of the podcast Lexicon Valley, in which the excellent Ben Zimmer explains.

I should also point out, by the way, that though the word gimlet, referring to the small drill, comes into English at least as far back as the 15th century, and the figurative gimlet-eyed goes back to 18th century, the OED doesn't have a citation for the gimlet as a drink any earlier than 1928, though perhaps some clever person will manage to backdate that at some point. References to mixtures of gin, lime, and sugar do seem to date back to the 19th century, so even without the name the drink seems to be at least that old. In any case, the most likely etymology of the drink name, I suspect, is the figurative sense of a penetrating drink. Sorry, Dr. Gimlette.

One interesting side detail is the pronunciation of the word quinine. My first instinct was to pronounce it as if to rhyme with "tin" and "mine" (in IPA /ˈkwɪn aɪn/), but I talked myself out of that pronunciation as just mixing up the British and American pronunciations and settled on the British. But after watching a video of quinine fluorescing under UV light that contained a similar uncertainty about the pronunciation, I started to think that my first instinct might represent a particularly Canadian pronunciation. So I polled people I knew on Twitter and Facebook, and here's the result:

Admittedly I don't have a lot of data to go on here, so I'd love to hear from anyone else as to how they pronounce the word, but it does seem clear that the British and American pronunciations are quite consistent (and different from each other), but the Canadian pronunciation is evenly distributed. The American outliers, by the way, are ex-pats living in Europe and Australia, so there may be some influence there. So what do you think?

The botanical name cinchona, by the way, though superficially sounding a bit similar, is not related to quinine and its Quechua root kina, but was instead assigned to the species by Carl Linnaeus, who kind of got the form of the word wrong, in honour of the Spanish Countess of Chinchon who was cured by the bark in 1638 while in Peru in the role of vice-queen, and later brought it back to Spain, after which it became known throughout Europe. This slightly garbled form of the name has nevertheless stuck.

Of course one of the main themes I was trying to draw out here was imperialism and capitalism, with the rise and influence of the East India Companies, in particular with the ongoing rivalry between the British (EIC) and the Dutch (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC). I cheated slightly, in that the word gimlet comes into English from Dutch through Anglo-Normal French, but the number of English borrowings from Dutch later on is significant and historically interesting. The -et on the end of the word is a diminutive suffix in French, so the diminutive form of the word in Dutch would be wimmelkijn. That Dutch suffix comes into English as -kin, as in the word napkin. The point of all this is that though these early commercial efforts led to important innovations like cures for scurvy and malaria (as well as less important innovations like cocktails), they also had the potential for great harm due to European attitudes to colonialism, and at their worst led to devastating atrocities. Our modern world might not be what it is today without this history, but it came with quite a price. For more background on the East India Companies and the rise of the corporation, have a look at this recent article on the British EIC or this Crash Course video on the VOC:

For those tracking previously mentioned links, this time we have the British East India Company, William of Orange, and the Gin Craze, previously mentioned in my first cocktail video. And polymath Erasmus Darwin got a look in in my Coach video. One additional set of links I didn't use in the video has to do with an early advertisement for Rose's Lime Cordial drawn by illustrator Edward Linley Sambourne -- I was unfortunately not able to find an image of this ad online but if you know of one please point it out to me. Sambourne was most famous for being one of the main illustrators for Punch magazine (previously mentioned in "A Detective Story" here) in which he drew a caricature of the first war correspondent William Howard Russell (also previously mentioned in "A Detective Story" here). Sambourne also drew a very famous caricature of Cecil Rhodes, after whom is named Rhodesia and the Rhodes Scholarship which he founded. The deeply racist Rhodes was big into colonialism and was a founder of the massively monopolistic and exploitative De Beers diamond mining company, another fine example of the combination of capitalism and colonialism gone horribly wrong. Sambourne's illustration of him has become iconic of 19th century colonialism.

In the final part of the video, I bring the story of European imperialism around to American imperialism with the story of Smedley Darlington Butler (whom I first heard of, I think, in the excellent Hardcore History podcast). Of course Butler's nickname of Old Gimlet Eye is useful in demonstrating the figurative use of the word gimlet which may also lie behind the name of the cocktail, and makes a nice coincidental parallel with the British naval admiral Old Grogram who invented grog. By the way grog is an example of an eponym, a word which is derived from the name of a person, in this case Old Grogram, and if you believe the Dr. Thomas D. Gimlette etymology for the drink name, that would make it also an eponym. (I discussed the similar concept of the toponym, a word that comes from a place name, in a previous blog post on for the video "Coach".) But Butler's story is also useful in demonstrating the dangers of corporate interests driving colonialist policies in ways not that far removed from the excesses of the British and Dutch East India companies of earlier times. So I'll leave you with Butler's own words, first in an excerpt from an article he wrote in the magazine Common Sense, and then in a video clip of his Business Plot accusation:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

The course, career, and currency of Coach

In this week's video I trace the course of the word "coach":

The surprise in this word's etymology is that so common a word comes from the name of relatively obscure town in Hungary. A word derived from a place name is sometimes referred to as a toponym (a term which also refers to the place name itself). There are of course many such words in English, such as armageddon, bikini, bohemian, champagne, hamburger, marathon, tuxedo--the list goes on. Tracing the town name back further to a word meaning "ram" made the tempting connection with the many sports teams named the Rams (not only the American football team -- here's a list on Wikipedia).  The further interesting etymological detail is the figurative use of the word "coach", in the sense of the type of wagon, to refer to an academic tutor and then a sports coach. (For a larger discussion of metaphor, see my earlier video "Paddle Your Own Canoe".) And along the way, there are some bonus etymologies like carriage, academia, and Oxbridge. Thackeray also coined the parallel word Camford in the novel Pendennis, by the way, but it didn't catch on the way Oxbridge did. For more on the technological history of the coach wagon, have a look at the sources listed on the show notes page.

The main story I wanted to tell through the lens of this etymology was the history of learning and academics, from Plato's Academy, through the Italian Renaissance and compilation of libraries, to Oxford and Cambridge, with their tutors and graded exams. I first heard that fact about William Farish inventing the graded exam, by the way, from QI (possibly their Twitter stream, if I'm remembering correctly). And one of the subplots is the history of women's education, with books on the subject from Erasmus Darwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the later efforts by Anne Clough at Cambridge.  Darwin's ideas on women's education are quite interesting. He was against sentimental novels and the sort of false refinement that Wollstonecraft argued against as well. Instead he had in mind very practical and pragmatic subjects such as the sciences, industry, finances, and foreign languages. A later detail that ties in with this story is Virginia Woolf's use of the word Oxbridge in A Room of One's Own, in which she tells a hypothetical story of a woman's experience at such a university. And finally, the epilogue to the video's story is the relationship between academics and athletics at universities/colleges. This has been discussed in many venues, but I'll leave it with this one clear example from PHD Comics.

Speaking of Erasmus Darwin, by the way, he is a fascinating character. In his long poem The Temple of Nature, he describes his conception of evolution through natural selection, preceding his famous grandson Charles Darwin:

Organic Life beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

And though I couldn't find a rights-free image I could use in the video, here's a picture of the mechanical bird constructed from his design:

And here's a reconstruction of Darwin's speaking machine, which apparently at the time Darwin built it was good enough to fool people into thinking it was a human voice:

And here's the reference to Mary Shelley's inspiration for Frankenstein, from the preface to the novel:

Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

One other detail you'll often hear about Darwin, is that he was quite a large man. He apparently hollowed out a semi-circle in his table to sit closer to his food, and because of the rather shoddy construction of the houses of his patients he often visited he would send in his driver (remember all those coach rides), who was also a substantial man, to test that the floors would hold before he himself entered. We'll be hearing a little more about Erasmus Darwin in an upcoming video, so stay tuned...

Speaking of which, for those like me who like to keep track of recurring nodes and references across the videos, in this one there are quick name checks of Florence Nightingale and Mary Shelley, who were previously mentioned in my videos "A Detective Story" and "Yule" respectively. Also, in "Cocktail part 1" I mentioned that the Old Fashioned cocktail was invented in the Pendennis Club, which was indeed named after Thackeray's novel Pendennis, in which we find the first occurrences of the the verb "to coach" (in its figurative sense) and Oxbridge.

My cuckoo Valentine

As something of a corrective to the usual saccharine Valentine's Day fare, this week's video is on the word "cuckold":

The idea for this video came from my noticing that the first recorded instance of the word 'cuckold' was in the Middle English poem "The Owl and the Nightingale". Every year at Valentine's Day, medievalists like myself bring up the fact that Geoffrey Chaucer in his "Parliament of Fowls" invented the connection between the eponymous saint and the celebration of romantic love, but I knew I wanted to do something a little different, more surprising, and most importantly counter to the usual sentimentality of the season. So once I had the connection between the two medieval bird debate poems and of course the interesting etymology of the word "cuckold" (and the fact that the cuckoo plays a significant role in Chaucer's poem), I knew I had my subject. I had also been aware of the possible cuckold's horns background to the bunny-ears-in-photographs meme, so it was just a question of doing a bit more research into the history of the cuckold horns. And that's when I came across the wonderful capon theory!

The best source for this is Graber and Richter's article "The Capon Theory of the Cuckold's Horns" (see the the show notes for full bibliographic info). Amazingly, this regrafting of the spur to the head seems to be biologically possible. Graber and Richter tell of a 1929 article in the Journal of Heredity in which A.W. Kozelka performs and reports on just this procedure. Unfortunately I haven't been able to track down the original 1929 article (or the photograph it included) but if anyone has access to this I'd love to hear more about it. There are 16th century Italian references to this procedure as well, but unfortunately that's as far back as the evidence goes. However, there is a much earlier ram's horn reference to cuckolding in the late Greek Artemidorus (2nd century), so this would suggest that the theory that it's just a sarcastic reference to animal horns and virility is the real origin, which later perhaps inspired the practice of regrafting the spurs of the capon. As for the Actaeon story, Claire McEachern discusses this and the renaissance context for cuckoldry in her article "Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns?" It's probably not the original source for the association between horns and cuckoldry, but is a renaissance rationalization, and McEachern interestingly argues that cuckold humour and the various associations are a kind of comic defusing of the anxieties over the Protestant theology of election. No, really!

The main source for research on gesture in general (including the sign of the horns and the V sign) is Desmond Morris, who has published widely on the topic. I've listed a few of his books in the show notes, along with a few links to excerpts online. And if you want to read more about the Chaucer/Valentine's Day date question, I've listed a few articles and links in show notes. Suffice it to say there has been a certain amount of discussion of the topic. And though you may sometimes see it claimed that Valentine's Day has its roots in the Roman festival Lupercalia, sadly it doesn't appear to be true. It really is all down to Chaucer.

By the way, we've made a shareable, customizable, somewhat cheeky Valentine's Day e-card with the Horny Cock on it, which you can find at: http://cardkarma.com/card/4XP -- feel free to share it in the spirit of Valentine's Day!

I mentioned that the "sumer" in "Sumer is icumen in" actually refers to spring. So says the excellent David Crystal as well (see the entry on "Cuckoo" in his book The Story of English in 100 Words, listed on the General Credits page). The term "spring" for the season in question isn't attested until 1547, with related terms appearing a little earlier: springing-time (1387), spring-time (1495), springing (1513), spring of the year (1530), spring tide (1530), spring of the leaf (1538). Before that the only other specific terms to refer to spring were references to Lent, part of the Church calendar, or forms of the Latin borrowing ver. Here's the relevant entries in the Historical Thesaurus if you want to look at more terms for spring.

For those keeping track, Oliver Cromwell was the repeat reference in this episode, last appearing in the Yule episode. Well, along with Chaucer and Shakespeare in the "Paddle Your Own Canoe" and "Loaf" episodes, I suppose.

I'd be interested to know how many people have heard the term "foolscap", and in particular if you knew it as the eggcorn "fullscap". When I was young I remember my teachers referring to long sheets of paper (legal?, A4?) as fullscap and short sheets of paper (smaller than letter size) as "halfscap". Please leave me a comment if you've heard of the word "halfscap". 

Finally, I'll leave you with another medieval cuckoo poem that I didn't mention in the video, the Old English cuckoo riddle, which revolves around brood parasitism. Here it is, first in Old English and then in a translation by Kevin Crossley-Holland:

Mec on þissum dagu     deadne ofgeafum
fæder ond modor;     ne wæs me feorh þa gen,
ealdor in innan.     Þa mec ongon,
welhold mege,     wedum þeccan,
heold ond freoþode,     hleosceorpe wrah
swa arlice     swa hire agen bearn,
oþþæt ic under sceate, ·     swa min gesceapu wæron
ungesibbum wearð     eacen gæste.
Mec seo friþemæg     fedde siþþan,
oþþæt ic aweox,     widdor meahte
siþas asettan.     Heo hæfde swæsra þy læs
suna ond dohtra,     þy heo swa dyde.

In former days my mother and father
forsook me for dead, for the fullness of life
was not yet within me. But another woman
graciously fitted me out in soft garments,
as kind to me as to her own children,
tended and took me under her wing;
until under shelter, unlike her kin,
I matured as a mighty bird (as was my fate).
My guardian then fed me until I could fly,
and could wander more widely on my
excursions; she had the less of her own
sons and daughters by what she did thus.

Don't have a cow with beef & don't have a beef with cow

In this week's video I have a look at the words "beef" and "cow":

This video was inspired by the standard example that everyone (myself included) uses to show how the Norman Conquest affected the history of the English language (watch this excellent summary of the history of English from The Ling Space). I often trot out these pairs of words, cow/beef, sheep/mutton, etc., when explaining the history of English literature during the middle ages. This reflects not only historical linguistics, but also another branch of linguistics called sociolinguistics, specifically how languages from two different groups (in this case with two very different levels of prestige and status) interact. What often happens in these instances of language contact between unbalanced groups is that a simplified language called a pidgin develops, to allow for communication between the two groups, which takes the structure from the lower-prestige language but imports much of its vocabulary from the higher-prestige language. The word "pidgin" itself probably has nothing to do with the similar sounding bird "pigeon" (unless it's a metaphorical reference to the brief messages carried by messenger pigeons, as has been suggested). Instead it's derived from the word "business" in the phrase "business English" which was used in the pidgin that developed from English and Chinese to allow those two groups to communicate for the purposes of commerce. If a pidgin language becomes the native language of a new generation of speakers, it develops a more complex structure and we call it a creole, and has the properties of any other fully formed language. Jamaican creole is a famous example of this process. This is what happened with the Old English spoken by the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman French of William the Conqueror and his fellow Normans. Initially a pidgin would have developed, which eventually became the creole that is Middle English and the Modern English we speak today. So a lot of French vocabulary came into English, leaving us in this case with these English-French pairs of words which reflect the social realities of life in England about a thousand years ago. The interesting twist here, of course, is that in the case of cow and beef, if you go back far enough all the way to Proto-Indo-European, the two words actually come from the same root, and that long history of the word inspired me to write what is essentially a story about war and conflict.

Since I've promised to point out in these blog posts some of the recurring nodes and connections that come up often in the videos, I'll draw attention to the Crimean War, which plays a more central role in my earlier video A Detective Story ( or click here for the specific reference in the video). A few other points to call attention to: Bulwer-Lytton was a wonderfully colourful figure, as his Wikipedia biography attests to. Have a look here and here for some more entertaining bits of trivia about him. According to the Wikipedia, Bovril is particularly associated with British football culture, since thermoses of the hot drink are a good way to keep warm while sitting in the stands watching a match, though apparently thermoses of Bovril are banned in Scotland due to their potential use as projectiles -- another link in the war and conflict associations with the word "beef"? And of course the Beefeaters, guards of the Tower of London who were apparently unusually well fed,  have become an icon of Britain as well, and it has been pointed out (see here and here for instance) that there is a similarity between the word "beefeater" and the Old English term hlaf-æta meaning "loaf-eater", which is an interesting parallel with the Old English hlaford or "loaf-warden" leading to our modern word "lord", which I discussed in my last video on the word "loaf". With videos on the words "loaf" and "beef", you can now make an etymological sandwich. You're welcome!

So I'll leave you with one last related etymology that I didn't use in the video. The Proto-Indo-European root that leads to beef and cow also leads to Greek βούς (or bous), which also means "cow". This is the first element in the compound boutyron which means literally "cow-cheese" and give English the word "butter". Butter is, of course, the first element of the word "butterfly". But why is a butterfly called a butterfly? It's been suggested that it comes from a folk belief that the insects or witches who have taken on the form of butterflies like to steal butter, which might also be supported by the German word for butterfly, milchdieb, which literally means "milk-thief". Or it might come from the supposed similarity in appearance between butter and the excrement of butterflies, a theory perhaps bolstered by the Dutch word for butterfly, boterschijte, which means literally (ahem) "butter-shit". And so I'll leave you with that appetizing thought!

Using My Loaf

After a month off, it's back to posting new videos, and this week's word is "loaf":

This video is one of the earlier ones I made, but for various scheduling reasons I haven't released it until now. As a result, the structure and pacing of this one is a bit different from the style I'm settling into now, and my apologies if the pace is a bit too quick -- you can have a look at the transcript if anything went by too quickly to pick up on. This video was inspired by my teaching of Anglo-Saxon literature and explanation of the comitatus society that lies behind early Germanic culture, and of course the key point is the etymological connection with the words lord and lady. As I keep putting out more and more of these videos, the connections between the videos will inevitably pop up more and more often, so I'll try to point out some the interesting ones. Both this video and the Yule episode mention the 1815 eruption of Mt Tambora which led the Year Without a Summer in 1816, and both videos mention the Old English poem Beowulf and the Roman writer Tacitus, an important source on early Germanic culture.

"Loaf" and as it turns out "bread" are examples of words that have become more restricted in their meanings over time. "Loaf" used to be a general word for bread, and "bread" could refer to morsels of any food. Another example of this is the verb "starve", which in Old English meant simply "to die" and only later narrowed to mean "to die due to lack of food". In linguistics this type of change in meaning is referred to as "narrowing". Another similar example of this is the word "meat", which in Old English meant "piece of food" or simply "food", but now refers mainly to food that is the flesh of an animal. Interestingly, it either comes from a the Proto-Indo-European root *mad- meaning "wet, to drip", referring perhaps to "fat", or it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *met- meaning "to measure" and gives us not only the word "measure" but also "meter" and "meal", in the sense of food measured out into portions. So perhaps "bread", "meat", and "meal" all reflect the communal action of sharing food. Oh, and the word "mate" comes from "meat", so a mate is someone you share food with, much like the word "companion" that I mention in the video. I guess that's why go out on a romantic date you often have a meal together! Well, if all this discussion of loaves, bread, meat, and meals is making you hungry, make sure you don't starve!

If it's occurred to you to wonder about the other meaning of the word "loaf", in the sense "to laze about, be idle", it's not related to the bread word. Instead, it seems to be a backformation from the word "loafer". Though there's some disagreement as to where "loafer" comes from, one suggestion is that it's an Anglicization of German landläufer meaning "vagabond", from land and the verb laufen meaning "to run". Or it might be related to Old English laf which means "what is left, the remainder", which is related to the verb "to leave", and is an element of the name of the character in Beowulf called Wiglaf (literally "the remainder of battle"), who unlike uncle Beowulf himself, survives the final battle with the dragon (sorry for the spoiler). Either way, this sense of "loaf" has nothing to do with bread, but it may still be connected to the poem Beowulf.

When writing the scripts, inevitably some material gets left out, so here are a few extra tidbits that were interesting but didn't make the cut. The word "companion" which I pointed out as a interesting parallel for "lord" is particularly significant as a reflection of Germanic culture as well. Though the word is Latin, it's probably a translation of an earlier Germanic one, as it first appears in a Frankish text, an early medieval Germanic tribe, and the Gothic language has a word related to "loaf" that means something like "messmate". The expression "to take bread and salt" means to swear an oath, and may be related to an old, possibly eastern, tradition of eating bread and salt once an oath was taken.  In Slavic cultures bread and salt is a sign of hospitality and is offered to guests. The expression "to take bread and salt" was a new one on me, but it's listed in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable.

The use of loaf to mean "head" (or by extension brain) as I've done in the title of this blog post with the common expression "use your loaf" is probably from rhyming slang: loaf of bread = head. Interesting, this rhyming slang also gives us loaf of bread = dead. All the discussion of the different senses of "loaf" and "bread", particularly with metaphorical senses related to money, were inspired by playing around with the OED, and particularly the historical thesaurus feature (also available separately as The Historical Thesaurus of English). It's lots of fun looking through various terms and euphemisms for basic concepts like money that were used over the years. If you know of any other bread expressions that I didn't mention in the video, feel free to share in the comments.

One final note about the bubbles in beer: I've been unable to find a satisfactory answer to the question of whether or not beer historically would have been fizzy. Today beer is usually artificially carbonated, but historically beer could be made fizzy by allowing it to continue fermenting in the bottle (as homebrewers often still do), but this would require bottles that could be properly sealed to maintain the fizz. But I would speculate that even in barrels that weren't fully sealed, some amount of fizziness might remain, particularly if the beer was consumed relatively quickly after fermentation, rather than stored for a long time. But if there are any food historians out there who could shed some light on this in the comments below, I'd be very interested to hear.