STRANGE STORIES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 54, Issue 3894, 26 April 1937, Page 3

STRANGE STORIES

WORDS’ BEGINNINGS. SLAVES AS MEN OF RANK. Many words in common use to-day are records of events or personalities of the past. In some cases the meaning has not changed since it was first introduced, in others the passage of years has altered its form altogether, says a writer in the Sunday Express. When we light a “bonfire,” we give no thought to St. John, in whose honour in the fifteenth century fires made from clean bones (bone-fires) were lit. The “Jerusalem” artichoke has nothing to do with Palestine; its proper name is the girasole (sunflower) artichoke. Carelessness and popular appeal has given it its more romantic name, and soup made from artichokes is even known as Palestine soup.

“Rotten Row,” in Hyde Park, London, was originally known as the Route due Roi, being the Plantagenet King’s road from Westminster to the Royal forests. “Pall Mall” received its name because a game in which a palle, or iron ball, was struck through an iron ring with a mall or mallet, was played there. We use the phrase “to the bitter end” as though referring to the harsh dregs of wine or medicine. Originally it was a nautical expression meaning the end of a ship’s cable, that part of it which is abaft the bitts —two pieces of timber to which the cable was attached when the ship rode at anchor. “To eat humble-pie” means to eat our words, to be humbled; the old expression was “umbles-pie,” pie made from inferior portions of deer and given to the poor. A Changed Purpose. Who connects “fiasco” with the word flask? When Venetian glassblowers discovered a flaw in the bulb they were blowing they would convert it into an ordinary commercial flask or fiasco. Hence its adoption to mean failure. We say of a coward that he shows “the white feather.” Why a feather, and why white? In the days of cockfighting the pure-bred game cock had only red and black feathers, but a cross-bred bird often had a white feather in his tail. At the slightest trace of impure breeding affected a cock’s gameness, those with a white feather were never trained for the pit.

Many well-known men have bequeathed their name to some article of clothing worn or designed by them; thus we have Wellington boots, tall riding boots with a flap over the knee, worn by the Iron Duke in his campaigns; Bluchers, short half-boots named after General Blucher; Raglan overcoats, the sleeves of which join the neck, not the shoulders, after Lord Raglan, who lost his right arm at Waterloo, and probably designed this coat as being easy to slip on and off.

The sandwich is called after Lord Sandwich, an inveterate gambler, who, not wishing to interrupt his play, ordered slices of bread and meat to l.e brought to the gambling table. Two Scotsmen gave us new dictionary words: Charles Macintosh, who in 1823 invented the garment that bears his name; and John Loudon McAdam, who about the same year discovered a new method of surfacing roads. Ben Outram is popularly supposed to be the father of the word “tram,” for in 1800 he introduced stone rails on which to run his trucks at the Little Eaton Mines, Derby. The First Boycott. The harshness of an Irish captain towards his employer’s tenants gave us the word “boycott.” To revenge themselves they resolved to have nothing to do with Captain Boycott in any way. The Land League adopted this plan against other enemies, the expression to “boycott” spread like wildfire over Ireland, and to-day it is a dictionary word of the Anglo-Saxon race. To an American, Felix Walker, member of Congress for Buncombe County, North Carolina, we owe the word “bunkum.” One day in Congress he talked so long a time with so little sense that the expression to “talk bunkum” was coined. From America, too, came that word, of dreadful import, “lynch,” Lynch being a Virginian planter who undertook to suppress outlaws and bad men generally. A summary Court tried all the malefactors and straightway had them flogged or expelled from the country so that “Lynch Law” became notorious though the death penalty was never inflicted. Time has given the term a more sinister meaning. A bayonet was so called because the first ones used by the French were made at Bayonne. The semi-precious stone “jade” took its name from the Spanish wordigada —the flank—for the Spaniards used to carry a piece of this stone in their pockets to cure pains in the side. William the Conquerer ordered watchmen to ring a bell every evening at eight o’clock, when all fires and lights had to be put out; the watchmen shouted “Cover the fires,” whence the word “Curfew.” Maker of Derricks. We do not ordinarily connect a “derrick” with a hangman, but hoisting cranes are called after Tom Derrick, who in the early seventeenth century was the Tyburn hangman. In 1759 a “silhouette” was a term of contempt in France applied to any cheeseparing effort, because Count Etienne de Silhouette introduced some highly unpopular reforms to cut down public expenditure. When about that period simple black outlines were introduced to take the place of the more expensive portraits they were nicknamed “silhouettes." Who would imagine that “slave" once meant a person of honourable rank? The Slavi were a powerful

tribe living on the banks of Dnieper, and were called by the word Slav, meaning illustrious. As time passed the tribe grew weaker, and at length so many of them were scattered throughout the Roman Empire as captive menials that their name came to mean a servant or slave. The expression “to maroon,” to set a man on a desert island and there abandon him, has a curious history. Originally the name was given to runaway slaves, especially those from Jamaica. It is a corruption of Cimarron, a word the Spaniards applied to anything unruly, whether man, beast, or Nature; this name being given to the wild strip of land north of Texas and south of Kansas, over which neither State had any control.