Monkey business

The English names of many monkeys are often taken directly from the local names in whatever part of the world the animals are found. When the names are more consciously awarded, however, some themes start to emerge. The names baboon and marmoset both come from French words that mean ‘grotesque figure’. When the people who named monkeys were in a more charitable mood, however, they drew analogies with monks.

The best known example of the latter practice can be found in the capuchin monkey of South America. This creature’s name comes from the supposed resemblance between its thick pelt and the cowl of the Capuchin monks, a branch of the Franciscan order noted for the hooded cloaks worn by its members (capuchon being the French word for a cowl).

A very similar process can be seen in the less familiar word talapoin. This comes from an ancient form of the Mon language of south-east Asia, and originally referred to a Buddhist monk. But it was later applied to a small West African monkey on account of a perceived similarity between the two.

It is curious that the entries for monk and monkey are adjacent in The Chambers Dictionary. On some levels the two represent quite contradictory ideas: monks are solitary, sober and serious, while we think of monkeys as being gregarious and fun-loving creatures. Moreover, although both words start with the same four letters, they have their origins in different languages: monk comes (via Old English and Latin) from the Greek word monachos meaning literally ‘a person who lives alone’; monkey appears to have come from the Middle Low German word moneke.

Is it just a coincidence that two different species of monkey should be named after two different types of holy man? Or is it perhaps that people have looked at these creatures and seen something spiritual going on behind all of their monkeying around?

Ian Brookes

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Words on the chopping block

At the end of February, researchers at The University of Reading claimed to have identified – with a little help from computer technology – the oldest words in English. Among these were the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘who’, and the numerals ‘two’ and ‘three’. More controversially, the researchers proposed words that could disappear relatively quickly, including verbs such as ‘turn’ and ‘wipe’.

As editor of The Chambers Dictionary, I was invited last week to take part in a discussion about the research on The Book Café on BBC Radio Scotland The overriding view among the guests was one of scepticism: surely language evolution is not so predictable that human or machine can say with any certainty which words will have the shortest life?

The extinction of words was a topic I had been pondering just before the research was published, having been prompted by a correspondent’s question about how we assign the label ‘obsolete’ to words in the dictionary. The answer is that we have no hard-and-fast rules, except that the label should be applied to words that we are certain have fallen out of use, usually because they refer to obsolete concepts. But then, it is very difficult to determine when a word is truly obsolete, and our awareness of it means there is always the potential to use it again. If I mention a word that has disappeared from the dictionary since 1901 – let’s say ‘wappet’ (a yelping dog) – can I claim to have resurrected the word by using it in this blog?

It was put to me by a producer on the programme that I must witness the death of words frequently, when we delete them from the dictionary and replace them with others. In truth, Chambers editors are not guilty of deleting very much. The editors of the 1972 edition of The Chambers Dictionary attempted to delete just one word – agene, a flour whitening agent. Not, you might imagine, a word of such inherent character and interest that it was bound to elicit love and loyalty. However, several correspondents remarked on its loss and the word was restored to the dictionary, where it resides contentedly to this day.

A report on the BBC news site on the Reading research described certain words as ‘heading for the lexicographer’s chopping block’. Because they can decide what is included in dictionaries, lexicographers are often perceived as having the final say in whether a word is dead or alive: they are the judge, jury and executioner in a word’s trial. However, lexicographers are well placed to appreciate how difficult it is, when language can be fluid and unpredictable, to say with confidence when a word is no longer in use. They also know how loath word lovers can be to think that any word could ever vanish completely.

Mary O'Neill

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Tackling the linguistics of rugby

In the first match of the Six Nations Rugby Championship this year Nick Mallet, Italy's coach, chose to play the talented flanker Mauro Bergamasco at scrum half. So appalling was his performance that a new phrase was immediately coined by journalists and rugby pundits: 'doing a Bergamasco'. Depending on who you listen to, the phrase refers either to one particularly shocking, ballooning pass by the hapless Mauro which gifted Italy's opponents England a try or to the poor decision by the selection committee to play a normally excellent player completely out of position with disastrous consequences.

Fortunately for Bergamasco and Italy such journalistic coinages are usually transient and tend to pass out of the language just as a badly thrown rugby ball can loop past its intended recipient (sorry, couldn't resist). However it won't be of comfort that there are cases of enduring performance-related coinages. These include the garryowen, defined by The Chambers Dictionary as 'a high kick forward together with a rush towards the landing-place of the ball'. The name comes from the Garryowen Club in County Limerick, Ireland, whose play was characterised by the frequent use of such 'up and under' kicking tactics.

As with many sports, the language of rugby is lively and rich: players forming a 'maul' could engage in some 'up the jumper' play, even a bit of 'truck and trailer' but they should be careful not to be 'pinged' by the referee or they might end up in the 'sin bin'. One of the most confusing things I found when I first started watching rugby was the multitude of names each position seemed to have. For example, the player in the number 10 position in rugby union can be referred to as a 'fly half', a 'fly', an 'outside half', an 'out half', a 'stand-off', a 'stand-off half', a 'five-eighth', a 'first five-eighth' or a 'first five', with apologies to the experts if I've missed out any. The diverse nomenclature is due to differences between rugby league and rugby union, historical rule changes and regional variation.

In addition to rugby-specific terminology, there are also more common words which have a particular rugby or sports sense such as 'mark', 'dummy', 'conversion', 'blind', 'open' and 'hooker'. Their use can lead to misunderstandings when rugby commentary is taken out of context, with often humorous or rude results. I spotted a nice example of potential ambiguity in the Observer's analysis of the Wales Italy game last weekend where Michael Aylwin writes:

'Tom Shanklin, one of a raft of replacements brought on to save a game that Wales were losing 12-7 as the final quarter approached, went over with eight minutes remaining after James Hook had gone blind from a ruck.'

For those of you with no interest in rugby, you'll be glad to know that James Hook is still fully-sighted. He just ran from the ruck on the side closer to the touch line.

Ruth O'Donovan

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Too extreme for words

Some of us at Chambers have banded together to take part in a charity white-water rafting race on Saturday (yes, white-water rafting in Scotland in March – it’s going to be rather chilly). Forming the fundraising group on Facebook meant we had to decide what type of group it was. Sport, undoubtedly, but what category? We plumped for ‘extreme sports’.

Any sport forms a vocabulary of its own with words and meanings unique to it: think of the intense air of excitement a corner conjures up in football compared to the relative drabness of the corner of your living room, or the fundamental differences between a metal fencing piste and a snowy skiing piste. But extreme sports require a vocabulary that is rather more… extreme.

For a start, the language used by extreme sports fanatics tends to be exceedingly earthy. Swearing is often regarded as a sign of a poor vocabulary (even if the delectably filthy Chambers Slang Dictionary would beg to differ), but perhaps there is something about these sports that is too extreme for everyday words, something that transcends the boundaries of polite conversation.

However, it is not just swear words that are employed to try to convey the sheer intensity of the adrenaline rush involved. ‘Wicked’, ‘awesome’, ‘to the max’, ‘gnarly’, ‘sick’, the rather telling ‘mental’ and, of course, ‘extreme’ are just some of the examples that are familiar from modern mainstream usage. If the manoeuvre you had planned didn’t quite work out, you might describe it as ‘carnage’.

While carnage is a frequent occurrence, most people do emerge unscathed. With such dangerous sports, safety is paramount so the worst only happens very rarely. However, when it does, the euphemisms tend to be more polite, more gentle, and rarely found in any sporting glossaries. In skydiving, for example, ‘hooking in’ [a fast, downwards turn performed close to the ground before you land] is very dangerous, and, unlike football, being ‘in the corner’ [performing such a turn too close to the ground] can kill. The phrase no skydiver wants to hear is that one of their friends ‘went in’ at the weekend.

As long as extreme sports remain minority sports, the extreme meanings of these words will remain outside of the mainstream. But that’s probably how they’d like to be. A bit maverick, a bit ‘mental’, and slightly smug that they’re in on something amazing that the rest of us have no idea about.

P.S. The white-water rafting is taking place on Saturday 21st of March in aid of Chest, Heart and Stroke Scotland. If you’re interested in supporting us, the Facebook group is called ‘Chambers Rafting’ and our Justgiving page is justgiving.com/chambersrafting. Thank you!

Naomi Farmer

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The surprising journey of the paternoster

At the University of Sheffield there is a twenty-storey Arts Tower that dominates the skyline and has been said to sway in strong winds. In order to get students to the many floors in time for lectures the building uses a paternoster, a lift that consists of 38 cars moving on a continuous belt, so that passengers must ascend and alight with just the right timing at their chosen floor.

It is common knowledge at the university that paternoster comes from the Latin for 'Our Father'. Indeed, the Latin 'pater' can be seen as the stem of words such as paternal and paternity, and survives in the Italian and Spanish for father, 'padre'. Yet how such a strange contraption should have been given this name seems at first to be baffling.

However, the entry paternoster in The Chambers Dictionary revealing the word's many applications, structured chronologically to list the uses in the order that each came about, soon sheds light on its interesting derivation. As 'Our Father' are the first words of the Lord's Prayer, so Paternoster became used to refer to the prayer itself. In turn this became applied to the large beads of a rosary that would be clutched with the telling of the Lord's Prayer, and then the rosary itself. Parallels between the structure of the rosary and other items strung in this way led to paternoster being applied to anything constructed like this, such as a fishing-line with hooks at intervals. This, coupled with the continuous movement of the rosary between the fingers during prayer, led to its application to the continuously moving paternoster lift, with its intermittent cars reminiscent of the threaded rosary.

While the paternoster at the University of Sheffield is the tallest in the United Kingdom, others that remain functioning exist at the universities of Essex and Leicester and in a Rolls-Royce building in Derby, as well as in public and private buildings throughout Europe. Yet the perceived health and safety risks and associated accidents mean that the construction of new paternosters is no longer allowed in many countries, and many existing lifts are being taken out of service and covered over. One can simply hope that should use of paternosters decline, the fascinating etymology of their name will not be forgotten.

Deborah Smith

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Pleasant surprises

One of the questions you often get asked when people find you are a lexicographer is, ‘So do you know all of the words in the dictionary?’ Unfortunately, this is a question that has to be answered in the negative. Although l must have looked at every page of The Chambers Dictionary on numerous occasions, there are still some words that appear quite unfamiliar to me when I come across them.

Of course, the reason why many words manage to evade notice for long periods is that they are instantly forgettable: scientific and technical terms, perhaps; obscure flowers, pieces of furniture, medieval weapons. But just occasionally I will come across a word that seems to have a very useful function, and I wonder why I have never encountered it before in everyday life.

I have watched golf on television for years and never remember having heard the term hosel, which the dictionary tells me is ‘the socket for the shaft in the head of a golf club’. I must have tied up shoelaces thousands of times, and yet I never imagined there would be a word for those tags on the ends of them before one day I came across the word aglet (‘the metal tag of a lace or string’).

I had a similar experience recently when encountering the word terret. This (among other things) is ‘a ring for fastening a chain to, eg on a dog’s collar’. This seems such a useful word that I am determined to make use of it. Yet it seems that most dog-owners simply use the word ‘ring’, if they feel the need to refer to the thing to which they attach the lead at all.

Wouldn’t life be dull for a dictionary editor if you really did know all of the words and never had the pleasure of coming across something new?

Ian Brookes

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Is it a bird...? Is it a plane...?

The film adaptation of the 1980s comic book series Watchmen is released in cinemas this Friday and highlights an increasing trend in the popularity of superhero blockbusters. After the seemingly unstoppable success of recent films starring such comic book characters as X-Men, Spiderman, Hulk and Superman, and the critical acclaim of 2008 Batman Begins sequel The Dark Knight, it is unsurprising that films of this genre continue to be released and to draw huge audiences.

Yet while highly imaginative fictional creations, the classic heroes of these stories are often less than original when it comes to the linguistic inventiveness of their names. The animal characteristics that distinguish Spiderman, Catwoman and Wolverine provide their obvious inspiration, while the physical traits of Iron Man and Hulk, or abilities of Storm, Magneto, Iceman and Pyro are reflected in their superhero aliases. Captain America exhibits patriotism in the extreme, while Wonder Woman's pseudonym simply exudes magnificence and the Fantastic Four inspire marvel. The characters of Watchmen are more creative, for example the mysterious Rorschach is named after the psychological inkblot test, or the ingenious and enterprising Ozymandias takes an alternative name for Rameses II, often considered Egypt's most powerful pharaoh.

For many, the traditional, definitive superhero is the one with arguably the least inventive name of all, Superman. Created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shushter in 1933, Superman first appeared as a comic book character in 1938, marking the beginning of the superhero comic book genre. Yet the etymology of the word reveals a surprisingly academic origin. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche first coined the term in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1883. Nietzsche wrote of an Übermensch, which roughly translates to superman, as representing an ideal man and a goal for humanity to reach. Later adopted by George Bernard Shaw in the play Man and Superman, and of course developed by Siegel and Shushter to become the Superman we know today, Nietzsche's superman was an ambition, a theoretical possibility, and ultimately the meaning of life.

So perhaps the recent obsession with the superhero is indicative of a collective quest for higher meaning. Or maybe we all just wish we could fly. But please, let's not go jumping off any roofs trying to achieve Nietzsche's goal for humanity. That's probably not quite what he had in mind.

Deborah Smith

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