The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Pleasing Psalms

Placebo is Latin for I will please, and its origins are not medical, but religious.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century a placebo has been a medical term for a ‘medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient’. Before this, a placebo was any commonplace cure that could be dreamt up by a barely qualified medic. The point was not that that pill would please, but that the doctor would. For long before placebo medicines there was Dr Placebo.

In 1697, a doctor called Robert Pierce recalled rather bitterly how he was always being beaten to new business by a charming and talentless medic whose name he was either too polite or too scared to write down. He called him instead Doctor Placebo, and noted with tragic jealousy that Placebo’s ‘wig was deeper than mine by two curls’.

Whoever the original Dr Placebo was, his nickname was taken up by various other embittered doctors of the eighteenth century, until placebo doctors had given placebo pills with placebo effects.

At this point things get a little misty, because although placebo does mean I will please, the word was originally associated not with cures, but with funerals. There’s nothing so much fun as a good funeral, and anybody who’s truly fond of a good party will tell you that the death rate is much too low, even though it adds up to 100 per cent in the end. The drink doled out at a wake has a certain morbid lavishness to it that is rarely or never found at christenings.

People probably still do turn up at the funerals of those they never knew, just in order to get their hands on some booze, but the practice was much more common in medieval times. People would put on their best clothes and turn up to the funerals of the rich, taking part in the service in the hope of joining in the wake.

This meant that they would all stand silent while the first nine verses of Psalm 114 were sung. Then, as it was an antiphon, and as they all wanted to seem particularly enthusiastic about the deceased, they would lustily sing the ninth verse back to the presiding priest:

Which means:

In the Ayenbite of Inwit (‘The Prick of Conscience’) from the mid-fourteenth century, the author observes that ‘the worst flattery is that one that singeth placebo’. Chaucer chimes in by saying that ‘Flatterers [are] the Devil’s chaplains that singeth ever Placebo’.

So the psalm led to the funeral, which led to the flatterers, which led to the flattering doctors, which led to the placebo pill.

This may all seem rather unlikely, and some etymologists are more inclined to go straight to the Latin I will please, but the psalms were much more important in the Middle Ages than they are today, and they have given us all sorts of words that we might not expect. Memento became famous because it was the first word of Psalm 131:

Even more obscure is the connection between the psalms and the phrase to pony up or pay.

Consider that 25 March is the end of the first quarter of the year, and was thus the first pay day for those who were paid quarterly. 25 March was therefore a good day for everybody except employers, and nobody likes them anyway.

People would wake up on 25 March, toddle along to church for Matins, and sing the psalm with avaricious expectation in their heart. The psalm for that day is the fifth division of Psalm 119, which is the longest psalm in the Bible and needs to be broken up into bite-size chunks. The fifth division begins with the words:

Legem pone (‘teach me, O Lord’) therefore became a slang word for a down-payment, because in the psalm-obsessed medieval mind it was the first two words of pay-day. In the centuries since then, the legem has been dropped, but that doesn’t mean that the phrase has disappeared. If you have ever been asked to pony up, it’s only a corruption of legem pone and a reference to the praises of pay.