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

Bows and Arrows and Cats

A toxophilite is somebody who loves archery. The reason for this is that toxin comes from toxon, the Greek word for bow, and toxic comes from toxikos, the Greek word for pertaining to archery. This is because when the ancient Greeks went to war they always dipped their arrowheads in poison. The two ideas were so connected in the Greek mind that toxon became toxin.

Archery used to be ubiquitous. That’s why there are so many people called Archer, Fletcher (arrow-maker) and Bowyer (bow-maker) in the phone book. In 1363 Edward III passed a law that required all men over the age of fourteen and under the age of 60 to practise the sport once a week. Obviously, it wasn’t so much a sport back then as a means of killing people. Edward III’s law has never actually been repealed.

So, terms from archery are hidden all over the English language, for example upshot. The upshot is the shot that decides who has won an archery contest. King Henry VIII’s accounts for 1531 include his sporting losses and:

Tudor archery was not necessarily a pleasant business. There are two theories on the origin of the phrase enough room to swing a cat. The first is that the cat is a cat-o’-nine-tails and that it’s hard to whip somebody properly in a small room. The other theory is to do with marksmanship.

Hitting a stationary target was just too easy for the Tudors. So the best archers used to test themselves by putting a cat in a bag and hanging the bag from the branch of a tree. The ferocious feline would wriggle about and the sack would swing, and this exercise in animal cruelty provided the discerning archer with a challenge and English with a phrase.

Incidentally, this has nothing to do with letting the cat out of the bag. That’s to do with pigs, obviously. In medieval markets piglets were sold in sacks, so that the farmer could carry them home more easily. This was a pig in a poke. A standard con at the time involved switching a valuable piglet for a valueless cat or dog. You were then being sold a pup, or, if you discovered the trick, you would let the cat out of the bag. Unlikely as that all sounds, there are equivalent phrases in almost every European language.

But to return to archery, all this sagittopotent[3] and toxophilite tosh brings us around to the odd phrase point blank.

The blank here is not your usual English blank, though it’s closely related. The blank in point blank is the French blanc, which of course means white. The term bullseye is reasonably new. It was invented only in the nineteenth century. Before that, the white spot bang in the middle of an archery target was called the white or blank.

The funny thing about archery is that you don’t usually aim at the target. Gravity decrees that if you aim straight at the blank your arrow will hit somewhere below. So you point the arrow somewhere above the blank, and hope that this cancels out the effects of Newton’s troublesome invention. That’s why aim high is another archer’s term; it doesn’t mean that you’ll end up high, or it’s not meant to. You aim high and hit on the level.

However, there’s one situation in which this rule does not apply: if you are very, very, very, very close to the target. In that case you can aim straight at the blank point or white spot in the middle. If you’re that close to the target, you’re at point blank range.