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

Flying Peters

Piers Plowman is a variant of Peter Plowman because the farmer in the poem was representative of the ideal disciple of Christ, the chief of the apostles and the first pope, whose real name was not, of course, Peter.

Once upon a time there was a fisherman called Simon. He fell in with a chap called Jesus who nicknamed him ‘The Rock’ (presumably in preparation for a career in professional wrestling), which in Greek was Petros.

So Simon was – quite technically – petrified. And this Jesus chap, not content with renaming his friend, then decided to walk on water and, in contravention of every health and safety rule you can think of, encouraged Peter to do the same. This did not work out well.

With that story in mind, what do you call a sea bird that appears just before a storm and dips its feet into the water? You call it a storm peter. And then you muck about with the letters a bit – just as a cock is a cockerel – until it’s called a storm petrel.

Peter went into French as Pierre. Little Peters are called Pierrots and in French sparrows are, for some obscure French reason, therefore called perots. For reasons even more obscure, England then imported this word as parrot. The word first pops up in the alliterative claptrap that the Tudor writer John Skelton was pleased to call his poetry. Skelton wrote an attack on Cardinal Wolsey called ‘Speke, Parrot’. Some fragments of the poem survive, which is a pity.

Parrot got verbed by Thomas Nashe at the end of the sixteenth century in the equally pointless but fantastically titled Have With You To Saffron Walden, an inexplicable work of incomprehensible invective.

Parrots are very important linguistically because they preserve the words of the dead. There was an explorer at the beginning of the nineteenth century called Alexander von Humboldt. He was in Venezuela and found an old parrot that still repeated words from the language of the Ature tribe. Nobody else did, because the Atures had been wiped out a few years before. Another tribe had slaughtered every last one of them and returned victorious with, among other things, a pet parrot. This parrot still spoke only words from the tribe that had raised him. So all that was left of a Venezuelan civilisation were the echoes and repetitions of a parrot.