The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Mark Forsyth (ч. notes)

Notes

1

That’s a blush to you and me.

2

He’d also be making a little less from Nick Cave’s ‘Red Right Hand’.

3

Good at archery, like Sagittarius, but we’ll come to the Zodiac (or little zoo) later.

4

This is also the first-ever reference to number one in a lavatorial context. Most authorities have it down as a twentieth-century term.

5

This was a Good Thing, as the American troops were issued with rations of bacon and eggs. When an American GI was hungry he would pay a local chef to turn these basics into a pasta dish, and that’s how spaghetti carbonara was invented. (At least, that’s one theory, and there’s certainly no record of carbonara before the Second World War.)

6

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says that he will ‘put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes’. This means that he must be able to travel at 37,000 miles an hour, or Mach 49.3.

7

Yes, really.

8

Thank God.

9

A dictionary of 1776 defines ‘old hat’ as ‘a woman’s privities, because frequently felt’.

10

I tried to count them all, but gave up.

11

Technically, the adverts went out before Murray was appointed, but we’re trying to keep this simple.

12

Pity for Bertha Krupp would be misplaced. The Krupp Berthawerk was quite officially named after her, and that was the armaments factory attached to Auschwitz.

13

Shell merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum to form the present Royal Dutch Shell.

14

In a spirit of scholarly enquiry, I tried to find out exactly when this line was discontinued, but the nice lady at Shell customer services thought I was making fun of her and hung up.

15

A similar feat was, apparently, achieved in about 1590 by an Englishman called Peter Bales, who did it with the Bible.

16

Contrary to popular belief, this probably has nothing to do with their sticking leeches on their patients.

17

This point has occasionally been disputed by people who will burn for ever in God’s loving torment.

18

History is actually rather bewildered as to who named it in honour of whom first.

19

There never was a Sir John Mandeville, but there is a book by him. That’s how authorship worked in the fourteenth century. Moreover, I have modernised the quotation to make it comprehensible. The gruntle is spelt gruntils in the original.

20

And the answers are: nose, burst, wade, stride and swathe.

21

Although people do wear wigs in odd places. Seventeenth-century prostitutes used to shave their economic areas in order to get rid of lice, and then wear a special pubic wig called a merkin. And while we’re on the subject of earwigs, ear-hair grows from a place medically known as the tragus because tragos was Greek for goat, and ear-hair resembles a goat’s beard. Ancient Athenian actors used to wear goatskin when they acted in serious plays, which is why the plays came to be known the songs of the goat, or tragedies.

22

The neatest palindrome in English is undoubtedly: ‘A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.’

23

In case you were wondering, the quotation reproduced here comes from a 1772 translation. From the fact that it doesn’t even feel the need to mention sandwiches, we can assume that everybody in England now knew the name.

24

Just to keep you informed, the Garden of Eden, being perfect, was assumed not to have been destroyed in Noah’s flood, but to have been washed far away to some inaccessible place where it could no longer be found.

25

I refer the curious reader to Seymour Schwartz’s The Mismapping of America, whose detailed account of the mistake I have tried, and failed, to compress.