Besides the ten words listed in this chapter, the English language also contains a vast number of phrases and expressions that make reference to some British location, like shipshape and Bristol fashion and carrying coals to Newcastle. Expressions like these are often rooted in an area’s association with a particular industry or historical event – Bristol fashion is derived from the city’s world-renowned seafaring proficiency, while the naturally coal-rich north-east of England (as in WALLSEND) implies that carrying coals to Newcastle would be a thankless or pointless task. Likewise, to be stabbed with a Bridport dagger was a seventeenth-century phrase meaning to be ‘hanged’, referring to the rope-making industry of Bridport in Dorset; to get yourself to Bath was a nineteenth-century way of being told that you are talking nonsense, as the city’s spring waters were once widely known to be used to treat patients with mental illnesses; and to walk Newgate fashion was a Shakespearean expression meaning to walk two-by-two, like prisoners shackled together in Newgate jail.
One of the most familiar of all of these British expressions, however, is also one of the most mysterious, as the origin of to send to Coventry, a seventeenth-century phrase meaning to ‘ostracize’ or ‘ignore’, is entirely unknown. Amongst the numerous suggestions attempting to explain its history are that it makes reference to a prison established in the city during the Civil War; that the locals’ supposed historical dislike of members of the British Army meant that anyone seen talking to a soldier would be shunned; or else that Coventry was once the site of an austere monastery, to which monks failing or disobeying their orders would have been sent to observe a strict vow of silence.
The first recorded reference to the sport of badminton in English dates from 1863, when it was described as a game ‘played with sides, across a string suspended some five feet off the ground’. Seemingly named after Badminton House, the Gloucestershire home of the Dukes of Beaufort, it is often claimed that the game originated amongst British Army officers on leave from India at Badminton in the nineteenth century. The game itself, meanwhile, is a development of the much earlier sixteenth-century game ‘battledore and shuttlecock’ (first recorded, rather unfortunately, as shittle-cock in the 1601 Ben Jonson play, Cynthia’s Revels) in which two players, with no net between them, would attempt to bat a shuttlecock back and forth as many times as possible without letting it touch the ground.
The word bedlam, describing a scene of utter madness or confusion, was first recorded in English in the mid-1600s. Derived from a corruption of Bethlehem, the word is ultimately taken from the name of the Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem in London, a former thirteenth-century priory that was later converted into a hospital and, after the dissolution of the monasteries, into an insane asylum, hence its modern connotations. Indeed, the word is found as the name of an asylum in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (V. i), in which Lord Clifford dismisses Richard Plantagenet, the Duke of York’s claim to the throne with the words, ‘To Bedlam with him! Is the man grown mad?’
As the name of a reformatory or detention centre for delinquent teenagers, the word borstal derives from the name of the village of Borstal near Rochester in north Kent, where just such an institution was established in 1902 on the site of an old Victorian prison. Used as a general term for any institution of this type since 1907, the word’s very specific British origins have ultimately led to it being only seldom encountered outside of British English.
Brummagem is an old local name for the city of Birmingham and as such is the root of other familiar local words like Brummie and Brum. As an adjective, however, brummagem has been used since the mid-seventeenth century in English to describe anything inauthentic or counterfeit, as Birmingham once had a reputation across the country for the manufacture of counterfeit coinage. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the term came to be used more generally of anything showy yet cheaply made, and in particular referred to so-called brummagem ware, namely poor-quality metalwork or other merchandise of little real value.
A horse’s canter – that is, a slow to moderate galloping pace – derives its name from a shortening of Canterbury, the English ecclesiastical city in which the principal Archbishop of England and a famous shrine to St Thomas à Beckett are both located. Dating from the early 1600s, the term canter supposedly makes reference to the so-called ‘Canterbury pace’ or ‘Canterbury trot’, a colloquial name for the dawdling speed supposedly favoured by Christian pilgrims as they made their way to the city.
Lyddite is an explosive, developed and widely employed by the British military in the late nineteenth century. First tested in 1888 – and named after the town of Lydd in Kent where the initial tests took place – lyddite was one of the first high explosives used in British mortar shells, produced by melting and then solidifying a volatile chemical known as trinitrophenol or picric acid. Lyddite was employed in both the Boer War and First World War until it began to be replaced by the relatively more reliable and controllable trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT, in the early twentieth century.
Chemical element number 38, strontium (Sr) is the only element of the periodic table named after a location in the British Isles. It derives its name from that of the Highland village of Strontian where its principal source mineral, strontianite, was first discovered in lead mines in the eighteenth century. A silvery-grey alkaline metal that is highly reactive to both water and oxygen, strontium was also one of the first elements to be isolated using electrolysis by the British chemist and inventor Sir Humphrey Davy in 1808.
A surrey is a four-wheeled, two-seater American horse-drawn carriage so called as its design is believed to have developed from an earlier style of carriage first manufactured in Surrey in the nineteenth century. Introduced to the United States in the 1870s, the first record of a surrey comes from the 1896 novella An Open-Eyed Conspiracy by the US writer William Dean Howells, but today the word is arguably much more familiar to English speakers thanks to the song ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’, from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma!
Originally a town in Northumberland but now a suburb of the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, the place name Wallsend literally describes the town’s location towards the eastern end of Hadrian’s Wall. For over 150 years, from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, the town was a major base for coal- mining in the north-east of England and was widely celebrated nationwide for the high quality of its produce – so much so, in fact, that the specific type of coal that the town produced came to be known as Wallsend in the early 1800s, as mentioned by Charles Dickens in Our Mutual Friend: ‘I would rather have approached my respected father by candlelight . . . but we will take him by twilight, enlivened with a glow of Wallsend’.
Worsted is the name of both a type of yarn and a type of thick woollen fabric, both of which are thought to have been developed in the Norfolk village of Worstead by weavers and cloth-makers who emigrated to England from Flanders after the Norman Conquest. As the name of a fabric, the word was first recorded in English in the late thirteenth century, with the first reference to worsted yarn dating from the mid-fifteenth century.