The ten entries listed in this chapter are all formed from the elision of the words of a full phrase rather than individual words. This type of formation is not as common in English as straightforward portmanteaux, but is a particularly fruitful source of so-called ‘minced oaths’, euphemistic expressions and interjections that have formed over time from the combination of the words of a more controversial (and often religious) phrase. The nineteenth-century expressions blimey, gorblimey and gawblimey, for example, are all formed from the phrase ‘God blind me!’; gadzooks is a sixteenth-century term supposedly referring to ‘God’s hooks’, the nails used to fasten Jesus to the cross; gadswoons and zounds make reference to ‘God’s wounds’; and both criminy and jiminy are popularly said to be a euphemistic alteration of ‘Christ’s money’ or ‘Jesus’s money’, the thirty pieces of silver accepted by Judas to betray Jesus to the Romans.
On its first appearance in the language in the fourteenth century, the word alarm was originally an exclamation used as a call to arms. Descended via French from the Italian phrase all’arme, meaning literally ‘to the arms’, over time the use and meaning of the word developed to come to refer to an actual call to arms itself – as in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2 (V. iii), ‘Whilst the angry trumpets sound the alarmes’ – and, eventually to any sound or noise intended to rouse someone or stir them into action. The first recorded reference to an alarm clock comes from a lost-and-found notice printed in the London Gazette in 1697, reading ‘Lost . . . a Larum Clock in a little Box’.
Until as recently as the early 1900s, it was once common practice when reciting the alphabet in English to use the Latin phrase per se (literally meaning ‘by itself’) to differentiate individual letters of the alphabet from single-character words like a and I. Ultimately, the letter A would be A per se, the letter I would be I per se, and the letter O would be O per se, distinguishing it from the interjection O! As just another individual character, the symbol & was also once considered a letter of the alphabet and was included after Z, in twenty-seventh place, and recited as and per se and, thereby differentiating the symbol ‘and’ from the word ‘and’. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, and per se and eventually combined into the single term ampersand, which has remained the name of the & symbol ever since.
The word culprit has its origins in the old French legal phrase Culpable: prist d’averrer nostre bille, roughly translating as ‘Guilty: ready to be proven of our charge’. Historically, this phrase was used in English courts as the stock response given by the clerk of the Crown when the accused entered a plea of not guilty. As the phrase was heard so frequently, in the court records it would be noted down just as cul. prist, and eventually this abbreviated form established itself as simply another word for the defendant, even after the use of French in English courtrooms died out in the seventeenth century. The word was first recorded in English in the court records of the trial of Philip Herbert, the Eighth Earl of Pembroke, who was accused of the murder of a man in a tavern brawl in 1678. Found not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter, Pembroke escaped prosecution through Privilege of the Peerage, and was simply ordered to pay all of the court fees incurred.
Effectively meaning ‘counteract’ or ‘compensate for’, the verb countervail is derived from the French contrevaille, which is itself descended from a contraction of the Latin phrase contra valere, meaning ‘to be of worth against’; in fact, on its first appearance in English in the late fourteenth century, the word meant to be ‘of equal value to’. Countervail is one of a number of English words that are descended from contractions of Latin phrases, including antebellum, literally meaning ‘before the war’; videlicit, usually abbreviated to viz., from the Latin videre licet, meaning ‘it is permissible to see’; and catacomb, which is believed to be taken from the Latin cata tumbas, meaning ‘amongst the tombs’. One explanation of the origin of the word snob, meanwhile, is that it is taken from a contraction of the Latin sine nobilitate, literally meaning ‘without nobility’, although this theory is now largely discredited.
Used since the sixteenth century in English as an explanation of discovery or triumph, eureka literally means ‘I have found it’ and is derived from Ancient Greek verb heurisko, meaning ‘to find’; in fact, eureka should rightly be spelled with an initial H. Archimedes’s famous use of the word – supposedly exclaiming it as he sat in a bathtub and saw the water level rise – alludes to a story in which he had been asked by the King of Syracuse to determine whether his crown was pure gold. As Archimedes discovered that the amount of water displaced by a submerged object is equal to its mass, he could work out the precise mass of the crown without damaging it, calculate what its density should be if it were indeed pure gold, and therefore assess whether or not it had been blended with any other metal.
Dating from the sixteenth century in English, in basic terms a fiat is an authoritative command or an official decree demanding an action. The word itself is specifically the third-person singular present subjunctive form of the Latin verb fio meaning ‘to become’ or ‘to make happen’, which effectively makes it the Latin equivalent of the phrase ‘let it be done’. Its use in English is likely reinforced by the familiarity of the biblical phrase fiat lux, meaning ‘Let there be light’.
First recorded in the language in the sixteenth century, goodbye is a contraction of the phrase ‘God be with you’. The change from God to good, influenced by other expressions like good day and good night, was complete by the early late 1600s, with the first use of the abbreviated colloquial form bye-bye first recorded in 1709.
A mondegreen is the misunderstanding of a phrase or lyric, caused by mishearing and misinterpreting the words that it contains for others that sound identical. Appropriately, the word mondegreen itself is an example of precisely that – coined by the American writer Sylvia Wright in a 1954 article in Harper’s Magazine, the word derives from Wright’s childhood misinterpretation of the final lines of the popular Scots ballad ‘The Bonny Earl O’Moray’. She mistook ‘They have slain the Earl o’ Moray / And layd him on the green’, for ‘They have slain the Earl o’ Moray / And Lady Mondegreen’. Wright goes on to explain that, ‘The point about what I shall hereafter call mondegreens . . . is that they are better than the original’.
Derived simply from the phrase oh no, an ohnosecond is the moment of time between making a terrible, irreversible mistake and realizing it. Coined in the 1990s, ohnosecond was first used in reference to computing, wherein the slightest of actions – such as deleting the wrong file or sending an email to the wrong person – can often have grave and irretrievable consequences, typically only realized the second after the damage has been done.
The extraordinary adjective ultracrepidarian essentially means ‘extending beyond one’s own knowledge’, and is often used to describe critics and other commentators who offer misguided opinions on subjects of which they have no real knowledge or expertise. First recorded in the works of the English writer and critic William Hazlitt in the early 1800s, the word derives from the Latin ne ultra crepidam, literally meaning ‘not beyond the sandal’, a phrase taken almost word for word from an anecdote recorded in the works of the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder. According to the story, a shoemaker once dared to point out that the renowned Greek artist Apelles had apparently made an error in painting a sandal on a figure in one of his artworks, an oversight which Apelles promptly corrected. Spurred on by this, the shoemaker went on to point out another apparent error in Apelles work, to which the artist is said to have replied, ‘ne supra crepidam sutor iudicaret’, meaning ‘a shoemaker should not judge above the sandal’.