Haggard is a strange word. Five centuries old, having been adopted into English from French in the mid-1500s, on its first appearance in the language it was a falconer’s term used to refer to a wild hawk captured as an adult and then trained to hunt and retrieve prey. As these haggard hawks tended to remain quite wild and unpredictable even after their training, especially compared to captive-bred birds, over time the meaning of the word developed to come to describe anything similarly unruly, erratic, world-worn and – well, haggard. As unusual as this history is, however, haggard is not alone. It is just one of a number of English words, including allure, turn-tail, rouse, poltroon and even codger, that all share some kind of connection to falconry. And this is precisely what this book is all about.
Assembled here are fifty lists of ten words, each group of ten having some linguistic quality or etymological quirk in common. From words derived from places in Ancient Greece to words derived from colours, from unusual animal names to words with fictitious histories, and from abbot, abdest and abelmosk to zed, zigzag and zombie, the 500 entries listed in Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons comprise some of the most remarkable words and word origins in the entire English language. Here you will find the connection between a family tree and a stork’s foot, what connects a sitcom to a hybrid zebra, which item of gym equipment was originally a jailhouse punishment, what the first blockbuster was, how long an ohnosecond is, which weapon is named after a musical instrument, how to stop plagiarism with a spelling mistake, what you should really call a unknowledgeable critic, how to cure a fever with a magic word and where to find a vampire in a theatre. The entries here mix the familiar with the unfamiliar, the exceptional with the everyday, and the old with the new – you might not know what an aphengescope is, or how to lucubrate, but they are related to the chocolate éclair and the name of the shortest bone in your arm.
So, where better to begin than where the English language calls home . . .