IF YOU HAVE something worth saying, say it out loud. The Neolithic word for speaking has the sense of a proclamation – when a man spoke, others listened. In English, the word that comes closest to this meaning is banns, the announcement of a wedding that must be read three times.
In modern English, a ban is a prohibition, but in the Old Germanic languages, a ban was a call that went out to everyone, a summons to convene or to fight. That’s why banal means something that everyone does. To abandon someone is to leave them beyond reach of the ban, and to banish them is to send them so far away that they couldn’t hear even if you called.
In Ancient Greek, the sound was softened. Pheme meant a voice and phasis was speech – so a euphemism is literally a good word, though a mealy-mouthed one. Blasphemy is speaking against the gods, which might provoke the gods to strike you dumb with aphasia, the loss of speech.
A clear voice in Greek was phone, which gives us phonetics, the symbols that record vocal sounds. If prehistoric man had developed a system of phonetics, we would have a much clearer idea of the grammar that strung these early words together – but history starts when civilisations begin writing things down, which is why the Stone Age tribes of the steppes were prehistoric in the first place.
Thanks to phone we have the telephone, which enables ‘speaking at a distance’, and the gramophone, which began as the phonogram but was preceded by the phonograph, literally meaning a clearly written voice. Early gramophone records used to split symphonies onto six or eight discs; nowadays, you can cram 1,000 symphonies onto a mobile phone.
Alexander Graham Bell’s device changed the world; at least, one of them did. He also developed the photophone, which used light to transmit sounds. Bell called it his greatest invention; the public was sceptical, and in 1880 The New York Times asked sardonically: ‘Does Prof. Bell intend to connect Boston and Cambridge with a line of sunbeams hung on telegraph posts, and, if so, what diameter are the sunbeams to be? Will it be necessary to insulate them against the weather?’ Though his invention was the forerunner of wireless radio, scientists couldn’t find a reliable way to send messages on sunrays. The clouds kept getting in the way.
The Roman word for speaking was fantem; the past tense, spoken, was fatum. It’s obvious that Fate is the voice of destiny, but more unexpected is the derivation of infant, a child too young to speak – and infantry, the common soldiery who fight the battles but have no say in the strategy or politics of war: ‘Theirs not to reason why.’ Not everything can be expressed in words, of course: some things are ineffable.
‘Let us now praise famous men’: that syllable fa talks its way into all sorts of concepts. A word before the main speech is a preface. A chap who is easy to speak to is affable. A story that speaks for itself is a fable, and a man confesses his sins by speaking them.
A bandit isn’t likely to confess, but then his etymology is a bit more obscure. He might be banned; on the other hand, he might be part of a band, and that comes from bhand – the original Indo-European word meaning to bind.
Thatched roofs are made with bundles of straw, but grass and branches can also be woven together by bending them. The strip of cloth that ties the bundle is a riband or a ribbon. Knot a ribbon round your head and it’s a bandana; tie it around a wound and it’s a bandage. Wind one round your waist and you have a cummerbund.
With a soft ‘f’ sound, bhand is the root of all faith, which binds us together, and federation, which is a bundle of states or countries all tied up with ribbon … or red tape.
BHAL IS ONE of Neolithic man’s many words for fire. The word conveyed the shimmering, moving, brilliant blaze, almost too bright to look upon. If you stare too long at the sun, you’ll go blind. Most people blink first. To a dazzled eye, everything looks bleached white, blenched and blanched, a blank.
Because the first cloths to be woven were not dyed, they were white – that’s why heavy woollen shawls and bedclothes are blankets. White or very fair hair is blond.
But fire can transform colours in other ways: sit too close to it and your face will flush or blush red. Let your blanket catch alight and it will be burned black.
In Spanish, white is blanco: that word was adopted as a trade name in the 1880s for the powder used by British soldiers to keep buckskin leather gleaming white. In France, white is blanc, and linen cloth from Normandy that is woven from bleached thread is still called blancard. The French for ‘to eat’ is manger, so if you eat a gelatinous white pudding made from cornflour and milk, you’ll find it is blancmange. In Slav languages from Czech to Croatian, white is biely, bijel or something very similar: that sound hasn’t found its way into English, but it’s a clear example of how closely other modern European language families also cleave to their Stone Age origins.
The initial bh was always a soft consonant, and in many of its derivations it is softer still, pronounced ph or f – the most obvious examples are flare and flame. The Latin word fulgere means to gleam, glitter, shine or sparkle – effulgent means radiant, but in medieval English the word was simply fulgent. The poet Milton, in Paradise Lost, describes the commander of the fallen angels, Beelzebub’s boss: ‘his fulgent head / And shape Starr bright’. (If you’re wondering whether Beelzebub, one of the devil’s minions, derives from bhal, it doesn’t. The word comes from the Hebrew, Ba’al z’bub – the Lord of Flies, worshipped by the Philistines.)
We don’t think today of the devil as being burning bright, even though his home is hellish hot – but Lucifer means ‘bearing fire’ (see luh and bhar), and it was common slang for a match 100 years ago.
Fulgurant means flashing like lightning, and fulgurate is an explosive. The Viking god Thor threw thunderbolts around, which is called fulminating. There’s a grubby by-product to all this fire, so fuliginous means sooty.
General Sir Harry Flashman, the creation of George MacDonald Fraser, was a Victorian hero, poltroon and ladies’ man whose fictional memoirs give first-hand descriptions of battles from the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean Campaign to the Opium Wars and Custer’s Last Stand. Flashman was based on the bully in Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes, but the word was old slang when the novel appeared in 1857 – it meant a disreputable gentleman, a swell who bet on bare-knuckle boxing matches and drank with petty criminals … a flagrant cad.
To flagrate is to burn, so a conflagration is a huge and destructive blaze. The original meaning of flagrant was blazing or glowing. For the past 300 years or so, it has meant glaring or scandalous – ‘flaming into notice’, as Samuel Johnson put it. To be discovered in flagrante delicto is to be caught in the heat of passion. The Latin for a shameful crime was flagitium, so flagitious means villainous, or even addicted to flagrancy and atrocious crimes – like the third Marquess of Hertford, a Napoleonic nobleman whose life was dedicated to dissipation and infamous living, and who inspired Thackeray’s portrait of the vicious Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair.
Anything that burns is inflammable, but to avoid confusion, the designers of safety symbols prefer to use the word flammable, which means the same thing. No one talks of seditious rhetoric as being ‘flammatory’, though – it’s inflammatory. And if you’ve got a rash, that’s no mere ‘flammation’ but an inflammation.
Anything flamboyant is brilliant or brightly coloured, such as a flamingo … or a dragon with fiery hiccups, which is flammivomous.
ONE OF THE numerous words to descend almost unchanged into English from the Stone Age, bher seems to have always had a double meaning – to shoulder a load, or to carry a child. A mother bears her baby and then she births it. Later she carries the bairn in her shawl, which makes it a bit of a burden. Let’s face it, life is no different today from how it was for our forebears.
The Anglo-Saxon word for ‘to bear’ was beran, and the word for a woman’s lower body and lap, where a baby would sit, was bearm. In the north of England, that word survives in dialect as barm.
If you can find yourself a secure place, whether that’s onboard a ship or in a safe job, you have a berth – a place to bear your weight. And if that safe job involves carting a lot of heavy goods around – bricks, perhaps, or vegetables – you can put them on a barrow. That way, you can bring more. A strong man can carry more than a weak one, of course – hence the word burly. Don’t work yourself to death, though, or you’ll end up being borne away on a bier.
In Greek, the blurred initial consonant bh was softened into phor – a pot for carrying wine or water was an amphora. If you’re lugging all sorts of stuff around with you, that’s paraphernalia. When a word or phrase bears a deeper meaning, it is a metaphor; when a spirit of joy lifts you up, that is euphoria; when the same word or phrase is repeated or carried over in a sentence (like this) the technical term is anaphora.
As a suffix, -phore implies something conveyed or carried. The most common example is semaphore, a system of waving flags to send signals. Phosphorous is a chemical element that glows when it comes into contact with oxygen – the Ancient Greek for light was phos.
To the Romans, whatever life brought, good or bad, was chance – fors. Good luck creates fortunes for the fortunate.
In Latin, that bh was softened further, to become ferre. That gives us fertile. But as a suffix, -fer is used in all sorts of words – suffer is to bear pain, transfer is to carry a load from one side to the other, prefer is to weigh more on one side than the other, refer is to hand the burden to someone else, proffer is to hold out the burden as a gift, confer is to share it with other people, differ is to carry it in an unconventional way and defer is to put it down with the intention of picking it up some other time.
An object that bears a bad smell with it is odiferous. A man whose voice carries is vociferous. Rocks that contain copper are cupriferous. And something filled with magnificent beauty is splendiferous.
Add a ‘t’ to ferre and you get ferret, a lithe hunter that kills prey in a burrow and carries it out. Burrow, if you’re wondering, comes from a Neolithic word so similar to bher that it seems to be an extension of it: bhergh means high land, especially a town built on a height. Perhaps the connection is that the settlement is borne upwards by the rise of the land: at any rate, bhergh became berg, burgh and borough – all old names for towns from Edinburgh to Pittsburgh … not to mention Hamburg.
Hamburgers don’t contain ham, though they might contain horse, but they definitely contain bhergh, which also gives us burglar, the town thief, who carries away the spoils of his work.
THIS WORD, PERHAPS more than any other, supplies an insight into the Stone Age mind. Bhleu is the way that the earth breathes and life flows. A man building a fire blows on the burning twigs to make the flames grow; the wind blows across the steppes and the grass grows. That’s why blow can also mean to blossom – after a bud has opened out, it is full-blown. When a flower opens and blooms, when bulbs give out shoots, when the river overflows and silt enriches the land, when the crops flourish, when blossoms bring fruit – all of that is natural as breathing.
A strong gust of wind is a blast; a feeble shout is a bleat. A machine to do the blowing for you is a bellows, though the earliest ones were simply blowpipes: paintings found in Egyptian tombs from the second century BC show a man huffing and puffing at one end of the tube into a furnace at the other.
Blow air into liquid and it will bubble and blister. Heat the liquid in a bowl and it will boil. A bowl of hot water is marvellous for chilblains, by the way – in Anglo-Saxon, a blegn was a boil but it has shrunk now and the OED defines a blain as a pustule. They are all derived from bhleu, as is belly – when a woman is pregnant, her belly swells.
Inflate a skin and you get a ball, a balloon or a bladder on a stick – literally, a windbag or, in Latin, follis. The ebullient jester with his cheeks puffed out is the original fool, and his capers are sheer folly. Sheets of paper watermarked with a jester’s cap are called foolscap. The cap has bells on it, though they are just the jingly kind … real bells make a loud noise. They bellow.
In Latin, a round seal is a bulla, which is why papal edicts, sealed with an impression of the Pope’s ring, are called bulls. Minor edicts are bulletins. Precious metal stamped with a seal, such as ingots of gold, is bullion. In Low Latin, any form of writing was a billa, the diminutive of bulla. That’s why you have so many bills. An even smaller scrap of writing was a billet – the billet-doux, for example (love letters), or the chit that tells an occupied village that troops are being billeted on them. The soldiers will have guns and bullets, which were originally roundshot, or little balls.
Latin softened the ‘bh’ to ‘f’: the verb fluere means to flow. It gives us fluent, fluid and flush, as well as fluctuate, which means flowing back and forth – that is, in flux. There’s confluence, which means flowing together, mellifluous, which means flowing sweetly, and superfluous, which originally meant flowing over but has now come to mean wasteful and unnecessary. To have influence is to flow through the corridors of power. Then there’s affluent, which is overflowing with money, or at least with a swimming pool of cash to float in – how the rich are blessed.
Bless, according to Walter Skeat, also derives from bhleu. The early sense of a blessing, he conjectures, was ‘to consecrate by blood’, which involved either an animal sacrifice to the gods or a blob of blood on the face. The link is that blood is also a bhleu word, because it flows and gives life.
Blow air from one end and you can coax a tune from a flute or a flageolet. Blow from the other, especially if you’re bloated, and you’re suffering from flatulence. If the gods breathe softly upon an artist, she will be inspired or experience visions, an experience called afflatus – though afflatus also denotes the hissing of snakes. Singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell recorded a beautiful album called The Hissing of Summer Lawns, a rare example of double afflatus.
There’s inflate, deflate, conflate and reflate, as well as exsufflate, which means to blow away. A dessert that rises like a puff of air is a soufflé; a whiff of unpleasant air is effluvium. Bad air was believed to carry influenza.
Remember that to blow can mean to open out like a flower, and that ‘bl’ was softened to ‘fl’? Wheat, the crop that changed nomads to farmers, produces flour – it is the flower of cornmeal. Flora was the Roman goddess of flowers. These days we buy them from rather florid shopkeepers called florists. A foil is a different kind of foliage, a thin sheet of metal, from the Latin folium or leaf. Each page of a book is a leaf, which is why a volume is called a folio and a collection of sheets is a portfolio. In architecture, the clover-shaped trefoil literally means three-leaved.
Even a simple word like flower can take on unimagined new resonances. As this story shows …
When the comedy writers Marty Feldman and Barry Took, creators of the anarchic radio sketch show Round the Horne, were first trying to sell their idea to the BBC in the mid-1960s, they were summoned to a meeting with the Head of Light Programmes – the forerunner of Radio 2. He was a stuffy and affected man, who always wore a carnation in his buttonhole. Things got heated, the writers got overexcited and Marty plucked the flower out and threw it away. After they staggered out, doubled over with giggles, a friend asked how the meeting went. Barry stopped laughing long enough to say, ‘We’ve just deflowered the Head of Light Programmes.’
LIKE DING, CRUNCH or splash in English, bhrag is onomatopoeic. It’s the sound of something breaking. On the Stone Age steppes, things didn’t get a chance to decay quietly. They cracked, shattered and tumbled down. Bhrag: it’s halfway between a snap and a crash.
A hole in a wall is a breach. That can be shored up with bricks, which weren’t always oblongs of baked clay: the first dry stone walls were built like jigsaws from broken bits and pieces of rock, so bricks are rough slabs or blocks that fit into a pattern.
The Gaelic word for an explosion is bragh. In Breton, braga means to strut about. Both words carry the suggestion that boasting is noisy and destructive – no one likes a braggart. A man makes an ass of himself when he brags: he sounds like a donkey braying.
That sense of a noise that heralds disaster has ribald overtones, which is why we still break wind. Badgers smell something horrible, so they are nicknamed brock. Bhrag gives us bruise, meaning to crush a leaf and emit its scent. One meaning of bray is to beat flat or to pound in a mortar. In the seventeenth century, a brayer was a wooden pestle used to rub down the ink on a printed sheet.
A wine broker was originally a broacher, because he had to broach or pierce the casks, opening them just enough to get the wine flowing. That’s why a broach or brooch is an ornament with a long pin on the back, and we broach a subject by introducing it pointedly into the conversation. These days, broking means dealing, the way a stockbroker buys and sells stocks. A brochure was originally a pamphlet stitched together with a long needle; brocade is fabric with a raised pattern, often in gold, that is pricked in with needles; broccoli is a floret on a needle-like stem – it’s an Italian word, the diminutive of brocco, which means a stalk.
Latin softens the ‘bh’– to break is frangere. Frangible is breakable, and a fraction is a part broken off from a whole number. A broken bone is a fracture; a broken piece is a fragment; anything easily broken is fragile or frail. Long folk songs are broken up by words repeated over and over: ‘Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme / Hey, ho, the wind and the rain’ – that’s the refrain.
When people are fractious, a fight is liable to break out. Far better to settle things with a vote: the earliest ballots were held with a fragment of stone to represent each vote. That’s why votes are ‘cast’ – the stone was literally thrown into one pile or another. The broken stones give us the word suffrage. When the suffragettes were chucking rocks through windows, they didn’t realise they were doing just what their name implied. They were also being irrefragable … obstinate and inflexible, and hard to break.
The osprey, a hawk that can pluck a fish out of the water and devour it, was originally known as an ossifrage – literally, a bone-breaker. The Romans brought the word ossifragus to Britain: it’s the Latin name for the bearded vulture or lammergeier, a big-beaked bird of prey without a bald head from the mountainous regions of Africa, Asia and Europe. Ossifrages earned their name by smashing open tortoises: picking them up in their claws and dropping them onto rocks from a height. Ospreys don’t eat tortoises, but they do clutch and carry fish in their talons; perhaps this behaviour prompted the legionaries to call them ossifraga. Or perhaps the soldiers just thought ossifragus meant hawk: not all legionaries were linguists.
A good many of the troops probably didn’t want to be watching the wildlife anyway. They would rather be with a broken woman, which is the literal translation of the medieval English brethal … at a house of ill repute, or brothel.
COFFEE AFICIONADOS COMPLAIN that the global chains over-roast their beans: the coffee is burned to intensify the flavour so that it cuts through the litres of frothy milk and glutinous syrups that are ladled into the bucket-sized mugs. Burning and brewing aren’t the same thing, even though they stem from the same root.
Burn and brew, bur-words and br-words, can both be traced to bhur. The colour of anything burned is brun with a long ‘u’ (in Old Saxon and Old High German), brunn with a short ‘u’ (in Old Norse), bruin in Dutch and brown in English.
It’s not only coffee that tastes stronger for being charred – burned wine, or gebrandet wjin in Dutch, became brandywine or brandy in English.
Coffee wasn’t drunk on the steppesfn1, but a hot brew was popular – it probably had the onomatopoeic name sup (the original cup-a-soup). We still make it today, all the leftover scraps of meat and vegetables soaked in a pan of water and left to simmer: broth. In Tudor times, broth or browet had to be made from the juices of boiled meat, thickened by flour.
Broth must broil, not burn. If the heat is too high, the stew will bubble and steam like fury (with the ‘bh’ softened to an ‘f’). Fury came to mean boiling rage (the Latin for ‘to boil’ was fervare). In Roman mythology, the Furiae were three sisters who dwelled in hell and brought divine retribution to sinners on Earth, while the Tricoteuses, the women who sat knitting in the bloodthirsty committees of the French Revolution, were sometimes called the Furies of the Guillotine. The Reverend E. Cobham Brewer seems to have had a lifelong horror of the French – he was born in 1810, during the Napoleonic Wars. Aged eighty-five, in the 1895 edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, he was still in a fervent ferment about the Furies of the Guillotine: ‘Never in any age or any country did women so disgrace their sex,’ he complained.
In medieval English, a brander or brandiron was a trivet, a metal stand for a pot or kettle. Food could be grilled if two branders were laid at right angles, one on the other, to form a grid: when builders placed battens of wood across joists to make a wall or floor, they called it brandering.
The old name for sulphur, so highly flammable that it was thought to be the material for Hell’s bricks, was brimstone (burning stone). Writers of swords-and-sorcery fantasies still refer to their warriors’ flashing blades as brands, because their steel is forged in flame (ideally, while the young hero watches from the shadows as his taciturn and doomed father hammers the molten metal).
Since a piece of iron taken red hot from the furnace was a brand, it followed that any metal still glowing from the forge was brand new. Owners’ marks could be branded on an animal’s hide with the hot metal; when an animal’s hide was mottled, as if naturally branded, it was brindled.
The word brand was first used to mean a trademark, label or logo in 1827, and within thirty years that covered, by extension, the goods themselves: the product was the brand. Now, the brand is the mere concept of the goods, the idea of where and how they should be sold, and who the perfect customers are: ideally, in the case of global drinks brands, people who like their coffee burned.
fn1 Coffee was allegedly discovered by a holy man called Omar, living in a cave in Yemen during the thirteenth century. Dying of hunger, he tried to eat some brown berries, which were too tough to chew; cooking them didn’t improve the meal, but he was able to boil the baked beans to make a drink that was invigorating and reviving. Omar took his discovery to the nearest settlement, a place called Mocha, where the inhabitants were so delighted that they made Omar a saint and gave their town’s name to the drink. Centuries later, the Dutch named it koffie, from the Arabic qahwa, short for qahhwat al-bun, meaning bean wine – not burned wine.