WHAT AN ELOQUENT noise wa is. It’s impossible to say it without sounding peevish and fed up. Wa is irritability, disappointment, complaint and chastisement all in one bitter syllable. An empty bottle, an empty purse, an empty stomach: wa!
In Latin, which spelled wa as ua, uacare, uanus and uastus define three different kinds of emptiness. Remember that the Romans pronounced ‘u’ as ‘v’ and you’ll see how uacare is to be vacant. It gives us vacate, vacuum and vacuous, which can mean empty of matter or devoid of ideas. Vacuity is one degree emptier, the complete vacancy of mind. A vacuole is an empty space, and a vacation is an absence of leave or holiday – a vac, in university slang. To empty either building or bowels is an evacuation: the Old French word was voit, which has become both void and vomit.
To make yourself scarce is to avoid or evade. Accountants know there’s a big difference: tax avoidance is the legal use of rules and loopholes, but tax evasion is plain unlawful.
Uanus means hollow, which is the essence of vanity – all show on the outside, empty on the inside. Boasting, arrogant speech is vaunting. You hear it from vain people. Vainglory is unwarranted pride in your own accomplishments. The Book of Ecclesiastes says gloomily that everything in life is empty show – ‘Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.’ Or, as depressive investigator Rustie Cohle put it in 2014, in the TV crime series True Detective, we are ‘programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody.’ This cheerful thought has been echoing for centuries: John Bunyan in The Pilgrim’s Progress applied the name Vanity Fair to the world, and William Makepeace Thackeray borrowed it for the title of his nineteenth-century society satire. In 1983, the publisher Condé Nast, with an absolute absence of irony, launched a fashion magazine called Vanity Fair – it shows no sign that it will vanish yet. To put that another way, it is not evanescent.
Uastus means vastness, a desolate waste, some place that has been devastated. Vastation is widespread destruction, and vastitude is the immensity of space. Glendower is vaunting when he brags, in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’
Idle people who fritter time and money are wasters – if they do it with deliberate, malicious intent they are wastrels, a crossbreed of wasters and scoundrels. In eighteenth-century England, vastly became a fashionable bit of ironic slang – people used it instead of very, the way they might use totally today. That is like vastly interesting, innit?
The moon, when it empties away, is on the wane, and it sheds a wan light. In Old Gothic and Norse, wan or wans meant to lack, or to be wanting. Originally, to want a thing was simply to be without it; before long, it meant to desire it, because absence makes the heart grow avaricious. A wanton woman wasn’t always sex-crazed – she was just badly brought up or in Anglo-Saxon wan-towen, lacking education.
A dip or hollow in the land is a vale or a valley, from the Latin uallem. The Old French for downward was aval, meaning to the valley: it gives us avalanche.
Because wa is empty, hwa is to breathe out and empty the lungs. You can’t say it without doing it … hwaaaa. With a hard Latin ‘v’, a sigh becomes vapour. Anything that creates vapour is vaporific; anything that can be vaporised is vaporose or vaporable. Anything weak as mist is vapid, or insipid. In Latin, uappa was stale wine, where most of the alcohol had evaporated. A vapourer talks incessantly, usually the most gassy nonsense. To be vapourish is to be prone to depression – in Georgian times an attack of the vapours was a dismissive term for low spirits and sudden nervous indisposition, usually affecting women. If you were genuinely poorly – that is, you were male and you had a sniffle – the best cure was to put your head over a vapour bath or bowl of boiling water infused with herbs, and inhale. Your symptoms would evaporate.
OX-DRAWN WAGONS BECAME common across Europe around 5,000 years ago, rolling in convoys down valleys and across grasslands as nomadic communities and their herds grew bigger. Wagh is transporting people and possessions on wheels, instead of carrying them on foot. Several root words to do with travel start with ‘w’ sounds: uen means to come and gives us went; wolw means to roll and gives us Volvo (which is Latin for ‘I roll’).
Wagon was pronounced wagan in Saxon times. In medieval English, it lost the central consonant and became wain – that’s why Constable’s painting of a farm cart fording a river is called The Hay Wain and not The Hay Wagon. By the same process, the Saxon weg became the modern way. In pre-Norman England, a wayfarer was a wegferender, and wegelagan was laying in wait to waylay him. You can work out aweg and allewegs for yourself. What you might not guess is that wegan, in Old English, became weight – the burden carried by the wagon. If the cargo isn’t tied down well, it will roll from side to side on the wagonbed, and that’s the source of wagging, as well as waggling. The other problem, if your possessions aren’t safely secured, is that some joker will steal them – he’s a wag-halter, or what we would call a waggish fellow.
Anyone who has tried to read the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and managed more than a few lines will know that the North Sea was called by poets the Whale Way or whael weg. That doesn’t mean trains ran on it; whale way is a kenning, a metaphor that avoids repeating a prosaic name. Blood is battle sweat, a warrior is the feeder of ravens and a ship is a sea steed. Most of those expressions have been forgotten, but we still think of the ocean as a ‘way’ – for this reason, its surface consists of waves.
With the invention of the wagon came cart tracks, with ruts for the wheels. The Indo-European term for this technological innovation was waghya, meaning road. In Latin, it became via, pronounced ‘weea’. A road that was well maintained was viabilis, or viable, and a road that was carried on pillars across a valley was a viaduct. To travel with companions was conviare, or convivial, but to leave the track was deviare, or deviation. Verdi’s opera about a woman led down the wrong path is La Traviata.
To set off on a journey was inviare, but the rich and busy soon realised that it was too time-consuming to make the trip themselves – so they sent envoys in their place. If the envoy was going to collect a payment, he would take what the French called une lettre d’envoi, and what we call an invoice. The journey wasn’t always easy: often the envoy would encounter something in the way, which in Latin would be obvius – since he could see it from a distance, it was obvious. If his conveyance could not find a way through, then the road was impervius, which we spell impervious … so he would have to turn round and go back on the road by which he came, the prae via – the previous way.
If all this toing and froing seems inconsequential, consider that a crossroads where three paths met was called a trivium by the Romans. Since all roads lead to Rome, it didn’t much matter which you chose: the decision was trivial.
Vehere means to transport in Latin: another wagh word. Vehicle is the immediate derivative but there are others, more unexpected. Carrying compliments back to the great and good is revehere, and that’s why modern celebrity culture doesn’t just admire the Z-listers – it reveres them.
The past tense of conuehere, to bring together, is convectus – it’s the origin of convection, as well as convex, but more interesting is plain vex. The point is that when people are brought together, they get on each other’s nerves. In fact, everyone vexes everyone else: a typical family Christmas.
Evehere, to carry out, goes through the same grammatical process: the past tense is evectus, which gives us eviction. And invehere, to carry into, became inveigh, which is an attack with words … so the past tense invectus gives us invective, savage words for a verbal assault. That’s why evehere is also the root of vehement.
In Old French, wagh became veage, which changed into voyage. The first spaceship to voyage outside the solar system took artefacts that scientists hoped would give extraterrestrial intelligences a sense of human civilisation. One was a gold-plated audio disc, including music by Mozart and Bulgarian folk singer Valya Balkanska, and Chuck Berry’s ‘Johnny B. Goode’. The joke at NASA is that alien-watchers at the CIA’s ultra-secret Area 51 compound have already had a response from beyond the stars: it said, ‘Send more Chuck Berry!’
The name of that spaceship is Voyager II.
IF HWA IS to empty the lungs, wak is to empty them noisily, with a loud voice. The Latin for voice is vox; the Sanskrit is vak. Vox populi is the voice of the people – or, in the old-fashioned newspaper feature called a vox pop, it’s half a dozen passers-by collared on the street to answer a topical question. A more authoritative answer might come from vox Dei, the voice of God. The rock god Paul Hewson, singer with U2, originally took the stage name Bono Vox, though he lost his Vox along the way. Machines have voices too: Vox is an electric amplifier manufacturer, set up in Kent during the 1950s by a keyboard-maker called Thomas Jennings – Vox became the sound of British pop after its amps were adopted by The Shadows and then The Beatles.
Vocalis is a Latin word that reveals how much value the early Romans placed on the importance of language. It means blessed with the gift of speech, with the implication that to possess a voice is to be illuminated by a spark of the divine.
From vocalis we derive vocal, and vocalist. A vocalic word is one that consists mainly of vowels, such as eerie, ooze or ooidal, which means egg-shaped. Vocalism is the exercise of the voice, especially for singing.
The Ancient Greek word for a vow or prayer was eukhe. In Latin it was votum, which gives us devotion, devout and votive.
The Latin for to call is vocare, which is why a vocation is a calling from God. To revoke a decision is to call it back; to call an image to mind is to evoke it. An assembly called together is a convocation; prayers to summon spirits are an invocation. The lawyer who speaks on behalf of clients is an advocate. To vouch for someone was originally to bear witness for them when summoned by a court, and a voucher was a document of proof or a written guarantee. To vouchsafe a favour is to grant it, though the word implies a condescending and pompous manner.
A steward, bailiff or any minor official who performs a public calling is a vogt. The writer A. E. van Vogt had a vocation for science fiction; in the 1940s and 1950s he turned out 3,000 words of febrile prose, six days a week, hammering away at a heavy typewriter – physically gruelling as well as mentally exhausting. Most of his stories don’t make complete sense, because when you’re writing that fast it’s easy to lose the narrative thread, but the best (such as The Weapon Shops of Isher) are astonishingly imaginative.
The noisiest animals to be domesticated when man first started farming were cattle, so yet another Indo-European word for a cow was a wak. That’s why the Spanish word for a cowboy is vaquerro, and that’s where the American English word for a rodeo rider comes from – a buckaroo. A vaccary was a medieval word for a dairy farm.
In the 1790s, the Gloucester doctor Edward Jenner noticed that the milkmaids who worked on dairy farms never seemed to get smallpox. Most contracted vaccinia or cowpox, but though this disease did leave the skin pockmarked it was not fatal, as smallpox often was. Jenner surmised that a dose of cowpox could prevent the more serious disease, and so he experimented with giving deliberate doses of cowpox … and discovered the vaccine.
WEARD IS THE Old English word for a watchman, standing guard against murderers and thieves. Some were personal bodyguards, protecting the wary feudal lord and his family; others were wardens, like the beefeaters at the Tower of London, whose function is to safeguard the Crown Jewels. The Saxon word for property is ead, so a steward on guard against theft was an eadweard. That’s how the name Edward was born.
During the reign of Edward VII, a fashion arose for ‘stovepipe’ trousers, tapering to the ankle. Forty years later, young toughs started wearing the style again, with cutaway frock coats. The newspapers needed a nickname for these lads with their bicycle chains and flick knives, and New Edwardians didn’t quite seem threatening enough. At first they were the Cosh Boys, but then, because Ted is short for Edward, a Daily Express subeditor coined the phrase Teddy Boys for a headline in 1953.
Every visitor to London is in danger of buying a fluffy toy dressed in a horseguard’s tunic and bearskin, but teddy bears are not natural guardsmen: they are named not after King Edward but US President Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt. On a bear-hunting trip in Mississippi in 1921, after he failed to bag a single animal, his friends captured a wild black bear and tied it to a willow tree as an easy target. Roosevelt refused: it was unsporting, he said. For the rest of his life, Roosevelt had a reputation as an animal-lover – entirely unwarranted.
Ward and guard, warden and guardian have nearly identical meanings, though the ‘w’ words arrived in England via the Germanic languages and the ‘gu’ words from France. Garder in French means to keep, and a garderobe is a walk-in wardrobe, a room where clothes are kept. In castles, it became the armoury, a place to store weapons – but then, in castles, a gardyloo was a hole in the outer wall for dumping human waste, with a warning cry of ‘Gare de l’eau’, or ‘Watch out for the water!’
Many cultures have folk tales of guardian angels. In Scotland these were called wraiths, and they were visible only at moments of impending disaster, urging us to beware. Our less superstitious era doesn’t believe in ghosts, but we have the utmost faith in guarantees and warrantees, which are bits of paper to protect our rights. When we claim on them, we expect our just reward.
Weird is not a war word; it probably stems from weordan, an Old English verb meaning to become. But war does give us weir, in the sense of a flood defence across a river. Damming a stream makes it easier to catch fish – a trick prehistoric man probably learned by watching beavers. In Saxon England, a landowner caller Ecgi built a weir to create a fishing pond, north-west of London: Ecgi’s Weir was recorded by charter in 975 AD but had gone a century later when the Domesday Book was compiled. It is remembered, though, or at least the road that led there is – the Edgware Road.
In Norman French, a warenier was a game reserve for the local aristocracy to enjoy hunting and fishing. In medieval English it became a wareyne, and now it’s called a warren. The only animals you’ll find there these days are rabbits.
The most obvious war word is war. Etymologists can’t trace this derivation back further than the Viking era: in Old Norse, it was werre, while in Old High German, werra means quarrelling and confusion. It seems possible, though, that to Neolithic man a war – not cattle raids or skirmishes, but a series of battles – could be forced only by a need to defend the whole tribe. The oldest images of war have been found on pictograms excavated at Kish, 50 miles south of Baghdad, in what was the ancient kingdom of Mesopotamia. They date back more than 5,000 years, but war must be much older than that – the first fortifications at Jericho, the world’s oldest city, were built 7,000 years ago – walls 3 meters (10 feet) thick, twice as high as a man. The engineers, unfortunately, had not reckoned against attack by angels and trumpets … as the spiritual hymn goes, ‘“Go blow them ram horns,” Joshua cried … when the walls came tumbling down.’
Like ward, the word war arrived in English from two directions: with a ‘w’ from northern Europe, and with a ‘gu’ from France and Spain, where it is spelled guerre or guerra. Guerrilla, literally, means little war, though in the modern world it means an urban warrior.
TO ANYONE WHO loves history and storybooks, wid is perhaps the strangest and most satisfying root word of all. Wisdom and ideas flow from it – it’s the source of every interview and all the visual arts. Wid is a mystical word to idolise.
For Neolithic man, wid meant more than just seeing – it was the knowledge that came from interpreting and understanding what lay before our eyes. Wid was visionary. Wid was wise.
In Germanic languages, it was wit – much more than a sense of humour and a sharp tongue, wit was reasoning and conscious thought. We needed our wits about us: they were our five senses, the bodily wits. That’s why, when we’re baffled, we say, ‘I’m at my wits’ end.’
To wit a thing was to know it. Someone who knew what they had seen was a witness. The past tense of wit was wot: the archaic God wot means God knows, as in the Victorian poet T. E. Brown’s exclamation, ‘A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!’ The mad king George III had a verbal tic, asking ‘wot wot?’ every time he spoke. That became a fashion among the dandies and drones, and 150 years later P. G. Wodehouse’s aristocratic dimwit Bertie Wooster was still protesting feebly, ‘I say, what?’ or greeting friends with a cheery ‘What-ho!’
A witan, in Old English, was a wise man, and in Anglo-Saxon times the parliament was the witenagemot, the gathering of the witena or advisers. The punishment they levied for crimes was a fine, called a wite – the bloodwite, for instance, was a price paid as reparation for injury or killing. It varied, according to the importance of the victim. In medieval England, a wite became the torture that souls in the afterlife would endure for their sins.
Wicca was the pre-Christian religion, the ancient wisdom practised by witches. Wis in Old English was wisdom, and those who possessed it were wizards. In medieval Dutch, a wijssegger was a soothsayer, but as the English dispensed with superstition it became a disparaging word – which is why nobody likes a wiseacre.
In Old French, wid gained a ‘g’ and became guide. In Latin, with the hard ‘v’, it was videre, to see – as in veni, vide and vici. Viz is an abbreviation of videre licet, meaning it is permissible to see, though when you see viz. in a written note now, it means namely or in other words.
Visibilis gives us visible and invisible, visual, visionary and even visage – the face, that bit of a body that we look at … unless it’s covered by a visor.
Visere means to go and see, and visitere is going to see something often – doing this makes us regular visitors. Revisere is to go back to a place, the way a writer goes back to a page to revise it. In French, visere became voir, which in English turned into view: hence review, interview, overview, purview and so on. It is also the root of purvey and revue.
To keep an eye on things is supervise – that is, overlooking. In Old French, that was sorveoir, which we spell survey.
Videre also became evidence, the proof of your eyes. Invidere was to look intensely, which suggested invidious, tending to excite ill will and envy. Envy is en + vy, to look upon.
Providens, to foresee, becomes providence and, since it requires foresight to have a well-stocked larder, provisions. The adjectival form prudens is the root of prudence.
But it is in Greek that wid experienced some really profound changes. It started as eidos, a shape – if you have an eidetic or photographic memory, you can visualise exactly what you’ve seen. Because each eidos is unique, our looks give each of us an identity.
Idea was another Greek word for a shape, but this one meant a perfect form. In Platonic philosophy, an idea is an ideal pattern that exists eternally, beyond time and in some unreachable dimension. An idyll is a perfect place. The concept got watered down, though, and now an idea is just a notion. Idealism is belief in some perfect system, and it leads to inflexible ideologies. It also throws up spurious leaders, ideopraxists (acting on an ideal) who hide behind an idealised image.
Like wit in English, istor in Greek was knowledge. As with many Greek words, it was pronounced with an aspirate: histor. In Latin that became historia, and estoire in medieval French, until, as historians will have guessed, the English adopted it. And the rest is history.