Finally, listed here are ten random words that, although they do not quite fit the brief of any of the preceding chapters, arguably have such interesting etymological stories to tell that they deserve to be included regardless.
Dating from the early fourteenth century in English, the word curfew was adopted into the language from the old Norman French term coeverfu or couvre-feu, literally meaning ‘cover-fire’, as historically curfews were regulations put in place in medieval Western Europe that demanded all domestic fires and candles be extinguished at a certain time in order to prevent fires from breaking out overnight. As these original curfews were typically signalled by the ringing of a bell late in the evening, long after the rule of extinguishing fires had dropped out of use the word curfew remained in the language simply as another name for any late-night signal or bell, or else as a directive restricting activities or movements after dark.
The word deadline first entered the language as a nineteenth-century American military term describing a line drawn on the ground, either around or within the boundaries of a military prison, which if crossed, a prisoner would risk being shot. In this sense, the term was first used during the American Civil War, and became more widely known following the trial and eventual execution of a Swiss-born major of the Confederate Army named Henry Mirz. He infamously employed a deadline during his brutal command of Camp Sumter, a prisoner of war camp in Anderson, Georgia; more than a quarter of the camp’s 45,000 prisoners died during Mirz’s control. This sense of a ‘line that should not be crossed’ presumably went on to influence the later use of deadline to refer to a time limit or closing date in the early 1900s.
Dogsbody was originally an early nineteenth-century naval slang term for a basic, unpalatable meal of dried split peas boiled in a cloth bag, or else a similarly unappetizing concoction of watered-down biscuits flavoured with sugar or salt. Quite why such foods became known as dogsbody is unknown, but it has been suggested that the name may be a humorous reference to the smell of the food as it cooked, to the distended shape of the bag once its contents had been boiled or to its somewhat unpleasant taste. Whatever its origins may be, in the early twentieth century the word developed to come to be used by senior naval officers in reference to any junior officer or midshipman who was typically charged with carrying out lowly or unpleasant duties. This development probably came about simply through association with the negative connotations of ‘dog’, or else through use of the word ‘body’ to refer to a crew or group of men, but eventually led to the modern use of the word to refer to a drudge or similarly menial worker.
The first recorded use of the word kibosh in English comes from Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz, written in 1836, in which the phrase ‘put the kye-bosh on’ is used to mean ‘do away with’ or ‘finish off’. The origin of the term is admittedly unknown, yet several explanations tracing the word back to a number of different languages have been suggested, ranging from Yiddish (in which it is popularly claimed that kibosh means a ‘cheap price’) to Scots (wherein kye-boots are shackles used to stop cows from straying too far away). Of all potential explanations of the word, however, a derivation from the Irish caipín báis, literally the ‘cap of death’ or the black cap worn by judges delivering the death penalty, is perhaps the most likely and the most unusual.
In Roman mythology, lemures were ghosts and ghouls who were said to wake at night to walk the earth, terrifying its inhabitants. The word variously described the malevolent, restless spirits of murderers and other criminals who had not been afforded a proper funeral or burial, or else the vengeful spirits of people who had died leaving unfinished business on earth. It was this ghostly description of the Roman lemures which in the eighteenth century led the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus to apply the name first to a group of similarly night-dwelling species of loris native to south-east Asia, and ultimately to the larger nocturnal mammals of Madagascar that still bear the name lemur today. Although Linnaeus himself explained that he chose the name simply because the creatures’ slow movements and nocturnal habits were reminiscent of the ghostly lemures, popular explanation claims that the name was intended to emphasize the ghostly appearance of the lemurs’ wide-eyed faces, or else the eerie sound of their calls.
Although it is used almost exclusively in modern English to refer simply to a bad dream – and ultimately, by extension, to any terrible situation or scenario – on its first appearance in the language in the fourteenth century the word nightmare originally described a female monster or succubus who was believed to sit on the chest of a sleeping person, causing a feeling of breathlessness or suffocation whilst they slept. In this context, the second part of the word is an Old English word used to describe a monster of this kind, mære, which is in fact one of the oldest recorded words in the entire language and dates back to the ninth century.
The word pandemonium has been used to refer to a clamorous state of confusion and chaos since the mid-1700s in English, although the creation of the word in fact dates from almost a century earlier. It was coined by the seventeenth-century English writer John Milton for use in his 1667 epic poem Paradise Lost, in which Pandaemonium is the ‘Citie and proud seate Of Lucifer’, and ‘high Capital Of Satan and his Peers’; it is the capital city of Hell, the dwelling place of all demons and home of the central council chamber of all evil spirits. Milton coined the term from classical roots, combining the Greek prefix pan-, meaning ‘all’ or ‘universal’ (as in panoramic or pandemic), the Latin word daemon, and the Latin suffix -ium, used here, as it is in words such as auditorium and stadium, to indicate a location or setting.
Formed from the Ancient Greek prefix para-, meaning ‘beside’, and pherne, meaning ‘dowry’, the word paraphernalia was originally a legal term used to refer to all the possessions of a woman – such as her clothes and jewellery – which remained her property after marriage and did not automatically pass over to her husband. In this context, the word was adopted from Roman family law in which a woman’s paraferna comprised all of the items she held on to outside of any other assets that would instead constitute her dowry. By law, her husband could not use or sell any of these possessions without her permission, whilst she retained the exclusive control to bequeath them to others in her will rather than have them obligatorily pass to her spouse on her death. In English, the word first appeared in this context in the mid-seventeenth century before its use became more generalized, meaning simply ‘possessions’ and later ‘necessary equipment’, in the early 1700s. Due to the introduction of the Married Woman’s Property Acts by Parliament in the late nineteenth century, the legal sense of paraphernalia has long since become obsolete.
As the name of a type of mixed alcoholic drink, punch dates from the early seventeenth century and was first adopted into English from the Hindi word for ‘five’, panch, as an original Indian punch contained just five ingredients: some type of liquor, water, lemon juice, sugar or molasses and spices. In this context, both punch and the Hindi word panch derive ultimately from the Sanskrit word for ‘five’, pañca.
In reference to a soulless reanimated corpse, the word zombie was first recorded in English in the early 1800s, although the image of a ferocious, bloodthirsty monster is a considerably more recent invention. The origin of the word in traditional voodoo sorcery, and in particular the traditional magic of the West Indies and southern United States, is fairly widely known: according to voodoo lore, a sorcerer or bokor can resurrect the dead either by taking control of and bottling a part of their soul known as the zombi, or else the body can be brought back to the life by a spirit, also known as a zombi, which enters the body to reanimate it. Like all voodoo culture, however, the word can ultimately be traced back to the traditional cultures of West Africa and is believed to be descended from the name of a snake-god, a supreme deity known as Nzambi, who is revered in the religion of the Bakongo people of northern Angola and Congo.