Chapter 4

Commuting

Looking glamorous (a word which is related to grammar) and suitably attired, it’s time to tackle the commute. This term for the journey to work was introduced in US English in the 1960s. It originates in the commutation ticket; from Latin com ‘altogether’ and mutare ‘to change’, the commutation ticket was a season ticket, in which the daily charge for travel was commuted to a single payment. Instead you may prefer to travel by car—from the Latin carrus ‘wheeled vehicle’, or ‘wagon’. Perhaps you are sufficiently important to be driven to work in a limousine. This may sound grand to us, but its etymological origins are considerably humbler. The limousine gets its name from the French city of Limousin, famous for the production of a hooded cloak favoured by drivers of early automobiles, in which the driver’s seat was placed outside. The term limousine was subsequently transferred to the cars themselves, especially ones where the chauffeur was separated from the passengers. And while the word chauffeur conjures up images of drivers in livery and peaked caps, its origins are also rather less grand. The word derives from the French verb chauffer ‘to heat’, and so means ‘stoker’—the person responsible for keeping a steam-engine fully stoked with coal. Given this, you may prefer to drive yourself—an opportunity to show off your sports car, or to roll down the roof of your cabriolet. While cabriolet is now a general term for a car with a folding roof, it was originally used of an eighteenth-century two-wheeled carriage with a hood. Because of its tendency to jump up and down on the uneven streets, this vehicle was named using the French verb cabrioler, ‘to leap in the air’. The origins of this verb lie in the Latin capra ‘she goat’; the goat’s fondness for leaping is also preserved in the word caper ‘a frolicsome leap’, and in the phrase to cut a caper. At this time of the morning, though, frolicsome leaps are inadvisable.

Perhaps, in the spirit of cutting congestion on the roads, or doing your bit for the environment, you prefer to use public transport. You could travel by bus, a clipped form of the Latin word omnibus ‘for all’ (the same word appears as a prefix in words like omnivore and omniscient). The word was first employed by a French company which transported its customers between Nantes and a nearby lido, or bathing place (from Italian lido ‘shore’). The name itself was borrowed from a French tradesman called Omnès, whose slogan was Omnès omnibus (‘Omnès for all’); the idea behind applying this to the transport company was to distinguish it from more expensive, and thus more exclusive, competitors. If your journey requires you to take more than one bus, be warned—despite being a Latin word ending in -us, the plural of omnibus is not omnibi. This is because omnibus is the dative plural of omnes, and so is already in the plural. Despite this, nineteenth-century spellings do include omnibi—as well as the even more egregious omnibus’s. The original omnibuses were staffed by omnibus cads—this sounds like an insult now, since today the word cad refers to someone who behaves dishonourably, but it began life as a shortened form of cadet. The modern meaning, glossed in OED as ‘A fellow of low vulgar manners and behaviour’, with the important further rider: ‘An offensive and insulting appellation’ (in case you were thinking of using it as a compliment), developed from Oxford slang for townspeople who did not belong to the university. Buses and coaches may be similar today, but their origins are very different. The original coaches were horse-drawn carriages used for state occasions by the Hungarian royal family in the sixteenth century. Since it was constructed in the town of Kocs, this vehicle was known as kocsi szekér ‘wagon from Kocs’, from which the English word coach is derived. Alternatively you might choose to travel by railway; although this is now the standard British English term, whereas railroad is favoured in US English, the two were widely used in both Britain and the USA when rail travel was first introduced. To get at least a rough idea of when a train will depart you will need to consult a timetable or schedule, from a Latin diminutive form of the Greek skhede ‘papyrus leaf’, used in the fourteenth century to mean ‘ticket’ or ‘label’.

Passing the time on the train might involve flicking through a magazine—from the Italian magazzino ‘storehouse’, this word was originally used to refer to a warehouse for storing goods or merchandise, or a military arms and ammunition depot (from which the modern sense of receptacle for feeding cartridges into a gun derives). In the eighteenth century magazine began to be used of journals and newspapers on specialist topics, such as The Gentleman’s Magazine or The Mechanics’ Magazine—the idea being that they were storehouses of information. In the seventeenth century, periodical publications were commonly known by the term gazette—as in The London Gazette and The Edinburgh Gazette. The word gazette is also of Italian extraction, originating in the Italian gazzetta. This term for a cheap news-sheet goes back to the name of a fifteenth-century Venetian publication known as gazeta de la novità ‘halfpennyworth of news’, so called because it cost a single Venetian coin known as the gazeta. Its cheap price and dubious reporting resulted in a somewhat mixed reputation; for a more official account of the news you might prefer to consult a bulletin. This word derives from the Italian bulleta, meaning ‘official warrant, passport’, the diminutive of bulla ‘seal’. Bulla is the origin of the papal bull—an edict issued by the pope to which his official seal is attached.

If a papal bull feels a bit heavy for first thing in the morning, or if your Latin is a little rusty, you might prefer something more lightweight. Perhaps you could leaf through a brochure, while pondering your next purchase or holiday. The brochure gets its name from the French verb brocher ‘to stitch’—it literally means ‘stitched work’. This is a reference to the way the pages were stitched together rather than being bound, as was customary with a more expensive and finished production. Or perhaps it’s time to wade through some of the inevitable office paperwork, household bills, and correspondence—known collectively as bumf. This word is rather appropriately a shortening of bum-fodder, a nineteenth-century term for toilet paper that was later transferred to other kinds of worthless printed materials. The most etymologically appropriate reading matter to accompany your travels is a journal, since both journal and journey derive from Latin diurnalis ‘belonging to a day’. Journey was originally a term for the distance that was travelled in a single day (usually considered to be 20 miles), while a journal was initially a daily record of events or financial transactions. Perhaps particularly suitable reading matter for a train is a railway novel, a nineteenth-century term for a lightweight work of fiction produced in a cheap edition and sold on railway platforms. The word novel is from Latin novus ‘new’, and originally referred to any new, or novel, story; novella ‘short novel’ is the diminutive form. For variety you could choose an anthology—etymologically a collection of flowers, from Greek anthos ‘flower’. The reason behind the name is that an anthology was considered to be a collection of the finest authors, or flowers of literature.

Books

The word book is probably related to the name of the beech tree, perhaps because the earliest forms of Germanic writing were scratched onto wood. These messages would have been carved using the ancient Germanic writing system known as runes: from an Old English word that can also mean ‘secret’. Runic characters are formed using a series of angular strokes, avoiding the loops found in many of our modern letters, since they were specifically developed for scratching onto hard surfaces: stones, bone, wood, and deer-horn. For us there is an obvious connection between the name of a tree like the beech and the word book, since the paper from which books are made today comes from the sap drawn from trees. But this connection does not apply for much of the medieval period since paper was only introduced to England in the fifteenth century, and even then in the form of a paper made from rags. Paper was first developed by the Chinese in the second century ad; it took a millennium before it made its way via the Arab world to western Europe. The word paper points back to a much earlier form of book-making, since it comes from the word papyrus, the writing material prepared by the ancient Egyptians using the pithy stem of a water plant. Papyrus was still known in the early Middle Ages, but fell out of use in the seventh century since it was too fragile to be used in books. The introduction of paper led to the adoption of watermarks—an image that was incorporated into the paper during manufacture that identified its maker. One such maker’s mark, a fool’s cap, lies behind the use of foolscap to refer to paper of a certain size. During the Middle Ages, texts were written on animal skin—in England sheepskin (known as parchment—from Latin pergamina ‘writing material from Pergamum’, a city in the west of Turkey where the material was thought to have been invented) was particularly common, though the more expensive deerskin (vellum, from vitellus ‘little calf’—also the root of veal) was used for more deluxe (French ‘of luxury’) productions. Medieval manuscripts are so called because they were written by hand: Latin manu ‘by hand’ and scriptus ‘written’; the Latin scribere ‘to write’ also lies behind the words scribe and script. The writing implement was a quill pen fashioned out of a bird’s feather (quill is from a Germanic root meaning ‘shaft of a feather’); it is for this reason that the word pen originates in the Latin penna ‘feather’. The end of the quill was cut to form a nib—a variant of the Old English neb, used of a bird’s beak or a person’s nose—using a pen-knife; this is the origin of the term for an implement more usually associated today with boy scouts and members of the Swiss army.

Wood did, however, play a part in the construction of a book in the Middle Ages, since it was the main material used in bookbindings. Although the words book and beech don’t appear connected today, the relationship is clearer if we go back to Old English. That’s because the plural of the Old English word book was bec, pronounced ‘beech’: it was one of a group of plurals where the stem vowel changed instead of adding an ending. Some of these survive into modern English—think of tooth–teeth, foot–feet—but most have become regularized according to the dominant class of nouns which form their plural by adding an ‘s’. The word book appears in a range of compounds in Old English: a letter was a bocstæf (literally ‘book-character’), and a library was a bochus ‘book-house’. As with much of the vocabulary of modern English (especially in the more technical fields), these words have mostly been replaced with words borrowed from Latin. Old English bocstæf is now a letter (from Latin littera); bochus has been replaced by library (from the Latin word liber ‘book’). The Latin word liber has a similar etymology to the English word book, since it originated in the Latin word for the bark of a tree. Like many Latin words now used in English, library entered the English language from French (which is itself derived from Latin); however, in adopting the word, English speakers introduced an important change in meaning. In French librairie meant bookseller’s shop, while in English, library referred to a place set apart for public study and reference of books. This distinction still applies, and is one to bear in mind if you should ever find yourself tempted to walk off with a book from a French librairie. The word for library in French is bibliothèque, which draws upon the Greek word for book—biblos—originally the name for the papyrus plant, and the origin of the English word Bible.

The connection between book and the Bible is an important one, since the first Bibles represent the earliest instances of the codex—the Latin word for a book, a variant form of caudex ‘trunk of a tree’—the form of the book as we know it. Codex is also the root of the words code and codify—the process of arranging and compiling a set of rules or laws according to an authoritative system. Before the birth of the codex, texts were inscribed onto wooden tablets (from Latin tabula, a flat piece of wood—also the root of table) coated with wax, onto which messages were scratched using a small pointed rod termed a stilus—the modern spelling stylus is the result of a mistaken association with the Greek word stulos, meaning ‘column’. The idiosyncratic features of a person’s handwriting were linked with mode of expression and manner of composition, and from this developed the word style. Although wooden tablets have been superseded, the word tablet is still used today to refer to a reading device, albeit one that is rather more technologically sophisticated. In the era of electronic tablets and smartphones, the stylus has also enjoyed something of a revival, since it is the term used for the pen-shaped device used for writing or drawing on the screen. The Roman stilus was blunted at the other end, allowing a message to be rubbed out and the tablet to be re-inscribed. The phrase tabula rasa, literally meaning ‘scraped tablet’ (compare razor), referring metaphorically to the human mind at the time of birth, or a state unencumbered by preconceived ideas, draws upon this image of a wax tablet that has been scraped blank ready for re-use. A more modern equivalent term is blank slate—deriving from the use of slates as writing surfaces by schoolchildren. Perhaps the next stage will be the formatted iPad.

Wax tablets were suitable only for the recording of short texts and messages; before the codex, longer works were copied onto scrolls or rolls—this form of book production is the source of modern English volume, from Latin volvere ‘to roll’. A major advantage of the codex format is the ability to flick through its component pages (from the Latin pagina ‘page’—ultimately from the verb pangere ‘fix, compose’), or leaves—a metaphorical reference to the similarities between the pages of a book and the leaves of a tree. This comparison also lies behind the word folio ‘leaf of paper or parchment’, which is from the Latin folium ‘leaf’ (also the root of the English word foliage). Latin folio is the source of the French word feuille, which can also refer to both a leaf on a tree and a page of a book. In a book, the text (from the Latin texere ‘to weave’—reflecting the woven appearance of the script used in medieval manuscripts) is organized into chapters. The chapter has its origins in Latin capitulum, the diminutive form of caput ‘head’—referring to the chapter as a smaller division within a larger work. The connection between this and a monastic chapter—the term for a general meeting of the members of a religious community—comes from the practice of reading a chapter of the monastic rule, or of the Bible, at such meetings, in the room that came to be known as the chapter house.

In order to navigate lengthy texts, various reading aids have developed. In the medieval period passages of significance were marked using a manicule (the diminutive of Latin manus ‘hand’)—a small hand with a finger pointing at the relevant passage. This same image of a guiding finger lies behind the word index, which originates in the Latin index ‘forefinger’ (still used in English index finger)—also the root of indicate. The appendix, added at the end of a volume, offering supplementary but not essential information, is from Latin appendere, a verb that describes something additional as if it were hung on (like an appendage). Turning to the back cover of a modern book we find the blurb, a short description of the contents—typically eulogistic (from Greek eulogia ‘praise’) and inevitably labelling the book a bestseller, originally a nineteenth-century term for anything that outsells its competitors, but now most commonly used of books. Blurb was invented by Gelett Burgess (1866–1951), from the depiction of a young woman called Miss Belinda Blurb who featured on the cover of one of his comic books. Burgess offered a definition which neatly captured the content of such descriptive accounts, which are typically ‘abounding in agile adjectives and adverbs, attesting that this book is the “sensation of the year”’.

Booksellers were originally known as stationers because they operated out of a shop or stall that enjoyed a fixed location (from Latin statio ‘I stand’)—also the root of stationary. Early stationers were also engaged in the production of books and in trade in the requisite materials—paper, pens, and ink; from this the modern concept of the stationer, dealing exclusively in office and writing materials, arose in the seventeenth century. Printing was introduced to England in the fifteenth century by William Caxton (c.1422–c.1491), who set up his print shop in Westminster—the centre of the thriving trade in manuscript books. Books printed in this early period—before the beginning of the sixteenth century—are known today as incunabula (singular incunabulum), a Latin word meaning ‘cradle’—a reference to this period as the infancy of printing technology. Caxton brought with him apprentices trained in the Low Countries, where printing was first invented, and this led them to introduce certain Dutch spelling practices: the ‘h’ added to ghost (the Old English form was gast) was suggested to them by the Middle Dutch spelling gheest. Several other examples, like ghest ‘guest’, ghoos ‘goose’, gherle ‘girl’, also appear in early printed books but then fell out of general use. Because the majuscule (Latin for ‘somewhat greater’) and minuscule (‘somewhat smaller’—related to minus rather than mini, hence the spelling) letters were stored in cases at different heights, these came to be known as upper-case and lower-case letters. Upper-case letters are also known as capital letters; this term, yet another derivation from Latin caput ‘head’, was originally used of an ornamented initial appearing at the head of a passage in a manuscript. As well as being decorated, such letters could contain illustrations depicting characters or events in the text, or even, in some cases, the author. The word author is from Latin auctor ‘originator’, and in the Middle Ages it was only applied to famous classical writers like Virgil, Ovid, and Homer. Writers like these were considered to carry authority, while English writers like Chaucer were viewed as lacking such status, writing not in Latin or Greek but in the vernacular. This term is from Latin vernaculus ‘domestic, indigenous’, from verna, the word for a native-born slave, referring to the use of an indigenous (from Latin indigena ‘native’) tongue rather than one of the more highly regarded classical languages. Because manuscript illustrations were painted with the red lead known in Latin as minium, they came to be known as miniatures. Since these pictures were necessarily of reduced size, the term miniature came to be extended to refer to all small pictures, and subsequently to any item that is a reduced version of the original.

Instead of reading a book you could purchase a newspaper—either a broadsheet—originally a single sheet of paper similar to a broadside—or a tabloid, from tablet—a reference to the paper’s small, concentrated, and easily digestible format. Once you have had enough of the gloomy news and celebrity gossip, why not turn to the back page and tackle the ultimate challenge in word puzzles: the cryptic crossword? The crossword was the invention of Liverpool émigré Arthur Wynne, whose first puzzle appeared in the New York World in 1913. This initial foray was christened a Word-Cross; the instruction in subsequent issues to ‘Find the missing cross words’ led to the birth of the crossword. Solving the daily crossword has long been associated with train travel; in 1920s America, trains between Baltimore and Ohio were supplied with dictionaries as an aid to the growing numbers of solvers, solutionists, puzzle-heads, and cruciverbalists (Latin for ‘crossworders’, albeit a twentieth-century formation). In Britain the stereotype of the respectable commuter, attired in pinstripe suit and bowler hat, includes the ability to dispatch the Times crossword before arriving at Waterloo.

Crosswords

Crosswords consist of a grid made up of black and white boxes, in which the answers, also known as lights, are to be entered. The term light derives from the word’s wider use to refer to facts or suggestions which help to explain, or cast light upon, a problem. The puzzle consists of a series of clues, a word that derives from Old English cleowen ‘ball of thread’. Since a ball of thread could be used to help guide someone out of a maze—just as Ariadne’s thread came to Theseus’ aid in the Minotaur’s labyrinth—it developed the figurative sense of a piece of evidence leading to a solution, especially in the investigation of a crime. The spelling changed from clew to clue (along with blew, glew, and trew) under the influence of French in the seventeenth century.

In the earliest crosswords the clue consisted of a straightforward synonym (Greek ‘with name’)—this type is still popular in concise or quick crosswords. A later development saw the emergence of the cryptic clue (from a Greek word meaning ‘hidden’), where, in addition to a definition, another route to the answer is concealed within a form of wordplay. Wordplay devices include the anagram, from a Greek word meaning ‘write anew’, and the charade, from a French word referring to a type of riddle in which each syllable of a word, or a complete word, is described, or acted out—as in the game charades. Punning on similar-sounding words, or homophones (Greek ‘same sound’), is a common trick. A reference to Spooner requires a solver to transpose the initial sounds of two or more words; this derives from a supposed predisposition to such slips of the tongue in the speech of Reverend William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), Warden of New College, Oxford, whose alleged Spoonerisms include a toast to ‘our queer dean’ and upbraiding a student who ‘hissed all his mystery lectures’. Other devious devices of misdirection include reversals, double definitions, containers (where all or part of a word must be placed within another), and words hidden inside others, or between two or more words. In the type known as &lit. (short for ‘& literally’), the whole clue serves as both definition and wordplay.

Although crosswords are generally a solitary pastime, the solver enters into battle with the compiler, or setter, who traditionally remains anonymous (Greek ‘without name’), or assumes a pseudonym (Greek ‘false name’). Famous exponents of this dark art include Torquemada (Edward Powys Mathers) and Ximenes (Derrick Macnutt), who adopted the names of Spanish inquisitors, Afrit, the name of a mythological Arabic demon hidden in that of the setter A.F. Ritchie, and Araucaria, the Latin name for the monkey puzzle tree, adopted by the Reverend John Graham. Colin Dexter, inventor of the famous crossword-solving sleuth Inspector Morse, set crosswords for the Oxford Times newspaper under the pseudonym Codex (hidden in the name COlin DEXter). Dexter was for many years a regular entrant in the Observer newspaper’s cryptic clue-writing competition. Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis take their names from two of Dexter’s principal rivals in that contest—Sir Jeremy Morse (former chairman of Lloyds Bank) and Mrs B. Lewis. In fact all the characters in the first Morse novel, Last Bus to Woodstock (1975), with the exception of the murderer, are named after Dexter’s crosswording comrades. Morse’s first name remains a secret throughout the series; in the penultimate novel, Death Is Now My Neighbour (1996), Morse revealed that he was named Endeavour—now the title of a prequel based on Morse’s early career—after Captain Cook’s ship. In the TV adaptation Morse hints at his name using a cryptic crossword clue: ‘My whole life’s effort has revolved around Eve’: an anagram (‘revolved’) of around Eve = Endeavour, defined as ‘My whole life’s effort’.

It is unfortunate that Lewis Carroll (the nom de plume, literally ‘feather, or quill, name’, of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832–1898), the inventor of several word games and a compulsive re-arranger of letters, died before the crossword was invented, as he would have undoubtedly been a brilliant exponent. Given that, it seems fitting that a key principle of the setter’s art—’You need not mean what you say, but you must say what you mean’—is a version of Alice’s confusing encounter with the March Hare; while Alice’s bewildered response echoes the sentiments of many novices when first confronted with a cryptic clue:

‘You should say what you mean,’ the March Hare went on.

‘I do,’ Alice hastily replied; ‘at least—at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.’

‘Not the same thing a bit!’ said the Hatter. ‘Why, you might just as well say that “I see what I eat” is the same thing as “I eat what I see”!’ . . .

Alice felt dreadfully puzzled. The Hatter’s remark seemed to her to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English.