Codswallop, Crumpet and Caper

Words and where they came from.
Words change, they emigrate and immigrate, they arrive with invading armies and embrace changing fashions; they amend their spelling as they roam across the centuries and languages. This book delves into their origins, their meanings and their changing habits. Some imagination is occasionally required to understand their peripatetic habits but bear with them and you will find many surprises and also, very often, explanations so simple that it is fun to have it explained. Remember that many of these wordy journeys took place before it was common practice to write things down so, as they moved from language to language and from dialect to dialect, the sound varied slightly and when eventually pen was put to paper, the result often bore little resemblance to the origin.

Their progress from ancient parchment to modern spell checker, has therefore been varied, unplanned and often unrecorded but as they wandered casually through the languages of the world stopping off here, picking up a new spelling there, they invariably retained a little bit of their history and this book explains the origins of over 1300 English words taken from 100 other languages.

Hardback 208 pages with 1300 English words from over 100 other languages.

Bankrupt
Latin Banco A table and Rotto Broken. Tables belonging to insolvent money changers were broken up to prevent further trading.


Bistro
Russian Bistro Quick. The Cossacks occupying Paris in 1814 would shout ‘Bistro!’ when they wanted food to be served quickly.


Bludgeon
Cornish Blugon Mallet.


Book
Anglo-Saxon Boc Beech. Gothic tribes used slips of wood for writing tablets and found that the wood of the beech tree was most suitable. They were gathered together like leaves of a book.


Conjugal
Latin Con Together and Jugum Yoke. A husband and wife joined in marriage are therefore yoked together.


Hooch
Inupiaq (Alaska) Hoochino The name of a tribe who made strong liquor from a distillation of fermented corn.


Loo
French Garde de l'eau Watch out for the water. In medieval times chamber pots were emptied from upstairs windows often to the misfortune of unsuspecting pedestrians in the street below. This cry was the only warning of what was about to befall them.


Lukewarm
Celtic Liegh Half, partly. Hence lukewarm is half warm.


Nectarine
Persian Nectarine Perfect. A nectarine was considered to be the perfect peach.


Spider
German Spinne To spin. Spiders spin webs. Cobweb is derived from Old English Coppe A spider.


Tabby
Arabic Attabiya A district of old Baghdad where a patterned silk with stripes resembling those of a tabby cat was made.


Tomato
Nahuatl (Aztec) Xitomatl Plump thing with a belly-button.


Worm
Norse Waurms Serpent. It seems inconceivable that the humble earthworm could ever have been thought to be menacing yet it was. In Old English it was a Wyrm A dragon.