Cab
Cab is a clipped form of cabriolet. It came into English through fr. caprioler, which in its turn comes from ital. capriolare, a derivative of capriolo, ‘roebuck’. How does a roebuck turn into a taxi? The name was applied because the vehicle’s suspension was so springy that it appeared to jump up and down as it went along, thus reminding people of deer jumping up and down. (Ayto 1991: 90)
Cadaver
The word cadaver comes from cadere and literally means ‘something that has fallen over’. (Ayto 1991: 91)
Calculate
In the olden days, pebbles were used to do arithmetics. This sort of pebble was called calculus in Latin. The English word comes from the Past Participle of the corresponding word, calculare. Thus calculate as a word preserves something that is long gone. Incidentally, calculus has also given English the words calcium and chalk. (Ayto 1991: 91-2)
Calendula
That calendar is derived from calendae, the first day of the Roman months, is not particularly surprising. However, there is another word, even closer to the original, which is also derived from calendae, but where the connection is less obvious: calendula. It refers to a plant of the daisy family. The connection is far-fetched but interesting. Apparently, the plant was once used to cure menstrual disorders, disorders which have a way of arriving regularly, in monthly intervals, just like the first day of the month. (Ayto 1991: 92)
Camera
There is an 18-century building in Oxford which is called Radcliffe Camera, a part of the university’s library. It seems odd that a building should be called camera, but actually this is the word’s original meaning. It comes from gr. kamara, ‘vault’, ‘arch’. It then came to applied to a vaulted room, then to rooms in general. When the precursor of the modern camera was invented in the 17th century, it consisted of a small box which produced the same effect as one which could be achieved in a small darkened room, a camera obscura. When modern photography was developed, the same principle was applied to the picture-framing box. (Ayton 1991: 93)
Cannibal
When Columbus first reached America, he made contact with the Tainos, native Indians of whom he spoke as ‘the best people in the world’. There were other Indians whom he liked much less. They were the Caniba. This was just a variant of Carib, the word which then gave origin to Caribbean. Columbus, however, believed that Caniba meant that they were subjects to the Grand Khan, and that confirmed him in his erroneous belief that he had reached India! Columbus initial dislike of the Caniba was then taken up by others. This led to the belief that they were ferocious people and ate human flesh. And that is how the word cannibal emerged. (Flavell & Flavell 2005: 136)
Car
Although the motor car was not developed until very late into the 19th century, the word car had been around since the 14th century, the only difference being that it referred to any wheeled vehicle. The word is yet another case which disproves the popular belief that you need a new word for every new object which appears.
Catamaran
In catamaran, the stress could, in principle, be on any of the four syllables: on the second as in Decameron, on the third as in Aldebaran, on the last as in Desperate Dan, and on the first – where it actually is. (McMahon 2002: 121)
Catastrophic
The word is remarkable in the way it relates to catastrophe. All the vowels in one word are different from the corresponding vowel in the other word. This is largely due to the change of stress. (Davis 2004: 66)
Cat in a hat
English is a stressed-timed language. What does that mean? It allows approximately the same time to elapse between one stressed syllable and the next stressed syllable, no matter how many unstressed syllables there may be in between. As a consequence, cat flap and cat in a hat, which both have two stressed syllables, take up the same amount of time, although there are two more syllables in cat in a hat. French, on the other hand, is not stressed-timed, it is syllable-timed, i.e. it allows the same amount of time for each syllable, no matter if stressed or not. Stress-timing is responsible for the characteristic rhythm of English. (McMahon 2002: 124)
Cattle
Horses, oxen, asses, mules and camels were included under the term cattle in a 13th century manuscript. The word, which was borrowed from Norman French and entered English as catel, could also apply to cows, calves, sheep, lambs, goats and pigs. Earlier, it was used to refer to all kinds of ‘personal property’, but as under the feudal system domesticated animals represented wealth, cattle was gradually understood to mean ‘livestock’. As if this weren’t enough, the word was once again borrowed from French, this time as chatel, and this gave rise to English chattel, which now means what cattle used to mean! Ultimately, both words go back to Latin capitalis, also the source of English capital. (Flavell & Flavell 2005: 24)
Cell
In The Pillars of the Earth, Brother Philip, one of the protagonists, is made the Prior of a cell. How can you be a prior of a cell? This is only comprehensible if you know the original meaning of cell. Cells were small dependant monasteries a little distance from the abbey to which they belonged. Originally, one of the principles had been that monks should never travel so far from the abbey that they could not return within a day. To wander about outside was not considered good for their souls. This became more difficult when the abbeys accumulated land given by benefactors. And therefore cells were built where the monks could tend to their more distant holdings. The use of cell to refer to a small single chamber in a monastery only developed later, in the 14th century. Then the word was extended to refer to the small single chambers in prisons and then to the small compartments in the body. In addition, cell is also the space where small insects live, a terrorist group, a phone and a piece of equipment to produce electricity. Not bad for such a small thing. (cf. Flavell & Flavell 2005: 40-1)
Chairman
A chairman today is somebody who is in charge of a meeting or who directs the work of a company or organisation. Originally, the chairman was somebody whose occupation it was to carry persons in chairs, something we would today consider a rather minor or even denigrating task but which originally was quite a distinction.
Chamberlain
Curiously, this name, which has a diphthong in the first and a monophthong in the last syllable when pronounced by native speakers, often has a diphthong in the last and a monophtong in the first syllable when pronounced by foreigners.
Champagne
Champage was originally just vin de champagne, wine from the countryside. Only later did it come to refer exclusively to the region around Épernay, where the famous wine is produced. French campagne comes from Latin campus, the word for the field, from which armies in the olden days set off for a new bout of fighting. That has given us the word campaign. The best soldiers in the campaign were the campiones, the champions. While the soldiers stayed in the field, they lived in tents and set up their camp. Which is why people still go on camping holidays. What else can you do with a field like this? You can build a university on the grounds, and what will emerge there is the university campus. Forsyth, Mark: The Etymologicon. A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language. London: Icon Books, 2016: 109-111.
Chancellor
A word which has two different meanings depending on whether it refers to German or to British politics. In a German context, the word refers to what in other countries is the Prime Minister. In Britain, however, the chancellor is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, i.e. what corresponds to a Finance Minister in other countries. Compare these sentences from two articles in the same edition of a British newspaper (The Independent September 2005): “German conservative leader Angela Merkel has raised the stakes in her poker game to become the country’s next chancellor” and “Allies of the Chancellor urged the Prime Minister to set out a timetable for his plans to step down”. Incidentally, both sentences deal with the succession to the post of Prime Minister, in one case the Chancellor being the post in question, in the other case the present Chancellor being the candidate for the post in question. If you were to translate the two texts into another language, you would therefore have to use different words.
Chauffeur
A chauffeur is originally ‘someone who heats’, derived from French chauffer, ‘heat’. He was the ‘fireman’ so to speak on board a steam train, and it was his job to shovel fuel into the boiler so that the machine kept going. The earliest steam-powered motor vehicles worked on the same principle, and in this case the fireman was often identical with the driver. The driver is still called chauffeur although he has long stopped being the ‘heater’. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2005: 262)
Cheesed off
Why you are cheesed off when you are fed up nobody knows, but the idiom is there. It was exploited for punning in advertising when an advertising jingle said, ‘Pour on parmesan when you’re cheesed off with potatoes’. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 50)
Chip in
When you chip something in you contribute to something: ‘If everyone chips in, we’ll be able to buy a nice present’. The allusion is to poker where players place their chips in the pot thus contributing to the overall sum. Today, it is not only money you can chip in when you use the idiom, but also remarks, suggestions, etc. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 51)
Chiswick
There is a place in Greater London called Chiswick. It means ‘cheese farm’. There is a place is Cumbria called Keswick. It also means ‘cheese farm’. Why, then, is one form different from the other? They are both Germanic forms and clearly related, but one of them, Keswick, lies in an area where the Scandinavians had settled in the Middle Ages. There was no such sound as / t S / in Old Norse. Instead, it preserved the old Germanic /k/ in these words. This is why the two places have a different name today. A similar example is Shipton in Dorset and Skipton in Yorkshire. They both mean ‘sheep farm’.
Close your eyes and think of England
If you want to advise somebody to just put up with an unpleasant situation you can say “Close your eyes and think of England ”. Although this idiom can now refer to all sorts of unpleasant situations, originally it referred to unwanted sexual intercourse. It is ascribed to a Lady Hamilton, who was rather glad that her husband did not call on her as often as he used to do. In her journal she wrote: “When I hear his steps outside my door, I lie down on my bed, close my eyes, open my legs and think of England. (Flavell & Flavell 3 2000: 55)
Codex
Literally, the word, deriving from Latin caudex, means ‘tree-trunk’. The reason for this is that the wax tablets into which the texts for the original codices was scratched were attached to small tablets – and they were made of wood. (Casemir & Fischer 2013: 179)
Coffee
How would an alien, were he just to observe us, find out the existence and the meaning of the word coffee? This is much trickier that it sounds. People rarely point to things and say what they are called. And words are seldom used in isolation. If the alien came upon of group of people talking and having coffee, the word coffee may be used but not necessarily. The one with the pot in his hand may just ask “Would anyone like another cup?” or “Would anyone like some more?” Nor would there have to be coffee around if the word was used. Somebody might just ask if somebody else has remembered to put coffee on their shopping list. Where, then, would the alien find the correlations between the word and the thing? (cf. Matthews 2003: 4-5)
Computer
“This I am told by a very skilful computer, who hath given a full demonstration of it from rules of arithmetics.” This was written by Jonathan Swift, three hundred years before the advent of the computer. Still, the word existed. Back in Swift’s era, a computer was some one, not some thing. A computer was a man who did the mind-numbing task of adding, substracting, multiplying and dividing as his job. He was a reckoner. He was a calculator. (Garg 2007: 65)
Concentration camp
The word concentration camp was first used in the context of the Boer Wars. It was used to refer to the camps erected by Kitchener (in the name of the British colonial administration) along railway lines to house the people of the Boers, against whom the British had fought the war. The word was coined in analogy to span. campo reconcentrado, a word used by the Spanish to refer to similar camps set up in Cuba for the captured Cuban guerrilla fighters. The word concentration camp was used by the British parliamentary opposition and other pro-Boers who wanted to know exactly what was going on South Africa. The government first claimed that the camp inmates had entered them voluntarily. When this turned out to be humbug, the government said that the camps had been set up on humanitarian grounds. One couldn’t after all leave the people out on the veld to starve. Only very gradually the truth emerged. The enormity of the tragedy in the camps came out when a British woman, Emily Hobhouse, toured the camps in both republics. Her suspicions were then confirmed by a committee under the leadership of Dame Millicent Fawcett, a feminist and liberal unionist. The Fawcett Report showed incompetence and neglect at every level. The failure to observe the most elementary rules of hygiene and the failure to bring doctors and nurses to the camp, the absence of healthy food, of blankets, of clean water, of protection against the sun and the frost had caused a catastrophe, with thousands of people dying from typhoid, dysentery and measles. It turned out that the number of people in the camps was much higher than the figures admitted by the government, about 150,000 people. The death rate was higher than admitted by the government and most of the deaths could have been prevented. The war had cost 20,000 British lives and £ 200 million. Kitchener was given a viscountcy and £ 50,000 as a token of the government’s appreciation. He immediately invested them in South African gold shares. Peckenham, Thomas: The Scramble for Africa. London: Abacus, 1991: 577-580.
Cool
Cool, in the sense of ‘stylish´’, ‘fashionable’, is not a recent invention though it may seem so. It stems from the early 1900s (first as an adjective, later as an interjection) and was popularised by black jazz musicians in the 1940s. It was taken up by teenagers and then by the general population. It has become so much the norm that a character in James Patterson’s London Bridges (2004) can exclaim, creating an oxymoron, “Not only is this smart, it is cool as hell.” (Ammer 2006: 81)
Cranberry
The words blackberry and blueberry are perfectly transparent. One can infer their meaning from their individual parts. A blueberry is a berry which is blue. This does not work with gooseberry or strawberry. Although we know what goose and straw mean, there does not seem to be a connection between their meaning as single words and their meaning as parts of these words. A third category is formed by words such as cranberry and huckleberry. The specific meaning of cran and huckle is elusive, and they make no other appearance in English except in these words. Actually, this type of word is known as cranberry words. (Katamba, Francis: “Morphology: Word Structure”, in: Culpeper 2009: 104)
Crayfish
In spite of its name, the crayfish is not a fish, but a crab (German Krebs). And a starfish is not a fish either, but a sea creature in the shape of a star with five arms (German Seestern).
Crocodile
The crocodile is so called because it is a ‘worm’ (gr. drilos) with a habit of basking on the ‘pebbles’ (gr. kroke), i.e. on the sandbanks or shores of rivers. Thus it ought to be called crocodrile, but it never has been. Somewhere along it lost its /r/, in a rather capricious way: in the Middle Ages it was called cokodrille in English, only to return to its present form in Early Modern English. Incidentally, its Spanish and Italian equivalents are cocodrilo and coccodrillo. (Ayto 1991: 146)
Crusade
Sometimes words disappear from a language because the ‘things’ they refer to do not exist any more. Words like brougham, gig or hansom were generally well known in the 19th century, but with the vehicles they referred to the words also disappeared. Not quite, of course, they are still there, in the books written at the time, in modern books about the time, in dictionaries, etc. but they do not form part of the general knowledge of contemporary speakers of English. Words do not need to disappear in this way, however. We still have crusades although we do not have crusades any more. At least we don’t have crosses of red on our tunics and do not ride shouting “Deus vult!” towards Jerusalem in order to tear it from the enemy. Today we have crusades against smoking, crusades against politically incorrect language or crusades against countries which stubbornly refuse to accept the superiority of democracy and its allies, Coco-Cola, McDonalds, Hollywood and IBM. Not so different from the old warriors after all.
Cunt
In Caernarfon, in North Wales, you hear peole calling each other cunt all the time. It simply means “mate”. In other parts of the country, it may be wise not to use the word in the same way. (Crystal 2007: 132)
Cuppa
The contraction cuppa has become quite a common short form of cup of tea. It has long begun to appear in semi-official contexts, on billboards, in signs, in advertisements, etc. This is odd. Why do cup and of form a union? Why has it become associated with the preceding strong syllable, not with the next strong syllable? There is system in the madness: if we pronounce cup+of tea, the second foot will have stress on the second syllable. But this is against the ‘rule’ that each phonological foot should start with a stressed syllable. If cup becomes aligned to of , then the problem is ‘solved’, and both cup of and tea can be stressed on the first syllable. (McMahon 2002: 125)
Curry favour
If you flatter someone insincerely in order to get want you want you curry favour with them. This seemingly nonsensical phrase makes more sense when one looks at its origins. There was no favour in the original phrase but favel, and this in its turn was originally Fauvel, the name of a horse. This horse war reported to be cunning and nasty, and to curry, i.e. to groom it, meant that one was enlisting it for its duplicity or other nasty traits. (Ammer 2006: 90)
Cyberspace
This is a word which, appropriately, made its way from a novel into common speech, from fiction into reality. It is believed to have first appeared in William Gibson novel Neuromancer (though Gibson himself claimed he had used it in an earlier short story). Neuromancer can be classified as a dystopian novel, and cyberspace clearly has ironic overtones here. Gibson said that his vision of cyberspace was inspired by watching arcade video games players as their leant into the machines, bumping the cabinets and hitting the buttons. Gibson, who himself was not a gamer, had the impression that the gamers were longing to be immersed in and disappear into the world on the other side of the screen. In Neuromancer, cyberspace was a consensual hallucination that felt and looked like a physical space but had no correlation in physical reality. People worked, played, carried out business transactions, broke the law as if they were in the “real” world. Gibson’s vision was first seen as pure science fiction. It is odd to see that this vision is now much closer to reality than anyone, including probably Gibson himself, might have anticipated. (Cavazos & Morin 1994: 1-5, Jones 2013: 26-28)