ˈpædʒəntrɪ / ˈpeɪdʒəntrɪ

pageantry: 1) splendid display, gorgeous spectacular show; 2) empty or specious display, show without substance

What pageantry, what feats, what shows,
What minstrelsy, and pretty din,
The regent made in Mytilene
To greet the king.

William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre Act V, Scene II

The coronation of King Charles III got me thinking about the word pageantry this week. The two conflicting meanings given at the head of this post highlight what an odd concept it is—a conspicuous investment in both money and people’s time, designed to impress, but quite often failing to do so. Those disposed to the second usage customarily flag their resentment by the addition of the adjective mere. The Oxford English Dictionary allows two pronunciations of the first syllable, both of which I’ve listed here. When I was growing up the second pronunciation was the one I learned, with the first syllable sounding like “pay”; nowadays, “pah” seems to be the more common—and my American dictionaries allow only that form.

Pageantry is formed from pageant and the suffix -ry, a shortened form of -ery. These suffixes originally came from the French, and generally denote the things people do (baker/bakery, archer/archery, traitor/treachery) or broad classes of things (ribald/ribaldry, pageant/pageantry).

The word pageant originally denoted a scene in a play, the part a particular actor played in a scene, or the stage on which the scene was enacted. From that original little cluster of senses, we derived both of the current meanings—something spectacular (in particular, an elaborate procession of some kind); or something devoid of real meaning. The old phrase to play one’s pageant meant “to play one’s part”. But to play [someone] a pageant was to trick or deceived them. A pageanteer is someone who takes part in a pageant; a tapestry decorated with Biblical scenes is said to be pageanted; and the noun has been known to form a rare adjective, pageantic.

But apart from this little cluster of related words, pageant has no known relatives—it seems to have simply sprung into existence in Middle English, meaning “scene”, with no evident antecedents in other languages. In Anglo-Latin (Latin as spoken in Britain during the Mediæval period), there was an evidently related word, pagina, which also meant “scene”. And that’s identical to the Latin word pagina “leaf of a book” that gave us our word page. And through Old French we also acquired the literary term pagine, referring to a page of a book. So we can easily imagine how a pagine from a manuscript play came to be understood as synonymous with the scene it described, giving rise to the word pageant, but the Oxford English Dictionary is unable to find any intermediate forms to make that more than an etymological Just So story.

Others have suggested that Anglo-Latin pagina derived from Latin pangere, “to fasten” or pegma “a structure made of boards”. And there was, in the seventeenth century, an English word pegma or pegme that referred to a wooden structure used in the staging of theatrical performances. In which case Anglo-Latin pagina and English pageant might possibly have derived not as a reference to the pages of a manuscript play, but from the boards on which the play was being performed. But, again, the OED bemoans the lack of evidence for any such derivation.

And that’s it for pageantry—a word with a meaning very much open to interpretation, which, for all we can tell, more or less magicked itself into spontaneous existence in English. And in the centuries since it appeared, the English establishment seems to have become really quite good at it, whichever meaning you prefer.

ɪnˈdaɪt

indict: to bring a charge against; to accuse (a person) of a crime

These [members of a Grand Jury] have just INDICATED the 45th President of the United States of America, and the leading Republican Candidate, by far, for the 2024 Nomination for President.

Donald Trump, Truth Social post, 30 March 2023

One has to assume that the former president was a victim of the Curse of Predictive Text when he replaced the word “indicted” with “indicated”, above. Certainly, of words beginning with indic-, the group related to indicate are more commonly used than the group related to indict; so predictive text software, ignorant of events in the world, might well have plumped for “indicate”.

But it’s the ending of indict that made me choose it for today’s “word in the news” post. The word-ending -ict is generally pronounced as spelled—contradict, afflict, depict, evict. But indict is different, sporting one of those silent letters that bedevil the English language. Why don’t we pronounce the “c”?

It turns out that the “c” is a relatively recent acquisition for indict, which used to be spelled endite in Middle English. It was a legal term absorbed from Norman French enditer, “to charge, accuse”. That in turn came from the Old French enditer, “to declare”. Simple etymological arguments suggest that this was in turn derived from a Latin word indictare, “to speak upon”, though there’s no example of such a word in the Classical Latin texts available to us. But then English endite was Latinized during the Middle Ages, by legal scholars who were aware of the likely etymology. So indictare was reborn in the legal Latin of the times, but with the meaning “to charge, accuse”. At which point the reconstituted Latin influenced the standard English spelling, and endite became indict, the silent “c” being a nod to its Latin origins.

This sort of thing was rife, at the time, and has created a lot of heartache for people trying to learn English spelling. The pronunciation of words like receipt, salmon and doubt come to us from their French origins (receite, saumon, douter in Norman French), and they were originally spelled receyt, samoun and doute in Middle English. But Latin scholars knew that the French words had derived from Latin receptus, salmo and dubitare. So they added the silent “p”, “l” and “b” to the English words as an act of what the OED calls “learned revision”, and the rest of us would call “showing off”.*

But this sort of “Latining up” of English sometimes served only to demonstrate ignorance. The same people who gave us receipt, salmon and doubt also stuck an “s” into Middle English ile and iland, producing isle and island, in reference to the Latin word insula. They were right about ile, which came to us from Latin through French, but wrong about iland, which originated in Old English and has a Germanic origin meaning something like “water land”—the similarity to ile was coincidental.

A host of English words originate from Latin dicere, “to speak”, including Trump’s mistyped indicate. But for this post I’m going to concentrate on those words that come to us from Latin parts of speech related to dicere, but containing the letter “t”, of which indict is a prime example.

The frequentative form of dicere is dictare, “to say often”, which in Latin took on the sense of issuing an order or command, and also of speaking so that another person could write down your words. From that we derive dictate, which can signify either the process of giving dictation or the actions of a dictator. Combined with the prefix in-, dictare is also the origin of our word indict, as described above. And it gave us the obsolete word indite, which was sometimes used to mean “give dictation”, but also to “set down in writing”, particularly if putting together a document for formal presentation. Something set down in this way was a dite.^†

Once dictare stopped meaning “to say often”, it was free to take on another frequentative suffix, forming dictitare, “to say repeatedly or emphatically”. That gave us the obsolete old word dictitate, meaning “declare”.

The Latin noun dictio, “saying” or “speech”, gives us diction. In Mediæval Latin a dictionarium was a collection of sayings or speeches, and is the origin of our own word dictionary.

Latin dictum had a variety of meanings, somewhat overlapping with dictio, but with a general sense of “something said”. It sits in the background of a number of English words involving speaking. To predict is to “speak before” some event; to contradict is to “speak against”; a verdict is a “true statement”; an edict is a “speaking out”. A malediction is a curse, literally a “bad statement”, while a benediction is a blessing, a “good statement”. The given name Benedict is variously interpreted as meaning “blessed” (the object of a benediction), or as “speaking good things”. A jurisdiction is a region in which the “law speaks” and a valediction is a “farewell statement”, delivered by a valedictorian. To be an addict used to mean that one was “spoken for”—that is, bound by an obligation. The trajectory to the current meaning is clear.

English has borrowed dictum directly, to indicate something said in a pithy and memorable way, and with a degree of authority. A harsher version of the same thing is a diktat, an instruction by which one imposes one’s will on others—the word is borrowed from German. Ditty, meaning “words of a song”, comes to us from Old French dité, from Latin dictatum, “thing spoken”. And in Scotland we have a legal term which has the same derivation—the “Statement of Facts” issued in the New York court, pictured at the head of this post, would be called a dittay in Scottish Law.

Finally, as is almost becoming customary, I’ll finish with a plant name: Herb Bennet, commonly known as the Wood Avens (Geum urbanum), a pretty little hedgerow flower. Its alternative name comes from the Latin herba benedicta, “blessed herb”. The fifteenth-century natural history encyclopaedia, Ortus Sanitatis, has this to say on how the humble little avens earned its name:

Where the root is in the house the devil can do nothing, and flies from it; wherefore it is blessed above all other herbs.

* I’m indebted (there’s another one!) to Arika Okrent’s entertaining and informative book, Highly Irregular (2021), for the receipt, salmon, doubt examples.
^† At this point I found myself wondering about the Royal Navy slang word dit, meaning “story” or “report”. But dite fell out of use round about the time the Royal Navy was formed, and there’s no mention of dit in Admiral Smyth’s Sailor’s Word Book (1867)—so the theory that it has something to do with the “dit-dah” sound of Morse code is perhaps more probable.

prɪˈtɛnʃəs

pretentious: professing or making claim to great merit or importance, especially when unwarranted

among […a]nd amongst. Most such forms ending in -st, such as whilst and amidst, are archaisms in American English. Amongst is no exception: in American English it is pretentious at best.

Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009)

I bow to no-one in my admiration for Bryan Garner, but that’s really pretty striking, isn’t it? A common, short, solidly Anglo-Saxon word that suddenly becomes “pretentious at best” with the addition of a couple of letters. (And I find myself wondering what consequences worse than “pretentious” Garner has in mind.) Garner no doubt knows how speakers of American English respond to certain words, but it’s a bit of a worry if a simple word choice can earn you the label “pretentious” in American English.

But Garner goes on to reassure us that:

Amongst is more common and more tolerable in British English where it doesn’t suggest affectation

Well, phew! There can be few less affected usages of the word amongst than the Scottish exhortation to “Get in amongst it!” (“Participate vigorously!”), but I’ve now made a mental note not to encourage any Americans in this way.

Anyway. There’s not much to say about the etymology of amongst, but pretentious has some interesting connections, which are what I’m going to write about today.

Pretentious, and its associated nouns pretension and pretentiousness, come from Latin prætendere, “to put forward”, derived in turn from the prefix præ– (which gives us our English pre-) and tendere, “to stretch”. All of these words have connotations of self-aggrandizement, in contrast to their relatives pretend and pretence, which indicate only that a person is portraying themselves as something different from reality. One can pretend to be a goldfish, for instance, which is the antithesis of pretentiousness.

But the original meaning of our word pretend was close to that of Latin prætendere—it had the sense of putting forward an argument, or advancing a claim, with no implication of falsity or deception. And so anyone with a potential claim on an inheritance would be called a pretender, in the eighteenth century. Here’s Sir William Blackstone, in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), on the issue of Title by Descent:

Whereas, by dividing the inheritance according to the roots or stirpes, the rule of descent is kept uniform and steady: the issue of the eldest son excludes all other pretenders, as the son himself (if living) would have done …

In other words, the eldest son inherits a title on the death of his father, which can pass to younger sons should the eldest die (they are the “other pretenders”); but if the eldest son has children (“the issue”), the title passes into that generation instead.

As you read your Scottish history, it’s useful to be aware of this older usage of the word pretender, since both the Old Pretender, James Stuart, and his son the Young Pretender (Bonnie Prince Charlie), were advancing well-founded claims to the throne—there was no pretence in the modern sense.

Latin præ–, in the form of English pre-, has spawned more words than could be dealt with here. Usually, it implies prior time, as in precognition, “foreknowledge”, or prehistory “before (written) history”. Sometimes, it implies superior importance or degree, as in pre-eminent and predominant. And in anatomical nomenclature, it implies a position in front of some other structure—if you have a pretibial laceration, for instance, it’s on the front of your tibia, or shin-bone. Beyond that quick summary of usage, I’ll pause only to express horror at such tautological constructions as preplan and prewarn. The former has been around since the middle of the last century, and the latter is first attested in 1603, though the OED touchingly and optimistically describes it as “v. rare”. Long history doesn’t make their use any less fatuous, however, given that both plans and warnings already imply priority in time. After all, it’s impossible to postplan or postwarn (though I’ve admittedly worked with people who made a fair stab at both).

The prefix præ– wasn’t the only one attracted by Latin tendere, and we have a family of corresponding English words as a result. To contend is to “stretch against”—to strive in opposition to something. To distend is to “stretch apart” and to extend is to “stretch out”. To intend is literally to “stretch inwards”—Latin intendere had a wide range of meanings, including our modern meaning of formulating a purpose. The verb to portend was original protend, to “stretch forth”. We use it in the sense of “foreshadowing”, and the metaphor behind this meaning is of future events “stretching forth” to influence the present. Subtend, “stretch under”, is a term used in geometry, applied to a line or curve that is on the opposite side of a geometrical figure from an angle of interest—the hypotenuse of a right triangle is said to subtend the right angle, for instance.

Ostend, to “stretch before” (not the Belgian seaport), means to reveal or demonstrate. An object or event designed to be particularly showy is ostentatious. The act of ostension, during the Catholic mass, is the moment when the priest holds up the consecrated wafers and wine before the congregation. For semioticians, ostension means the use of an object or an action (rather than language) to communicate a message—holding up your empty glass to indicate that you want another drink; jangling your car keys to suggest that it’s time to go home. And for folklorists, ostension refers to one of those disturbing moments when something previously known only from urban legend or folklore seems to leak into the real world.

I’ve saved attend, “stretch towards”, for the last of this list of -tend words. It has acquired two, related meanings. The first involves directing one’s thoughts and senses towards something—paying attention, in other words. The second involves physical presence—one can attend a ceremony, for instance. In this second meaning, attend frequently loses its prefix (a process called aphesis), and becomes merely tend. One tends to the sick, for example, by being physically present at their bedside; and a bartender is physically present behind the bar.

But tend is really two verbs masquerading as one, and the second versions of tend comes directly from tendere. Latin tendere cursum means “to direct one’s path”, and our word tend has the same implication—“I tend to believe him, despite his tendency to lie.”

Our verb to tender, as in tendering one’s resignation or one’s apologies, also comes to us from tendere—the metaphor here seems to refer to the physical stretching forth of a hand when making an offer of some material object.

My last tendere word is tendril, the slender organ stretched forth by some plants. Tendon, on the other hand, comes from the Greek tenon, designating the same anatomical structure as our modern word. The Romans borrowed from the Greek, but stuck in an extraneous “d”, no doubt influenced by the existence of their own word tendere, and produced Latin tendo, which in turn gave us the English word.

But there’s more. The perfect passive participle of tendere is tentus, “stretched”, which gives us our word tent, for a temporary dwelling of stretched canvas. The word can also function as a verb, meaning “to stretch”, and something which performs a tenting function is a tenter, a name usually applied to a frame on which cloth is stretched. Such tenters are equipped with tenterhooks, the origin of our metaphor “on tenterhooks”, indicating a state of painful suspense.

In later Latin, tentus became tensus, the origin of our adjective tense and noun tension. Something that resists breaking under tension has tensile strength. In anatomy, tensor muscles pull other structures tight; in mathematics, tensors are complicated mathematical objects that can be used to describe (among many other things) the stretching of elastic materials.

But what, I hear you ask, about the adjective tender? From Latin tener, “delicate”. And tentacle? From tentare, “to feel”. I make no pretence of my disappointment.

ˈeɪndʒəl

angel: One of an order of spiritual beings superior to man in power and intelligence, who, according to the Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and other theologies, are the attendants and messengers of the Deity

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night.
And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid.
And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.
For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord.

Luke 2:8-11

At the age of eight, I was press-ganged into playing the angel Gabriel in my school’s Nativity play. With cardboard wings, a bed-sheet smock, and a wobbly wire halo, I fluted my way through “Fear not: for behold, I bring you tidings of great joy …” and so on. The language of the King James Edition did not commit easily to my eight-year-old memory, or trip lightly off my eight-year-old tongue, and I developed a deep and life-long antipathy to participation in the performing arts as a result. (I would, however, have killed to glow in the dark like Bloch’s marvellously effulgent specimen, above.)

Another bit of damage done to my brain by the Nativity-play experience was that I spent a few decades convinced that it was the angel Gabriel who delivered the Annunciation to the Shepherds. Because that’s what it said on the script I received from my primary-school teacher, and she was a Person Who Is Never Wrong. But, as you’ll see above, Luke doesn’t actually specify the name of the angel who delivered the good tidings, and Luke is the only one of the Four Evangelists who tells the story of the shepherds.

Perhaps my teacher just got her Annunciations mixed up. The angel Gabriel turns up only twice in the New Testament, both times in the first chapter of Luke—once delivering the Annunciation to Zacharias (of the forthcoming birth of John the Baptist); and once delivering the Annunciation to Mary (of the forthcoming birth of Jesus).

So when preparing the by-now traditional Christmas “Words” post, I started wondering about how many angels are actually named in the Bible, and how many remain anonymous, like the one who delivered the Good News to the shepherds. This led me off at a tangent which I hope you’ll indulge—there will be some etymology at the end, I promise.

It turns out that, depending on your disposition, there are either two, or three, or four, or five angels specifically named in the Bible. Gabriel is one, appearing twice in the Book of Daniel and twice in the Gospel of Luke. He seems to fulfil a role as a messenger. Then there’s the warrior angel, Michael—he’s quoted a couple of times in Daniel and referred to in the Epistle of Jude, but has perhaps his most notable mention in the Book of Revelation:

And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, and prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.

(We’ll come back to “the dragon” in a moment.)

So Gabriel and Michael are the two biggies. Then there’s the Book of Tobit, which is considered canonical by Catholic and Orthodox Christians but consigned to the Apocrypha by Protestants. It narrates Tobias’ journey between Nineveh and Ecbatana, in which he is aided by an angel called Raphael, who performs various acts of healing along the way.

For more named angels we have to resort to the Fallen Angels—those who were cast out after the war in heaven mentioned above. And the big kahuna of the Fallen is, of course, Satan. He is named on multiple occasions in the Bible, and is identified as the “dragon” against whom Michael fought, in a passage immediately following my quote above:

And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.

There’s also an assumption that he’s the same entity who turns up under a different name in Isaiah:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!

But Lucifer is a Latin translation of the original Hebrew Helel ben Shakhar, “shining one”, a name applied to the planet Venus when it appeared as the morning star. And the passage in Isaiah in which the name Lucifer appears is actually a prophetic vision concerning the downfall of an unnamed king of Babylon, so it seems that the name was intended as a metaphorical reference to this king—Venus being the brightest object in the morning sky for a while, before it sinks closer to the rising sun and eventually disappears from view. So the association of the name Lucifer with Satan seems to have been out of a confusion of identities arising from that “fallen from heaven” phrase.

And finally there’s this one, again from Revelation:

And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit, whose name in the Hebrew tongue is Abaddon, but in the Greek tongue hath his name Apollyon.

So Abaddon/Apollyon seems to be another Fallen Angel, but turns out to be a rather dubious one. If we go back to the original Hebrew texts again, Abaddon tends to turn up as the name of a place, which the King James Edition translates as “Hell”. Other translations, however, preserve the original name—see, for instance the many translations of Job 26:6 here. So Abaddon may really refer to the “bottomless pit” itself, rather than to the angel thereof.

And those are all the named angels in the Bible: two definites, one debatable, one Fallen, and one that’s both Fallen and of doubtful validity. Which I found slightly surprising, given that my copy of Gustav Davidson’s Dictionary of Angels contains 330 pages of names and biographies, from A’albiel to Zuriel. But these are all gleaned from various non-Biblical sources—the Pseudepigrapha, later mediæval writings, and grimoires, among others. Among my favourites are:

Wall: an angel formerly of the order of powers, but now a grand duke in Hell. When invoked he manifests in the form of a dromedary

and

Yaasriel: an angel in Jewish legend who is in charge of the “70 holy pencils.”

(Lest these examples, which I’ve cherry-picked for their amusement value, make you think A Dictionary of Angels is a work of comic imagination, I assure you it’s a fascinating work of considerable scholarship.)

But now (and finally, I hear you sigh), on to the etymology bit.

Gabriel derives from Hebrew gavriʾel, “God is my strength”, and has lent his name to a couple of English words. A Gabriel-bell was once rung at the parish church to remind people of their morning and evening prayers; and the yelping cries of migrating wild geese as they pass overhead has led to a sort-of-charming-but-also-a-bit-disconcerting nickname—they’ve been called Gabriel’s Hounds.

Michael is Hebrew mi kaʼel “who is like God”, and Michaelmas is a feast day in the Church calendar—celebrated on 29 September in the Western tradition. It’s more formally known as the Feast of Saint Michael and All Angels. The feast in turn gave its name to Saint Michael’s pear, which ripens around the time of Michaelmas, and the Michaelmas daisy, which flowers at the same time.

Raphael derives from rafa el, “healing of God”, which fits with his activities as a healer in the Book of Tobit. His contribution to English comes via the Italian Renaissance artist Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, commonly known in English as Raphael. Art that adopts his distinctive style is called Raphaelesque. And the nineteenth-century artistic movement that rejected Raphael’s “mechanistic” approach in favour of earlier styles was initiated by a rebellious group who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Satan is Hebrew tsatan, “adversary”, and has spawned a cluster of fairly self-explanatory words like Satanic, Satanist and Satanism. One to be avoided is a Satanophany, a “visible manifestation of Satan”. His other Biblical name, Lucifer, means “light bringer”—the Latin equivalent of the Greek phosphoros, which I’ve written about previously. It’s a name that sits puzzlingly on the Prince of Darkness, so it’s usually interpreted as being Satan’s name when he was still an angel in good standing, before he was cast out of heaven. It has spawned a little cluster of adjectives, now disused: Luciferine, Luciferian and Luciferous, all of which were synonyms for Satanic. A lucifer match, often called just a lucifer, was a nineteenth century invention that had nothing to do with Satan, but was merely a “light bringer”; likewise for the naturally glowing biological molecules produced by bioluminescent organisms, luciferins, and the enzyme that activates them, luciferase. Nothing devilish about them.

Abaddon comes from Hebrew ʾabaddon, “destruction”, and Greek Apollyon, “destroyer”, is simply borrowed from the Hebrew. Neither word has gained much traction in English, beyond the abortive seventeenth-century coining of Apollyonist as an unsuccessful synonym for Satanist. (It sounds like some sort of public-relations ploy by Satanists, but it actually originates with Phineas Fletcher, a Church of England rector, who applied the word in all seriousness to the Jesuits.)

I’ll stop there. When I set out to research this post, I imagined I was going to regale you with tales of the seraphim, cherubim and archangels, but that’s probably a post for another day.

If you’re disposed to celebrate Christmas, I trust your only encounter with a fallen angel will be one that’s become dislodged from the top of the Christmas tree. Have a good one.