strɑˈveɡ

stravaig: (verb) to wander aimlessly; (noun) an instance of such wandering

Not all who wander are lost

J.R.R. Tolkien “The Riddle Of Strider” (1954)

This Scots word has been on my “to do” list for a while, linking back as it does to my recent post about useful Scottish words, and farther back to my discussion of the transformed usage of the word gangrel in Scottish hill-walking circles.

Like gangrel, the use of stravaig, as a noun or verb, has become a little distorted among hill-walkers—the defining aimlessness of the original usage seems to have faded into the background, and it’s often used now to indicate long-distance, multi-day or particularly energetic walks. But here at The Oikofuge I’m constitutionally disposed to adhere to the original meaning. Long-time readers of my various Sidlaws adventures will appreciate that they are stravaigs in the true sense, undertaken with little objective in mind except getting home in one piece and in time for tea. Someone who wanders in this way is a stravaiger.

For all its appearance of coming from the Gaelic, the word is actually Latin in origin—an aphetic and apocopic trimming of the word extravagate, “to wander at large”, which is formed from the Latin prefix extra- “outside” and the verb vagari, “to wander”.

To call something extravagant originally indicated that it was wandering beyond normal bounds. Only in the eighteenth century did the word transform into an adjective for things that were overly expensive or wasteful. Shakespeare used it in its original sense when he had Horatio say:

Awake the god of day, and, at his warning,
Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,
Th’ extravagant and erring spirit hies
To his confine

Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 1

By which he meant: “The rising sun drives wandering ghosts back into hiding.” (And notice that Shakespeare was using erring in its old sense of “wandering”, too—a usage we’d now replace with errant.)

On a related note, the Italians used estravaganza to designate things that had strayed outside the normal—oddity or eccentricity, in other words. English adopted the word to describe musical or literary works that were bombastically over-the-top in composition—but we revised the prefix to a more familiar form, creating the word extravaganza.

The prefix extra- is responsible for a large number of English words, all indicating a state of being outside something—so for instance we have extramural (“outside walls”), extracurricular (“outside the set work”), extraordinary (“outside the ordinary”) and any number of medical words describing anatomical relationships. Extraordinary originally meant “beyond the usual quantity”. It became contracted to extra, which retains that original meaning, while extraordinary evolved to its current meaning, designating something remarkable, aberrant or strange.

Latin vagari is at the root of a range of English words, some common, some disused and some obscure. If you are vagant, you are wandering, and an instance of such wandering is vagation (disappointingly unrelated to vacation). The corresponding verb is to vagitate. To divagate is to wander from one place to another, to pervagate is to wander through, and evagation is the act of wandering off. A vagary was originally a sort of roaming tour, but it came to be used metaphorically for rambling speech or writing, from which it evolved to take on its current meaning, designating eccentric conduct or strange tricks of fate.

Our word astray comes from Old French estraier, “to wander”, a heavily condensed descendant of Latin extravagari. Shortened further in English, it turned into stray. A stray animal is legally designated an estray.

With the suffix -bundus, the verb vagari forms the adjective vagabundus, “wandering about”, from which we derive our word vagabond. But, despite appearances, vagrant proves to be unrelated—it came into English from Old French wacrant, which in turn derived from the same Proto-Indo-European root as our word walk.

A shorter adjective related to vagari was vagus, “wandering”. It gives us the name of the vagus nerve, which wanders widely on its course through the body, and our word vague, for things that are poorly defined.

Finally, I offer a little crop of -vagant words that deserved to be resuscitated from their current obscurity. Someone or something that roams at night is noctivagant; something floating around in the sea is fluctivagant; someone who wanders alone is solivagant. And, coming back to topics dear to the Oikofuge’s heart, someone who roams the mountains is montivagant and someone who roams the world is mundivagant.

Scotland is a picturesque country where the people are friendly yet completely incomprehensible.

Adam Schlesinger

Setting aside Scots accents, which most people manage to tune into after fairly short exposure, it’s the vocabulary of Scottish English which is the main source of incomprehension for visitors. Some Scots words are easily translated: to swither is to vacillate, for instance, and a spaiver is a trouser fly. But some seem to serve functions that have no exact synonyms in standard English, and I thought I’d offer a brief selection of those here.

DREICH

ˈdriːx

Dreich: (of experiences) protracted, hard to bear, depressing; (of weather) damp, overcast, unpleasant.

The original meaning of this word involved duration and tedium—journeys could be dreich, tasks could be dreich, sermons could be dreich. But the soul-sapping original meaning has now become inextricably linked to that most characteristic of Scottish weather—low cloud weeping gentle rain on a chilly day. So iconic has the word become for native Scots that it keeps being voted “Scots Word of the Year” in various polls.

Like many Scots words, it derives from older English vocabulary rather than (as one might guess) Gaelic. It is related to Old English dréoᵹan, “to work”, from which we get the word drudge. Dréoᵹan also gave us dree, “to do duty, to suffer”, which is now pretty much obsolete, but I do still take every opportunity to use the splendid expression to dree (one’s) weird, which means “to submit to (one’s) fate”.

THRAWN

ˈθrɑːn; ˈθrɔːn

Thrawn: perverse, obstinate, intractable, sullen

Thrawn is a personality type, rather than a temporary state of mind, though one may become increasingly thrawn with age (I know I have). And those who are thrawn may develop a particular set to their facial features, making them thrawn-faced or thrawn-gabbit (“thrawn-mouthed”).

Again, the word has English origins—it’s no more than a dialectic version of the word thrown. This originally meant “turned” or “twisted”, and the last relic of that old meaning in standard English is in the idea that we “throw” a pot if we mould its clay on a rotating potter’s wheel. But the Scots word has stayed close to the original meaning, implying that thrawn people have a twisted attitude to life.

SLAISTER

ˈslestər

Slaister: to move around or work messily in water or mud

You can slaister because you’re clumsy, or because you have no other choice. In Scottish hillwalking circles, the occasional need to slaister your way out of a peat bog is almost inevitable. By association, someone who is a particularly messy eater can also be said to slaister.

As a noun, a slaister is an instance of slaistering—the crossing of a peat bog can be described as a slaister, for instance, and the bog itself is said to be slaistery. You can also make a slaister of a job if you make a complete mess of it.

The Oxford English Dictionary describes the origin of the word as “obscure”, but I can’t help hearing a certain onomatopoeia to it.

SHOOGLE

ˈʃugl

Shoogle: to rock, oscillate slightly, or shift unsteadily

When I was first asked by a non-Scot to explain the word shoogle, I said that it meant “to shake”, but was quickly corrected by a friend who pointed out that there’s no such thing as “Shoogled Baby Syndrome”. Indeed, babies tend to enjoy being shoogled.

The key features of shoogling are a small applied force and a slight resultant movement. A baby dandled on the knee is being shoogled; a table that rocks on an uneven floor is shoogling; a child’s baby teeth will shoogle before they fall out. Something that is unstable enough to shoogle is said to be shoogly. Which gives rise to the lovely metaphorical usage “on a shoogly peg” or “on a shoogly nail” for anything that is insecure. “Your jacket’s on a shoogly peg” is a blunt way of advising someone that their employment may soon be terminated.

The word comes from Middle English shog, “to shake”, which is probably also related to the modern English words jog and shock.

COORIE

ˈkuːri

Coorie: to stoop or crouch; to nestle

The verb to coorie is a diminutive form of coor, which is a Scots dialectic form of standard English cower. So it originally indicated a small act of cowering—stooping or crouching for protection, perhaps to get out of the wind or to conceal oneself. This association with seeking comfort then led to a usage which emphasizes warmth and safety, most commonly in combination with the word doon (“down”). As a child on a cold night I was often encouraged to “coorie doon” with my hot-water bottle among the warm bedclothes.

And building on that idea, Coorie has recently turned into a proper noun and an honest-to-God lifestyle trend. It has been dressed up as a translation of Gaelic còsagach (“snug, warm, cosy, sheltered”), which it never really was, and offered as the Scottish alternative to Danish hygge. Apparently, Scots are no longer stern Calvinists who scorn central heating and palatable cooking, but serious proponents of comfortable living with a product to sell to the world. You can read all about it in books like The Art of Coorie: How To Live Happy The Scottish Way and Coorie: What You Need to Know About The Scottish Lifestyle Trend. There’s even (saints preserve us) a colouring book.

Coorie has come a very long way from a shivering child clutching a hot-water bottle on a winter’s night.

wɒnhəʊp

Wanhope: hopelessness, despair

Now comth wanhope þat is dispeire of the mercy of god þat comth somtyme of to moch outrageous sorow and som tyme of to moch drede

Geoffrey Chaucer The Parson’s Tale (c.1400)

I’ve fallen into the habit, recently, of picking words from current affairs for my posts about etymology and usage. I thought it was perhaps about time I reverted to resuscitating obscure words with interesting histories, and wanhope, which turned up recently in my reading, gives me the opportunity.

Wan- is an Old English prefix “expressing privation or negation”, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary. It has long ceased to be active in producing words, but in its day was used to modify meaning in the same way as un- or mis- does today. So a state of wanhope was a state of complete deprivation of hope. In Chaucer’s time, that loss of hope was often religious in nature—”despair of the mercy of God”, as he puts it. It was an extreme condition, as Chaucer makes clear, coming “sometimes of too much outrageous sorrow, and sometimes of too much dread”.

J.R.R. Tolkien used many fine old words in his Lord of the Rings cycle, and wanhope was among them. Here it is in one of the Unfinished Tales, “The Istari“:

[Gandalf] was the Enemy of Sauron, opposing the fire that devours and wastes with the fire that kindles, and succours in wanhope and distress

In The Origins Of English Words (1984), Joseph Shipley errs in giving it a milder meaning:

Almost forgotten is wanhope, gentler than despair, softer than hope against hope.

He seems to have been influenced by the modern meaning of the adjective wan, “pale, sickly”. But the old English prefix is more related to the verbs wane and want, implying something lacking. The origin of the adjective wan seems to be obscure, and the OED is uncertain whether it is related to wane or merely influenced by it. But it originally meant “dark, leaden hued, lacking in light”—the Scots noun wan, meaning “bruise”, preserves that old meaning. Then confusion arose. The faces of the sick or dead were described as being wan; the light of dim stars was also wan—and so the word switched its meaning from “dark” to “pale”.

The prefix wan- barely survived into Middle English, but it spawned a fine list of now-forgotten words: for instance, wanchancy “unlucky”, wandought “feeble”, and wanthriven “stunted”. My personal favourite is wanweird, “ill fate”, from the old usage of the word weird to mean “destiny”. The only one that has survived into current usage is wanton, “undisciplined”, which comes to us from Middle English wantowen, “lacking training”.

I won’t spend much time on hope, beyond pointing out that I doubt Shipley’s attempt to connect it to hop (“watch a boy in eager expectation”), and mentioning that I’ve dealt with the unexpected original meaning of forlorn hope in a previous post dealing with the prefix for-.

Oh, and then there’s hopefully, a perfectly useful adverb meaning “with a feeling of hope”, which does not deserve the vitriol poured upon it. It’s become strangely popular to hate the use of the word  hopefully at the start of a sentence. This usage is called a sentence adverb, it has a long history in English, and there must be a hundred adverbs that are used in this way, either to say what the writer feels about what follows, or to put the rest of the sentence into a particular context—obviously, technically, curiously, regrettably, ironically, clearly, thankfully, theoretically … and so on.

Frankly, I’ve scant idea why the grammar snobs have all piled on to poor little hopefully—the argument that curiously (for instance) can be expanded to “it is curious that …”, whereas hopefully unpacks to “I hope that …” (thereby unavoidably intruding the writer into the sentence) doesn’t seem to stand up to careful thought. Surely curiously expresses the writer’s opinion that what follows is indeed curious (“I find it curious that …”), and obviously reflects the writer’s opinion on what is obvious, just as much as hopefully expresses the writer’s feeling of hope (“I am hopeful that …”). But poor hopefully has become what Bryan A. Garner calls a “skunked term”—one can no longer use it either as a standard adverb or a sentence adverb without creating confusion or annoyance in some of one’s readers.

ˈalapə / ˈalba

Alba: Scotland (Scottish Gaelic)

In my previous post about this word, I described how the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland, Alba, originated in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European albho-, meaning “white”. In Proto-Celtic, this evolved into another word something like albiyu. This word seems to have meant something like “bright place” or “high place”, and in the later Celtic languages Brittonic and Goidelic (spoken on the islands of Britain and Ireland, respectively) it produced place-names that ended up as Alba, Albion and Albany. Likewise in the Germanic languages, albho- gave rise to a “high place” word that gives us the name of the Alps mountain range.

As well as place-names, Proto-Indo-European albho- has spawned a number of words that have ended up in English, having first evolved and mutated in the Germanic and Romance languages.

But not much happened to this word when it entered the language that eventually became Greek. The Classical Greek word for “white” was leukos, which I’ll perhaps write about in another post. The only Greek descendant of albho- that ever seems to have entered English is alphos, a name the Greeks applied to some sort of white-spotted skin condition. In English, it was used rather vaguely for various skin diseases, including leprosy, and was then abandoned.

In the Germanic languages, albho- seems to have evolved in two directions. One was the “high place” meaning that spawned our word Alps, as I’ve previously described. But the other meaning was a supernatural one, involving a Proto-Germanic word that has been reconstructed as albiz or albaz. The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots wonders if this might have originally meant something like “white ghostly apparition”—and it spawned the German word Alb, which is generally translated as “elf”. (German more commonly now uses the word Elf, borrowed from English, but Alb is still with us, embedded in the lovely German word Albtraum, “nightmare”, which literally means “elf dream”.) In other Germanic languages, the “b” sound mutated to “v” or “f”, so we have Norwegian alv, Danish alf, Old English ælf and Modern English elf, all denoting some sort of supernatural humanoid with at best ambivalent intentions towards humans. The Old Norse alfr had a similar meaning, but was adopted into English as auf, meaning “elf-child”—the word for a changeling infant left in place of a real human child that had been stolen away by fairies. Such children (it was believed) never matured mentally as they grew up—which is how the old word auf evolved into the modern word oaf.

From Old English ælf we have the personal names Alfred (from ælf-rede, “elf-counsel”) and Oliver (ælf-here, “elf army”). From Alb the Germans have the name Alberich (“elf king”), which in French became Auberi—the source of the British name Aubrey, as well as of Oberon, Shakespeare’s King of the Fairies.

The word elfin was coined by Edmund Spenser in his epic poem The Faerie Queene (1590). It originally meant “pertaining to elves”, but has now taken on the meaning “small, delicately formed” (with perhaps an added connotation of mischievousness). But J.R.R. Tolkien despised the word as being ill-formed on philological grounds, and used elven when writing about the elves of his Middle Earth. (The same motivation was behind his use of the plural dwarves, rather than the standard dwarfs.)

In Latin, albho- gave rise to the noun album “the colour white” and adjective albus, “white in colour”. The feminine of albus is alba, which (as I described last time) was once invoked as the origin of Gaelic Alba. From the Latin we have alb, the white priestly garment; albedo, an astronomical term for reflectivity; albescent, “becoming pale”; albumen, the white of an egg; and albumins, a family of proteins related to a constituent of albumen. Albite is a white mineral, and abele is an old name for the White Poplar, which was once called albellus in Latin. Albedineity and albedony are both old words meaning “whiteness”, which could do with being revived, in my opinion. Albication is the process of becoming white, albification is the process of making something white, and something albificative has the power to make something white. An albiflorous plant has white flowers.

The Romans referred to a blank writing tablet as an album. The word was later used to refer to books of blank paper, and then took on its modern meaning because of the album amicorum (“book of friends”) which became fashionable in Germany during the sixteenth century. These were blank books in which people collected the signatures, writings and drawings of their friends. The word album was thereafter repurposed to designate a book in which one collected things—autographs, photographs, stamps. And the concept of a collection under one cover eventually fed into the idea of a record album.

The Portuguese, who were among the first Europeans to encounter Black Africans with depigmented skin, referred to them as albinos, from their word albo, “white”. The word albino was thereafter adopted in English, giving rise to the noun albinism and the adjective albinistic, which refer to a genetic lack of the usual pigmentation. One may speak, if one wishes, of an “albino rat”, but describing someone as “an albino” is a potentially offensive focus on disease over person. And we can similarly consign the old word albiness, “a female albino”, to the dustbin of disuse.

The Latin verb dealbare meant “to cover with white”—that is, to whitewash. This was absorbed into Old French as the verb dauber, and then found its way into English as daub, which originally meant “to cover in plaster”—hence the existence of wattle and daub walls. But now it has lost its connotations of whiteness and smoothness, and applies to the clumsy application of a coating of any (or many) colours.

Latin alburnus, “nearly white” became auborne in Old French and then auburn in English. The -burn bit made people thing of French brun, “brown”, so its meaning in English started off as “pale brown”, but has gradually shifted towards the redder end of the brown range.

In Spanish, Latin albus became albor, meaning “white”. But by association with the way the sky grows pale as dawn approaches, albor also came to mean “dawn-light”. By adding the suffix -ada, indicating a time period, the Spanish then produced alborada, “sunrise”. In French that was adopted as aubade, and designated a love song sung in the morning. These were the days when courtly love was a thing, and singing beneath your lover’s window at an ungodly hour was also a thing. (The aubade was an opposite, of sorts, to the serenade, which was sung in the evening, god help us.) In English, aubade still has a lingering usage referring to music and poetry connected with the morning, but mainly it’s just a fine word to use to refer to the “dawn chorus”—the explosion of birdsong that greets the sunrise.

And if that isn’t a tortuous enough piece of ornithological etymology, try this one. It starts with the Portuguese word for the pelican, alcatraz, which comes from the Arabic. Some say it derives from al qadus, “the bucket”, in reference to the pelican’s throat pouch; some say it’s from al gattas, “the diver”. Given that the Portuguese word was also applied to the gannet, which notably lacks a throat pouch and just as notably dives, I lean to the latter etymology. The prison island of Alcatraz, in San Francisco Bay, gets its name from the pelicans that once nested there.

The name alcatraz also ended up attached to the frigate bird, a dark and predatory creature which both has a throat pouch and dives to attack other birds in the air. English-speaking sailors, already happily in possession of names for the pelican and gannet, but evidently short of a word for the frigate bird, adopted the Portuguese name in the form alcatras. And at some point someone seems to have looked at a bird skimming the waves behind a ship in the Southern Ocean and decided that if a large, black, slim-winged bird was called an alcatras, then a large, white, slim-winged bird should be called an alba-tras. And so the albatross reputedly got its name, as a rather recondite Latin pun.

ˈalapə / ˈalba

Alba: Scotland (Scottish Gaelic)

Today I am announcing the public launch of a new political force—the Alba Party.

Alex Salmond, 28 March 2021

As we trundle towards an impending Scottish Parliamentary election, we seem to have acquired a new political party. From the name, Alba, one could be forgiven for assuming that the new party was created by people who feel that the Scottish National Party is in some way deficient in its Scottish-National-ness.

Alba is the Scottish Gaelic name for Scotland. At time of writing, there seems to be some confusion in the party ranks as to whether to pronounce the name in the Gaelic fashion (ˈalapə) or the Scots (ˈalba), but the BBC is firmly on the side of the Gaelic.

When I first looked into the origin of this name, quarter of a century ago, the narrative I encountered was that it had originated with Latin alba, “white”—a reference to the White Cliffs of Dover, which would be familiar to Romans crossing the English Channel to the island of Britain. The story for Alba then required a rather convoluted series of events in which speakers of Old Irish adopted the Roman name for the island of Britain, then repurposed it to apply to Scotland, and then transmitted the name into Scottish Gaelic.

So I’m interested to find that the story now places the origin of the name Alba firmly within the Celtic language family—tracing Old Irish Albu, “Scotland” back to a (reconstructed) Proto-Celtic word albiyu, and then to the (even more reconstructed) Proto-Indo-European root albho-, meaning “white”. In this narrative, it is Proto-Indo-European that gives rise to both Latin alba and Gaelic Alba, by separate strands of linguistic evolution, and the similarity between the two words should not be interpreted as a direct connection.

It’s probable that the name Albion, which initially designated the island of Britain, but is now generally reserved as a poetic name for England, is also of Celtic origin. It appeared in Latin as insula Albionum (“Albion island”), a name apparently derived from various Greek sailing directions that are now lost, and which may in turn have derived the name Albion from the name used by the Celtic-speaking inhabitants of the island. French inherited the name from Latin, and English borrowed it from French. Albion is largely remembered now in the phrase “perfidious Albion”, directly translated from the French phrase la perfide Albion, which was popular at the time of the Napoleonic Wars. But Lord Byron deployed it to great effect in his paean to the Scottish mountain Lochnagar:

Years have roll’d on, Loch na Garr, since I left you,
⁠Years must elapse, ere I tread you again:
Nature of verdure and flowers has bereft you,
⁠Yet still are you dearer than Albion’s plain:
England! thy beauties are tame and domestic,
⁠To one who has rov’d on the mountains afar:
Oh! for the crags that are wild and majestic,
⁠The steep, frowning glories of dark Loch na Garr.

That’s all very well, I hear you say, but if Alba and Albion actually have nothing to do with the White Cliffs of Dover, what’s the connection with “white”? Indirect, is the answer. It seems that when Proto-Indo-European albho-, “white”, became Proto-Celtic albiyu, it assumed a more metaphorical meaning, something like “bright place” or “high place”, perhaps as a contrast with a mythical dark underworld. The ancient Britons that Greek sailors would have encountered when they first ventured north would have spoken Brittonic languages, derived from Proto-Celtic. So if the Britons did indeed call their homeland something that the Greeks rendered as Albion, the name perhaps had connotations with happy, sunlit spaces.

In Ireland, the inhabitants were speaking another set of Celtic languages, called Goidelic, which had diverged somewhat from Brittonic. In Scotland, the native Picts spoke a language that was probably more closely related to Brittonic. So the Irish may have adopted their name for Scotland, Albu, from the Picts’ own name for their homeland. Or perhaps the Irish just looked across the North Channel at Scotland and used their own word for “high place”.

Interestingly, Proto-Indo-European albho- seems to have undergone a similar evolution during the development of the Germanic languages. Old High German alba meant “high pasture”. The Romans adopted the word to give the name Alpes to the mountain range in which these high pastures occur. In English, that became Alps. And later, by back-formation, we came up with the singular alp to designate those same high pastures that gave the mountains their Latin name.

But back in Scotland, the Old Irish name Albu developed into Alba in the Scottish Gaelic spoken by the Irish-descended inhabitants of the Kingdom of Dál Riata on the west coast of Scotland. And they eventually ended up running the whole of northern Scotland when King Kenneth I of Dál Riata became King of the Picts, too, in the year 843. The language of the Picts was lost after this Gaelic take-over, and Alba became the name of the new combined kingdom.

English chroniclers writing in Latin, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, referred to the consolidated Kingdom of Alba as Albania,* which mutated in English to Albany. Although there are now places called Albany all over the world, the name isn’t much used in Scotland, except for the intermittently created title Duke of Albany, occasionally bestowed on younger sons of Scottish (and then British) monarchs. In Scotland, we pronounce it with a short front “a” (ˈalbəni), in contrast to the capital of of New York State, which takes a long, rounded vowel (ˈɔːlbəni).

So that’s the convoluted story that ends with Alba being considered an epitome of Scottishness today. Next time, I’ll write about some of the English words that Proto-Indo-European albho- gave rise to.

---

* The country in southeastern Europe, called Albania in English but Shqipëri by its citizens, gets its name from an ancient tribe called the Albanoi by the Greeks. To what extent this name was related to whiteness, or to mountainous terrain, or to neither, seems to be a matter for debate.

ɪˈnɒkjʊleɪt

inoculate: (horticulture) to insert a plant bud as a graft into another plant; (medicine) to insert a disease organism into the body by puncturing the skin, or into a culture medium using a needle; (medicine) to inject a vaccine

In May 1796, Edward Jenner found a young dairymaid, Sarah Nelms, who had fresh cowpox lesions on her hands and arms. On May 14, 1796, using matter from Nelms’ lesions, he inoculated an 8-year-old boy, James Phipps. Subsequently, the boy developed mild fever and discomfort in the axillae. Nine days after the procedure he felt cold and had lost his appetite, but on the next day he was much better. In July 1796, Jenner inoculated the boy again, this time with matter from a fresh smallpox lesion. No disease developed, and Jenner concluded that protection was complete.

Stefan Riedel “Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination” (2005)

That’s Edward Jenner, the inventor of vaccination, performing an experiment that would be difficult to get past an ethics committee these days.

The Oxford English Dictionary has citations for inoculate, meaning to graft the bud of one plant into the bark of another, going back as far as the fifteenth century. Its first citation with the sense of inserting disease organisms into the skin through a wound or puncture dates from 1722, and refers to the disease smallpox—a small quantity of fluid or scab from a smallpox pustule was rubbed into a skin incision.

Why were people rubbing each other with smallpox? Because it was understood to be a way of producing a mild infection, which people usually survived, and after which they developed immunity to subsequent infection with the disease, which carried a mortality of 30%. The practice was introduced to England in 1721 by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had encountered it in Constantinople. (To demonstrate its efficacy, this inoculation was carried out on several imprisoned criminals and abandoned children, who were later exposed to smallpox without ill-effect. Another one you’d struggle to get past an ethics committee nowadays, I feel.) The practice was introduced to North America by an African whose slave-name was Onesimus, and it was deployed during the Boston smallpox epidemic of 1721. Another name for this practice was variolation, from variola, the medical Latin name for smallpox, which derives from Latin variola, “pustule”.

But variolation was not without risk—about 1% of those thus inoculated died. At which point, enter Jenner, and the observation that dairy workers who became infected with cowpox, a mild disease they acquired from cattle, were subsequently immune to smallpox. Using the technique of inoculation, Jenner was able to use cowpox to produce a mild case of a mild disease, which then conferred immunity from smallpox. In the medical Latin of the time, cowpox was called variolæ vaccinæ (“cow pustules”), from Latin vacca, “cow”. In English, this spawned the adjective vaccine (originally pronounced to rhyme with sign, not seen), “pertaining to cowpox”. Which in turn quickly gave rise to the noun vaccine, the stuff that was introduced into the skin by the process of vaccination. And so both inoculation and vaccination went on to become general terms for the process of injecting a substance in order to provoke immunity to an infectious disease. About a century later they were joined by immunization, and the three words have fought a battle for supremacy every since.

When I was a kid in Scotland in the 1960s, we received the limited repertoire of inoculations then on offer; but nowadays we elderly folk are invited for vaccinations. That shift in usage is reflected in the Google Ngram for the three competing terms, with inoculation taking a fairly recent dive in popularity.

In the days before smallpox was eliminated from the world, routine childhood inoculations included a descendant of Jenner’s original vaccine—in the UK, a dried extract of lymph taken from a calf infected with cowpox. This was mixed with a diluent and then carefully pricked into the skin of the recipient using a bifurcated needle charged with a bead of the vaccine, in what amounted to a medicalized reenactment of the original process of variolation. You can see the whole kit (lymph, diluent, needle) at the head of this post. The bifurcated needle was wielded several times, producing a small ring of inoculations, which initially formed up into pustules and then matured into a round, indented white scar, still visible on the upper arms of those of us of a Certain Age.

The word inoculate derives from the Latin inoculare, which in turn derives from the prefix in-, “into”, and the noun oculus, which usually meant “eye” but did double duty as an occasional word for “plant bud”. So inoculare meant “to insert a plant bud”, which is the original meaning of inoculate, too. There are no other remotely common words in English derived from this specialist meaning of oculus, and that may be part of the reason that people often associate inoculate with the unrelated word innocuous (derived from Latin in-, on this occasion meaning “not”, and nocuus “harmful”), and want to give it a double “n”. A Google search for the erroneous spelling innoculate produces 800,000 hits; innoculation about the same number, including an embarrassing 38 entries in the on-line catalogue of the Wellcome Collection of medical books.

A person who performs inoculation is an inoculator, which has a very rare feminine form inoculatrix. The stuff that is inoculated is the inoculant or the inoculum.

The remaining oculus words relate to the Latin meaning “eye”, which has the diminutive ocellus, which is applied to the primitive eyes of molluscs and other creatures, and is also the name for a single facet of the compound eyes of insects. Something biocellate is marked with two eye-spots, like a butterfly’s wings. Anatomical structure that support an eye, such as the horns of a snail, are oculiferous. The adjective ocular means “pertaining to an eye”, something possessing eyes is oculate, and a person who studies and understands eyes is an oculist practising oculism (but an ocularist is a person who makes glass eyes). Deocular is a rare old word for “blind”.

Doctors have a whole collection of eye-related words that need not detain us for long. Examples include supraocular (“above the eye”), periocular (“around the eye”) and the grim exoculation (“removal of an eye”), but there are many more.

Monocular once meant “having one eye”, but that task has largely been taken over by monoculous, leaving monocular to deal with “pertaining to one eye”. A monocule is a creature with only one eye; a monoculist, monoculus or monoculite is a one-eyed person. And of course a monocle is a single eye-glass.

Binocular has similarly surrendered the meaning “having two eyes” to binoculate, reserving “pertaining to two eyes” for its own use. A binocle is an opera glass—a little pair of binoculars on a stick that can be used to observe the action on-stage.

For creatures with greater numbers of eyes than two, we have triocular (three), senocular (six), octonocular (eight), centoculated (one hundred, reserved for the mythical all-seeing giant Argus Panoptes) and the noncommittal multiocular (many).

The three-eyed option pertains pretty much exclusively to New Zealand’s tuatara, a reptile possessing a remnant “parietal eye” on the top of its head. So triocular isn’t a word you see every day. Which is perhaps why, when science-fiction writer Larry Niven introduced a race of three-eyed aliens to his Known Space universe in 1968, in a short story entitled “There Is A Tide”, he instead used the word trinocular to describe them—a perfectly reasonable construction. In the later Known Space novel Ringworld (1970), the race is accordingly called the Trinocs.

But it’s not just a science-fiction word, because back in 1960 the trinocular microscope had been invented. No, you don’t need to be a Trinoc to use it—it consists of a binocular microscope with a camera attached, so that you can photograph what you’re looking at.

dɪˈmɒkrəsɪ

Democracy: that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole

[…] we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (1863)

Democracy is an ancient idea, coming to us from Athens in the sixth century BCE—though the Classical Greek idea of who had the right to vote in matters of state was different from our modern, more inclusive view. Our word democracy comes, via French and Latin, from the Greek demokratia, which was formed from demos “people” and kratos, meaning “strength”, “power” or “rule”—so “government by the people”, as Lincoln phrased it.

Kratos hasn’t given us many English words beyond the ubiquitous suffix -cracy, of which more in a moment. A cratometer is a device that measures the magnifying power of lenses. And geologists have used the terms orocratic (“mountain strength”) and pediocratic (“plain strength”) to designate geological periods in which mountain-building or erosion, respectively, are the dominant forces in the landscape. They also used to refer to the ancient, stable core of a continent as a kratogen. This means something like “strength formation” and presumably refers to the long-term stability of these regions. But the word has since been shortened to craton, which seems to be the more common usage now.

But -cracy has been the dominant legacy of kratos in English. In contrast to democracy we have aristocracy, “best rule” (for a particular usage of “best” defined by social status), and autocracy, “self rule”, for an absolute monarch who answers to no-one.

Less commonly seen nowadays is timocracy, “value rule”, a term over which Greek philosophers disagreed. For Aristotle, the word implied rule by people who owned some minimum amount of property; for Plato, it indicated rulers who valued honourable behaviour. Aristotle’s meaning is duplicated in plutocracy, “wealthy rule”. A gerontocracy is ruled by the elderly, a hierocracy is ruled by priests, and a theocracy by gods (or their earthly representatives). An isocracy or a pantisocracy is ruled by everyone, with equal power. An androcracy is governed by men, a gynæcocracy by women. Oddly, the latter is by far the older word, dating from the seventeenth century, while the male equivalent is first recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary in 1903. Perhaps gynæcocracy was considered so aberrant that it urgently needed a label, while androcracy was just the normal state of things. The advent of Communism brought with it a need for a new word—ergatocracy, government by the workers, which first appeared in English in 1920. As an ironic contrast to the assumptions underlying the word aristocracy, we have kakistocracy, “government by the worst”. Equally undesirable are ochlocracy, “government by the mob”, barbarocracy “government by barbarians” and kleptocracy, “government by thieves”. The alarming word pornocracy, “government by prostitutes”, refers specifically to the influence of the Empress Theodora upon the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Despite being considered a saint by the Eastern Orthodox Church, Theodora’s reputation has never recovered from the salacious allegations in Procopius’ Secret History, in which she is described as the “most depraved of all courtesans”. A near-synonym, hetærocracy, has had an amusing double life. Literally “government by companions”, it has been used to mean “government by courtesans”, but also “government by fellows”—as in, the fellows of an English university college. That must have been the cause of a few brittle, erudite jokes in the Fellows’ Dining Room, over the years.

All of these words are, I think, legitimately formed from Greek roots. But in more modern times people have thrown caution to the winds, and pressed all sorts of prefixes into use. For this to work, the correct -cracy suffix, which represents the original kratos, often accretes the recurring “o” of the Greek prefixes above, so that -ocracy has become a word-forming suffix in its own right. There are simply too many of these to deal with individually. Somewhere between democracy and  autocracy sits anocracy, an etymologically confused designation for a system which partakes of some of the furniture of democracy without delivering the full package. The punning mediocracy, “government by the mediocre” has been around for a century, whereas meritocracy is barely fifty years old. In various times and places, various groups have risen to power and influence—so we have landocracy (landowners), plantocracy (sugar planters), cottonocracy (cotton-growers), albocracy (white people) , shopocracy (shop-owners), papyrocracy (newspaper publishers), clubocracy (members of elite London clubs), chumocracy (friends of the ruling elite), millocracy (mill-owners), technocracy (technologists) and my personal favourite, beerocracy (brewers). Foolocracy needs no explanation.

And then there’s the curious bureaucracy, formed from the French bureau, “office”, which notably lacks the “o” common to all the other -cracy examples above, but is nevertheless pronounced as if it has one. In Future Shock (1970) Alvin Toffler offered his vision of what an organization might look like if it tried to eliminate bureaucracy and operate with a flexible and informal organizational style—he called it an ad-hocracy.

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Now, demos. For the Greeks, at a time when few people travelled more than a few miles from the place they were born, demos also referred to the place inhabited by a particular group of people—a nation or a region—and that sense lurks in the background of many English dem- words. It’ll reappear in my final example.

Demos has given us a number of currently relevant words in addition to democracy. There’s demagogue, “leader of the people”, which used to have a positive sense, but it now more often applied to those who appeal to the passions of the mob in order to raise themselves to power. And there’s epidemic, “on the people”, which refers to an infectious disease that appears and spreads widely in a particular region; if it spreads around the globe it is a pandemic, from “all the people”; if it settles into a place so that it is always present to some extent, it has become endemic, “in the people”. That final word has assumed a broader meaning, “specific to a group of people or a certain place”—so we have the idea of endemic plants, for instance, which are native to a specific place, and to be contrasted with exotics, which are intruders from elsewhere.

Demegoric refers to the art of public speaking. Demography is the study of the living conditions of groups of people, and demographics are the characteristics of groups of people. A demonym is a name for people who live in a particular place—Liverpudlians from Liverpool, Angelenos from Los Angeles, Michiganders from Michigan, Kittitians from St Kitts, and so on. A demophil is a “friend of the people”, pretty much a synonym for philanthropist, and such a person is described as being philodemic. Demotic means “pertaining to the common people”—Demotic Greek is the current form of spoken Greek, descended from Ancient Greek; Demotic Egyptian was the simple writing style used by the common people of Ancient Egypt, distinct from the hieroglyphic (“sacred carving”) symbols used by the priesthood.

Demos is also embedded in a few Ancient Greek personal names, two of which are more familiar in their Latinized versions. Demosthenes means “vigour of the people”, Democritus means “chosen of the people”, and Academus means “of a silent region”. An area of land near Athens, said to have been owned by the legendary Greek hero Akademos, was planted with trees and named the Akademia. The philosopher Plato subsequently gave lectures among these trees—the “groves of Academe”. Which is where we get our word academy.

nəˈtɪvɪtɪ

nativity: Birth, in particular the birth of Jesus Christ

This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heav’n’s eternal King,
Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,
Our great redemption from above did bring;
For so the holy sages once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.

John Milton “On The Morning Of Christ’s Nativity” (1645)

Nativity paintings, like Stom’s above, have been largely replaced by  little dioramas, featuring toy figures of shepherds, wise men, farm animals, and the holy family. Getting the figures and props of a “Nativity Scene” out of their box and setting them out in dramatic poses under the Christmas tree was a childhood ritual for many kids, when I was growing up. (And I’d have killed for a luminous baby Jesus like the one in the painting.)

Nativity comes to us via French from the Latin phrase in nativitate Domini, “at the birth of the Lord” and so its earliest usage in English, in the fourteenth century, relates specifically to the birth of Christ. Nativitate is the ablative singular of nativitas, “birth”, which has a related adjective nativus, “inborn”, and a verb nasci, “to be born”.

The nat- stem cropped up in a lot of Latin words. Nativus gives us native, which can mean both “inborn” (as in “native wit”) and “borne in a particular place”. Natio, “race, people”, implied a group of people all born in the same place, from which we derive nation. Hence, the Native Americans of the United States, and the First Nations of Canada. The French derived their word naïve (feminine, naïf) from nativus. The dieresis on the “i” reminds them to pronounce the “a” and “i” separately, rather than as a diphthong “ai”—in effect, it’s a relic of the departed “t” that used to separate the two vowels. The implication is that a person in a “native” state is rather simple and unsophisticated, and that’s the sense we’ve adopted in English—though nowadays we increasingly drop the dieresis accent, and ignore the masculine/feminine distinction, settling for plain naive.

Latin natura meant “character”, understood as an inborn property, present from birth. From which we derive nature, meaning a fundamental and original property. From there, we can go on to designate the natural world as being distinct from the world that humanity has built for itself. Things that are unnatural are tainted to the extent that they deviate from what we think of as natural, whereas things that are supernatural are more powerful than mere nature. A naturian is a person who studies the natural world—a “natural philosopher”; not to be confused with a naturist, who is a person who indulges in communal nudity. The derivation of the latter word is unclear—naturism originally meant “nature worship”, so perhaps modern naturism derives from that; or perhaps it refers to nudity as being a natural state for humans. In either case, the word was officially adopted in 1961 by the British Sun Bathing Association, replacing the previous term, nudism. Naturesse is a fine old word for “affection” or “generosity”, charmingly implying that these are natural attributes of humanity. And naturopathy is the belief that diseases can be treated using only the products of the natural world.

Latin natus (sometimes gnatus) meant “offspring”. Something innate is inborn. Things that are connate are “born together”—coming from the same origin or arising at the same time. We more often see this word in the form cognate, which applies to words with common etymological origins.

From the Latin verb nasci, “to be born”, we get our adjective nascent, “in the act of being born or brought forth”. Something innascible is not subject to being born—a word that seems only to be applied to the Christian concept of God the Father. Something renascent is being born again; and although we have the French to thank for the word Renaissance, we have the Italians to thank for the fourteenth-century cultural revival that the word designates.

Finally, there’s the Latin natalis, “pertaining to birth”, from which we get our word natal, with the same meaning. In 1497 the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, having rounded the southernmost point of Africa, spent Christmas Day travelling along a northward-trending coast which he called Terra Natalis, because the Portuguese word for Christmas Day is Natal. This became the site of the British settlement of Port Natal (now Durban). The hinterland of Port Natal was subsequently fought over by Zulus, British and Boers, and is now the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal.

So from English Nativity I’ve worked my way to Portuguese Natal—both of which refer to Christmas Day. If you’re planning on celebrating, in whatever modified form the Current Unpleasantness permits, have a good one.