ˈaɪsəleɪtɪd

Isolated: placed or standing apart or alone; detached or separate from other things or persons; unconnected with anything else; solitary

To protect others, you must stay at home if you or someone you live with has symptoms of coronavirus (COVID-19).
This is called self-isolation.

UK National Health Service, Self-Isolation Advice (2020)

During the Current Unpleasantness, people all around the world have become acquainted with the concept of “self-isolation”—an infected person’s duty to break the epidemic’s chain of infection by voluntarily withdrawing from all external contacts with other people. For those of us in the UK, that concept has become particularly salient over the last few days, as we have been amused/entertained/irritated/outraged* by the unfolding saga of the self-isolation of a senior government adviser, Dominic Cummings, which involved a rather unusual amount of travel. Who’d have guessed, as Covid-19 lock-down restrictions slowly eased, that the national conversation would be largely taken up by speculation on the bladder capacity of four-year-old children on long car journeys, or the advisability of testing your vision by taking your wife and child out for a drive?

Isolated and isolation come to us from the French verb isoler, “to isolate”. The French formed an adjective, isolé, and a noun, isolation, from that verb; both were at first adopted into English unchanged, but the intrusively French isolé evolved first into the awkward isolé’d and was finally fully Anglicized as isolated during the eighteenth century, albeit against stiff resistance. An anonymous reviewer of the book Morality United With Policy by Robert Fellowes, writing for the conservative magazine The British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review in October 1800 opined:

In point of language, we have little to object to Mr. F. but we must tell him, as we have told many others, that the affected, frenchified, unnecessary word, isolated is not English, and we trust never will be. Much the same may be said of reclamation, and one or two other words; but in general his language is pure, and his style vigorous: and when he shall have a little less confidence in himself, his sober readers will place more in him.

p.418

(The British and French were going through one of their occasional episodes of disharmony at the time.)

The English verb isolate was then back-formed from the adjective isolated, which subsequently took up an additional duty as a past participle.

Something that can be isolated is isolable or isolatable; a thing that isolates is an isolator, and has an isolative function; someone in favour of political isolation is an isolationist, who favours isolationism. And a person who is an outcast from society is an isolato, a word we have acquired directly from the Italian.

Both the French and Italian roots come from Latin insula, “island”, a word that the Romans also applied to what we’d now call a block of flats or a condominium. A peninsula is, of course, a promontory of land that is “almost an island”. Insula has provided English with a list of words that relate in some way to the properties of an island. Something pertaining to an island is insular—which has also acquired figurative applications to people or societies that are cut off from the mainstream, stuck in their ways, or narrow-minded. Such people are said to show insularity or insularism. We cut things off from the rest of the world by insulating them, for which purpose we apply insulation. A thing which insulates is described as insulative; it is an insulator or insulant. And then there was the short-lived Septinsular Republic, based on the seven Ionian Islands of Greece. It existed, appropriately enough, for seven years, gaining independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1800, and falling to the French under Napoleon in 1807.

Our English words isle and island have a complicated history. Isle was originally spelled “ile” or “yle”, brought into Middle English from Old French ile, the equivalent of modern French île, “island”. Island, on the other hand, is Germanic in origin, and was originally iland or yland. The first syllable takes its origin from Old English ieg, which was pronounced something like “eey”, and meant … well, “island”. So island is literally “island land”. During the fifteenth century, English speakers began to think of the Germanic word as containing the French word, and would write iland as ile-land. Meanwhile, the French decided to add an “s” to ile, in acknowledgement of its Latin origin in insula. This new French spelling. isle with a silent “s”, leaked into English usage, and immediately had a knock-on effect on the spelling of ile-land. So the old Germanic word acquired a Franco-Latin silent “s” that it really didn’t need, and we ended up with confusing modern spelling “island”. Another English word that ended up with a pointless silent “s” is aisle, which strictly designates the wings on either side of the nave of a church, but (probably because of confusion with the unrelated word alley), is also now the name for a passage between the rows of church pews. It came into English from French aile, which derives from Latin ala, “wing”. English speakers managed to get aile confused with ile, “island”, and when they added the silent “s” in isle, they also added one to aile. (The French later dropped the “s” from isle, marking its departure with a circumflex on the “i”, and in effect walked away whistling, denying all responsibility for the mess they’d created in English spelling.)

A sea dotted with islands can be described as islanded or islandy. Someone who comes from an island is an isleman, islesman, or a gender-neutral islander. Someone who loves islands suffers from islomania. And a small island is, of course, an islet.

Which brings me to the anatomical structures known as the Islets of Langerhans—little circular patches of cells, scattered through the pancreas like islands, and named in honour of the German anatomist Paul Langerhans, who first described them in 1869. It was known that the main part of the pancreas produced digestive enzymes, and it was known that removal of the pancreas caused diabetes. So Sir Edward Sharpey-Schafer suggested, during the 1890s, that the Islets of Langerhans must be responsible for producing some substance that acted to control blood sugar. Harking back to Latin insula, “island”, he coined a name for this hypothetical substance produced by the Islet cells—he called it “insuline”, and today we know it as insulin.

* Delete as applicable

kɒˈrəʊnə

Corona: a circular structure, or spiked circular structure, surrounding a central core

Corona is the Latin word for a crown. And, after passing through French, it’s the origin of our word crown. In its original form, it’s used to designate all sorts of crown-like structures. The spiky protrusions from the capsule of the coronavirus give it its name. The halos of coloured light often seen around the moon are also referred to as a corona—they are generated by diffraction and interference of light passing through tiny particles in the Earth’s atmosphere. And during a total solar eclipse we are able to see the wispy outer atmosphere of the sun, which is also called a corona.

There are others. The circular chandelier of a church is called a corona lucis, “crown of light”; the tonsure of a Roman Catholic monk is called a corona clericalis, “clerical crown”; electrically charged conductors can cause a halo of ionization in the surrounding atmosphere, called a corona discharge; and there are a host of biological structures, from seeds to brains, that are called coronas because of their shape. We also have two constellations, Corona Borealis and Corona Australis, the northern and southern crowns. Both consist of tightly curved arrays of stars, more reminiscent of tiaras than conventional crowns.

Corona is still the word for “crown” in Spanish, which is why a bottle of Mexican Corona beer has a little picture of a crown on it. (Fatuous early reports that American beer drinkers were avoiding Corona beer because of confusion with coronavirus turned out not to be reflected by reality.) Corona is also the Spanish name for a particular size of cigar, intermediate in length between a robusto (“strong”) and a toro (“bull”), though slimmer than either—there seems to be no particular logic to the nomenclature.

A coronet is a small crown. A coronation is, of course, a crowning ceremony. The person who sets the crown on the royal head is variously styled a coronator or coronant. To coronize is the act of crowning, and a person wearing a crown is incoronate. Something crown-shaped is coroniform, or coronary. The latter word gives its name to the two coronary arteries of the heart, which supply blood to the heart muscle. Their ramifications around the heart make it look, I suppose, a little as if it is set inside a a rather exotic inverted crown.

Something pertaining to a crown is coronal. So in anatomy, we have the coronal suture of the skull, which crosses the head from side to side; and the coronal plane, one of the three principal anatomical planes of the body, which cuts through from side to side and top to bottom.

We often use the phrase “The Crown” to refer to the royal office itself.* A coroner was once a local or regional officer assigned to protect the property rights of the Crown. (Nowadays in England, a coroner’s main role is to hold inquests into deaths caused by violence or accident.)

Corolla is the Latin word for a small crown, or a garland of flowers, and it’s the name applied in English to the petals of a flower. In ancient Rome a corollarium was a small sum of money paid for a garland of flowers; it went on to mean a tip or gratuity. Then,  in a metaphorical sense, it became the word for a little extra bit of detail at the end of a mathematical proof—something that followed naturally from the proof already given, which did not require a proof of its own. Which is where the English word corollary comes from, designating something that is an immediate consequence of what has previously occurred or been said.

And finally, have you ever wondered why the military rank of colonel is pronounced in English as if the first “l” is an “r”? The word, and its spelling, comes from Italian colonnello, which is derived in turn from colonna, “column”. So the military rank of colonnello was the person who led a column of men. The French adopted this as coronel—probably just because l’s sometimes change into r’s, especially if there is more than one “l” in a word, but also perhaps under the influence of couronne, “crown”—the French version of Latin corona. But then, in a delayed burst of etymological exactitude, the French word was revised to colonel during the 16th century. English acquired both spellings from the French, but then managed to eliminate the “r” version during the 17th century, while perversely preserving the “r” pronunciation.

* This substitution of an attribute for the name of the thing meant, which is a common enough formulation, is called metonymy. Other examples are “The Vatican”, “The Oval Office” and “The Kremlin”.

I think it is appropriate for me to admonish both the House managers and the President’s counsel in equal terms to remember that they are addressing the world’s greatest deliberative body. One reason it has earned that title is because its members avoid speaking in a manner and using language that is not conducive to civil discourse.
In the 1905 Swayne trial, a senator objected when one of the managers used the word “pettifogging” and the presiding officer said the word ought not to have been used. I don’t think we need to aspire to that high of a standard, but I do think those addressing the Senate should remember where they are.

Chief Justice John Roberts, 22 January 2020

The word “pettifogging” was recently introduced to many people when it was spoken by Chief Justice John Roberts on the first day of the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. He was admonishing those speaking at the trial to avoid the use of insulting or inflammatory language—and the news media found themselves obliged to explain what exactly “pettifogging” meant.

The act of pettifogging is pettifoggery, and the word’s little moment of fame reminded me that there seem to be rather a lot of strange and obscure compound nouns ending in -ery that are used in a pejorative manner. And that’s what this post is about.

A pettifogger is a lawyer who uses sharp or dishonest practice in order to win cases. The first element comes from petty, which derives from French petit, “small”; the second element probably derives from the Fuggers, a family of wealthy merchants and bankers based in Augsburg during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Even during their ascendancy, the word fogger, derived from their name, was used to designate a person who was prepared to use underhand methods for financial gain. The verb to pettifog, quoted by Justice Roberts, is a back-formation from the noun.

Skulduggery is underhand dealing, secret machination, or just plain trickery. No-one seems to know the origin of the expression, which started out as sculduddery in the eighteenth century. It has a back-formed verb, to skuldug, which has failed to gain as much popularity as it deserves.

Tomfoolery is foolish behaviour. The word comes from the stock character Tom Fool who appeared in mediaeval plays—the name “Tom” was used to designate the common man, much in the manner of “Joe Public” today. Damfoolery is a more modern equivalent, the behaviour of “damned fools”. It has an associated adjective damfool, which in the nineteenth century was occasionally spelled damphool, for no readily apparent reason.

Crackpottery is the behaviour of a crackpot—the “pot” in this case being a slang term for the skull. Crackpot was once synonymous with the now obsolete crackbrain—a person who’s brain isn’t working properly. In modern times, the pejorative crackpot seems to be reserved to designate cranks and other harmless eccentrics. Crackpottery has an apparently medical synonym, psychoceramics—this is the fictitious field of study of the equally fictitious Professor Josiah Stinkney Carberry. Carberry originated as a hoax in 1929, but has now become a tradition at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Madcappery is a little like crackpottery, except the madcap is maniacal in behaviour. The derivation is obvious, though quite why the headgear is relevant is unknown.

Fruitloopery, a word championed by the magazine New Scientist since 2005, is the ignorant misuse of scientific jargon to add a superficial air of plausibility to one’s speech or writing. It derives from fruit loop, a slang expression for someone who is eccentric or credulous, which has been around since the 1980s. And that, in turn, presumably has something to do with the alarming children’s breakfast cereal Froot Loops, though I’m hard-pressed to think what.

Loonspuddery is a naive willingness to accept or transmit even the most outlandish conspiracy theories or “alternative” viewpoints. Although it has been knocking around for the better part of a decade, the word doesn’t seem to have made it into the dictionaries yet. But if I had to hazard a guess at the etymology, I’d say loon in the sense of “lunatic”, and spud in the Scottish sense of “potato”—which is to say, both mad and not very clever.

Sunspottery is the act of credulously mistaking correlation for causation. The word was coined in the nineteenth century during a vogue for seeking correlations between the 11-year sunspot cycle and human events, particularly in the field of economics. It was discussed in some detail in a pamphlet entitled Sunspottery: What Do We Owe The Sun? (1883) by J.A. Westwood Oliver.

Nincompoopery is the state of being, or the actions of, a nincompoop—a word of obscure origin, meaning “idiot”. Samuel Johnson hazarded that it might have something to do with the Latin non compos mentis, “not of sound mind”, but that doesn’t seem to match with the earliest form of the word, nickumpoop. Nitwittery is a synonym, referring to a nitwit—a person who has no more wit than a nit (which is the egg of a headlouse, and therefore not particularly bright). At the other end of the intelligence scale is eggheadery, which derives from the noun egghead, applied to an intellectual or “high-browed” person—one with a stereotypical brow as smoothly rounded as an egg.

Quacksalvery pertains to the activities of quacksalvers—ignorant people peddling miracle cures. The derivation seems to come from salve, meaning “ointment”, and an analogy between the quacking of a duck and the meaningless speech of the quacksalver. The word has now been abbreviated to just plain quack, for a bogus doctor. Another word applying to the same deceitful profession is mountebankery—mountebanks take their name from Italian montimbanco “mount-on-bench”, because they would often climb on to a chair to address their audience and peddle their wares.

Thimbleriggery is another deceitful profession—that of the thimblerigger. The reference is to the old “hunt the pea” sleight of hand trick, performed with three thimbles (or inverted cups) and a single pea, but it has application to anyone who cheats you by nimble deception.

Jiggery-pokery is another word for manipulative deceit. It comes from the Scots joukery-pawkery, and in my home town a hybrid version, joukery-pokery is still in current use. In Scots, to jouk is to dodge or dive; and a pawky person is sly, though the word has now acquired light-hearted connotations—in the phrase “a pawky sense of humour”, pawky could perhaps best be translated as “arch”.

While we’re on the subject of deceit, scallywaggery covers all possible modes—the derivation of scallywag is obscure, but it’s a word applied to deceitful, disreputable or just plain idle folk.

Swashbucklery, on the other hand, is all about noisy activity. A swashbuckler is a person who swashes a buckler—that is, strikes a shield noisily (with a sword or other weapon). It’s a rather dismissive term for those who indulge in swaggering braggadocio. To swashbuckle is to indulge in swashbucklery—a verb back-formed from the original swashbuckler.

Gimcrackery is a collection of gimcracks—tawdry and worthless ornaments. Be sure to pronounce it with a soft “g”. The etymology is obscure, but it seems to refer to an object that breaks easily.

Godwottery is an over-elaborate style of gardening. It takes its mocking origin from a poem by T.E. Brown entitled “My Garden”, which opens with the line:

A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!

Wot is the third person singular of the old verb wit, meaning “to know”, and “God wot!” was a common enough exclamation in Shakespeare’s time, meaning something like “It is certainly so!” The Victorian poets briefly revived the expression, as they did with so much archaic language.

Finally, I’ll leave you with one of the many words coined by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake—Scandiknavery. Which is a deceit perpetrated by one or more Scandinavians.

əˈpɒstrəfiː

apostrophe: 1) A rhetorical device in which the speaker breaks off from discourse in order to address a person or thing, absent or present; 2) The sign ’, used to indicate omitted letters, or the possessive case

In my previous post about apostrophes, I wrote about the use of the punctuation mark, and mentioned briefly that the name comes from Greek apostrophe, compounded of the prefix apo-, “away” and strophe “a turning”. I’ve written before about the prefix apo-, and its various applications, when I dealt with the words perihelion and aphelion. So this post will deal with the family of words descended from Greek strophe.

Last time, I gave a Shakespearean example of the rhetorical kind of apostrophe (the first definition at the head of this post). Here’s another, more modern example:

Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again

That’s Paul Simon, “turning away” to address a literal or figurative darkness at the start of his song “The Sound Of Silence” (1964). If you indulge in apostrophe of this sort, then you apostrophize. But if you apostrophate, you cut short your discourse—a more literal interpretation of “turning away”.

Another rhetorical device is epistrophe, “turning upon”, in which a word or phrase is repeated, for emphasis, at the end of successive clauses or sentences. Abraham Lincoln used it to good effect in his Gettysburg Address when he spoke of “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.

And then there anastrophe, “turning back”, another rhetorical device, in which normal word order is reversed so as to place emphasis where it needs to be—”life eternal”, “body beautiful” and Longfellow’s “forest primeval” all use anastrophe to put the emphasis on the adjective, rather than the noun.

The word catastrophe, “turning over”, was originally used to mean a reversal of fortune, for good or bad, at the conclusion of a drama. Only later did it come to have its current extreme, negative connotations. J.R.R. Tolkien felt that we really needed a specific word for a reversal of fortune that produced a good outcome, and so added the Greek prefix eu-, “good”, coining the handy word eucatastrophe.

In Ancient Greek theatre, scene-setting was done by a chorus, who would sing poetic odes to introduce the characters and their situation. This was traditionally done in matched sections, the strophe and antistrophe—the first sung as the chorus moved across the stage from right to left, and the second (matching the poetic structure of the first but delivering some alternative aspect of the plot) as the chorus moved from left to right. So the strophe (“turn”) and antistrophe (“turn against”) were literal movements as well as figurative opposites. Nowadays, strophe applies to a metrical group of lines of verse, a usage almost indistinguishable from stanza. But antistrophe has taken on new meanings—as a synonym for epistrophe; and to designate the deeply satisfying practice, in debate, of turning one opponents’ own words against them. An example of such debating judo is called an antistrophon.

Greek strophe also gives us many scientific words, of which the following is just a sampler. Diastrophism (“turning across”) is the geological process of folding and faulting that produces much of our landscape. In biology, a snail-shell that curls in the reverse direction to the normal for its species is said to be heterostrophic (“different turning”). Exstrophy (“out turning”) is the turning inside-out of an organ during embryological development (never a good thing). Geostrophic (“earth turning”) winds or ocean currents are movements of air or water under the influence of the Earth’s rotation (I wrote about this phenomenon in my post about the Coriolis force). And hypostrophe (“turning back”) has had several medical usages over the years—the tossing and turning of delirious people; a relapse of a disease that had been in remission; and as a synonym for what’s now more commonly called retroversion—the process by which an internal organ folds back on itself (never a good thing).

Greek strophos, “twisted cord” gives us the genus name Strophanthus (“twisted cord flower”), which includes some African species that were used to create arrow poisons. (The name comes from the fan of thin, twisting petals sported by some species.) The pharmacologically active ingredient of the arrow poison was extracted and named strophanthin—it has an action on the heart similar to that of digitalis. And just as digoxin is the purified drug made from digitalis, a drug called ouabain was made from strophanthin, its name deriving from Somali waabaayo, “arrow poison”. It was still something I learned about when I studied pharmacology back in the 1970s, but I never saw it used, and it has now  vanished from the pharmacopoeia.

Finally, there’s boustrophedon, “ox-turning”. This originally referred to the path taken by a team of oxen pulling a plough—moving first from left to right, then turning at the end of a furrow so as to plough the next furrow from right to left. Then turning again, and repeating the process. It is applied to the Ancient Greek style of writing which was read in from left to right on one line and then from right to left (with the letters mirror-reversed) on the next. In (slightly) more modern times, it refers to the motion of the printing head of a dot-matrix printer, which would zip alternately from left to right and right to left, so that it printed every second line in the reverse of reading order.

And that concludes my turn for today.

ɪmˈpiːtʃmənt

impeachment: The accusation and prosecution of a person for treason or other high crime or misdemeanour before a competent tribunal; in Great Britain, the judicial process by which a person may be tried before the House of Lords at the instigation of the House of Commons; in the U.S.A., a similar process in which the accusers are the House of Representatives and the court is the Senate.

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

Article II, Section 4, of the Constitution Of The United States

As a sort of companion to my post about the etymology of the word prorogation, it seems like it might be time to investigate another unusual word that is freighted with political significance at present.

It’s an interesting fact, often omitted from potted histories of the U.S. Constitution, that its drafters borrowed both the technical usage of the word impeachment and the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” from British constitutional law. Impeachment was originally a process by which the English Parliament could remove from office (and indeed judicially kill), representatives of the King who were deemed to be abusing the powers of their office. (That’s what the “high” in “high crimes and misdemeanours” means—the crimes and misdemeanours cited are not of the sort available to the common person, only to those who hold high office.)

Impeachment comes from the verb to impeach and the suffix -ment, which forms nouns from verbs, relating to either the process or result of the verb’s action. The verb to impeach came to us from Old French empechier, which in turn derived from the Latin verb impedicare. And impedicare refers to the Latin noun pedica, meaning “shackle” or “snare”*. So impedicare was the act of placing a person in shackles, and it gives us our English word impede. The same etymology applies to Modern French empêcher, which means “to hinder”, and that is also the original meaning of the English word impeach. But in English the sense of hindering a person, or impeding what they were doing, gradually evolved into the idea of legally challenging their actions, and so to its current highly specific usage. We also used to have a verb appeach, with the same derivation, and which underwent the same slow evolution in its meaning. It’s now obsolete and replaced by impeach, but it has left a tiny residue behind by dropping its first letter to form the verb to peach—to peach on someone is to give evidence against them.

Returning now to impedicare and our word impede, an impediment is of course something that impedes; impedimenta are things that impede progress, and the word has come to be applied to bulky baggage.

Latin impedicare had an opposite, expedire—to release from fetters. Which of course gives us English expedite, meaning to clear of difficulties or to hasten progress. Something expeditious is speedily performed, and an expedition is a well-organized movement of people and equipment. However, the word expedient has taken on negative connotations—an expedient may clear difficulties and hasten progress, but the final result is deemed unsatisfactory or reprehensible. (Expedite also once came with an exact opposite, impedite, which has become obsolete in favour of impede.)

There seems also to have been another Latin opposite to impedicare—depedicare. There’s now no written Latin evidence for it, but it is presumably the origin of the French verb dépêcher “to hurry”. And we used to have an English word depeach, derived from the French, meaning “to send away” or “to dispose of”. But its function has now been entirely taken over by dispatch, which (despite the similarity in sound) has a different etymology.

Finally, if you’ve been fretting about the derivation of the name of the fruit, peach, it has nothing to do with any of the above. The Romans thought of it as a “Persian apple”, persicum malum, which in Late Latin mutated into persica, then into Italian pesca, French pêche, and finally into our peach.

* And if you’re thinking that pedica has something to do with Latin pes, “foot”, you’re right. Pedica was something that tangled up your feet and stopped you walking.

ˈmeɪndʒə(r)

manger: A box or trough in a stable or byre, from which horses and cattle eat. 

Away in a manger, no crib for a bed,
The little Lord Jesus laid down his sweet head.
The stars in the bright sky looked down where he lay,
The little Lord Jesus asleep on the hay.

Nineteenth-century Christmas carol

The text above is often attributed to Martin Luther, but that story seems to have been invented when the first two verses of the carol were published in the The Christian Cynosure in 1882. The true author is unknown, and the slightly chilling third verse seems to have been added later. (When I was a tot, and obliged to learn these supposedly uplifting verses, I wasn’t that keen on the prospect of Jesus taking “all the dear children” to heaven—I rather wanted to stay at home with my Mum and Dad.)

The other problem I had with this carol was that I had no idea what the first line was about—no-one ever thought to explain what a “manger” or a “crib” were. But after a while I learned that a “crib” was what we in the UK call a cot*; and close inspection of Nativity scenes like the one above led me to believe that a “manger” was a sort of short, wooden trough, triangular in cross-section and comfortably stuffed with hay. But it turns out that’s not generally true—the Oxford English Dictionary notes parenthetically that the manger is “[c]hiefly used for those kinds of food which cannot be placed, like hay and straw, in the rack above.” So really the baby Jesus should be depicted nestling comfortably on a bed of slightly decaying turnips.

Well, not really. The relevant Biblical verse is Luke 2:12, which the King James edition renders into English as:

And this shall be a sign unto you; You shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

The Greek word translated here as “manger” is phatne, which could mean a manger, a feeding trough or even an animal stall. The sign the angel is reporting to the shepherds is that they’ll find a conventionally dressed baby (swaddling clothes) resting in an unusual location (somewhere farm animals are fed), but not necessarily in the specific bit of farmyard kit we associate with the word manger.

Manger comes to us from French mangeoire, which means … well … “manger”, and is related to the French verb manger, “to eat”, which comes from the Latin mandare, “to chew”. In Old French, mangeue meant both “to eat” and “to itch” (maybe there is an analogy between repetitive chewing motions and repetitive scratching motions). The duty for the second meaning has been taken over by démanger in modern French, but the old word gave us English mange, an itchy skin disease suffered by furry animals. The French verb manger has leaked into culinary English just a little, in the form of blancmange, literally “white eat”, and mangetout, “eat all”—the kinds of peas you can eat along with their pods, also called snap peas and snow peas.

Latin mandare gives us the anatomical name of the jaw-bone, the mandible, and manducate, an obscure word meaning “to chew”. Manducation is the act of eating, but is applied almost solely to the Christian ceremony in which the bread of the Eucharist is eaten.

Mandare is descended from a Proto-Indo-European root reconstructed as mendh-, which meant something like “to chew”. Despite promising first appearances, the Germanic word “mouth” actually has a different PIE root, but mendh- did give rise to Classical Greek mastax, “mouth”. Mastax gives us masticate, “to chew”, and masseter, the big chewing muscle on either side of the jaw. Maxilla is the anatomical term for the bone of the upper jaw, which came to us from the Greek via Latin. And mastic is a chewy resin obtained from the mastic tree (Pistacia lentiscus).

Finally, we have mystax, a word from the Doric dialect of Greek, related to Classical Greek mastax. Doric was spoken is southern Italy, among other places, and mystax eventually gave rise to Italian mostaccio, and then French moustache. Which gave us, respectively, English mustachio and moustache.

I hope that’s given you something to chew on, whether or not you’re chewing on Christmas dinner.

* Interestingly, though, the earliest usage of the word crib recorded by the OED has the meaning “barred receptacle for fodder”. It seems to have acquired the meaning “child’s bed with barred sides” by early association with the story of Jesus lying in a manger, which was sometimes referred to as a “crib”.

prɒrəʊˈɡeɪʃən

prorogation: the act of discontinuing the meetings of an assembly without dissolving it

For present purposes, the relevant limit on the power to prorogue is this: that a decision to prorogue (or advise the monarch to prorogue) will be unlawful if the prorogation has the effect of frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and as the body responsible for the supervision of the executive.

Lady Hale, President of the Supreme Court, 24 September 2019

Here in the UK we’ve recently been getting a little lesson on the importance of the Separation of Powers in a democratic state. In particular, the judiciary has just, at time of writing, intervened in the relationship between the executive and legislature (see above), thereby limiting the ability of the Government to prorogue Parliament. So the unfamiliar word prorogation has been on everyone’s lips.

The verb to prorogue comes from the Latin prefix pro- and the verb rogare, “to ask”. The meaning of prorogare in Latin was “to extend” (a term of office). In English it was used to mean both “to prolong” and “to postpone”, and as early as the fifteenth century it acquired its specific relevance to the (then) English Parliament—to discontinue meetings for a (usually brief) period. Quite how a Latin construction that should mean “asking before” or “asking on behalf of” acquired its connection to prolongation is unclear. It has been suggested that perhaps, at some period in Roman history, the extension of some period of office required specific permission to be asked for, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence to support that idea.

Latin rogare also gives us rogation—in Roman history, the act of submitting a proposed law to the people to ask for their approval. In the Christian calendar the Rogation Days are the three days before Ascension Day, marked by processions and prayers—the prayers being the act of “asking” for which the days are named.

So we have two associations for rogare in English—law-making and asking, and each has spawned its own list of words.

First, in the legal sense, we have the verb to abrogate means “to repeal” or “to do away with” (a law or established custom). To derogate is to abrogate in part—to diminish the force of something (originally a law, but now more generally applied). And that sense of diminishment gives us the usually meaning of derogatory—”disrespectful” or “disparaging”. To obrogate is to repeal a law, and to irrogate was an old Scottish legal term meaning “to impose” (a legal penalty). To subrogate is to replace one person with another, the original meaning having to do with legally replacing office bearers or election candidates.

When it comes to the sense of asking, we have the verb interrogate, which literally means “asking questions at intervals”, and the noun prerogative (literally “asked first”), meaning a right or privilege.* To erogate is to pay out money—the reference is to disbursing funds from the public purse after asking permission from the Roman people. To arrogate is to claim something for oneself (or about another). It has now come to be associated with false or unjustified claims, but its original meaning was “to adopt a child”. Its cousin adrogate has a specialized meaning, referring to the Roman custom of adopting adults into one’s own family.

Finally, there’s corvée, a French word that has come a long way, in terms of pronunciation, from its Latin origins in corrogare, literally “to ask together”. The Latin word referred to a sort of tax paid in labour by Roman citizens, who would do work on public structures like roads and bridges rather than pay money to the state. The word then evolved to designate the duty of unpaid labour owed by a mediaeval vassal to his feudal lord—a practice which persisted in France right up to the French Revolution. In both senses (public work in lieu of tax, or as a duty imposed by a government on its citizens) corvée labour persists in several countries today, including Myanmar, Vietnam, Rwanda and Bhutan.

There’s a certain irony embedded in the etymology of prorogation, I think, in the context of the current fuss. It seems that something for which one once had to ask permission has turned into something that can be unilaterally imposed, requiring legal intervention to undo.

* And a prerogative is how the monarchy becomes involved in the whole prorogation stramash. In the UK, prorogation is a Royal Prerogative—a power exercised by the monarch, in this case under the advice of her government. Royal Prerogative is, however, trumped by statute law—which is how the Supreme Court became involved.