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WORDS · LANGUAGE · ETYMOLOGY
THE ACCIDENTAL DICTIONARY (2017)
PAPERBACK & U.S. EDITIONS AVAILABLE
It’s by no means rare for words to change their meanings over time, but sometimes those changes can take words in quite bizarre or unexpected directions, leaving them quite some distance from where they started out. In fact, cast an etymological eye over the words in the dictionary, and you’ll soon uncover some very odd tales indeed.
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Girls, you discover, could once be boys. Your nephew was originally your grandson. The queen was your wife. A shampoo was a massage. Clouds were rocks. Noon was 3pm. Once upon a time, you could eat potpourri and wear alcohol. You could paint with pencils, get drenched in a tiddlywink, fall for a hat-trick, play hijinks with dice, and end the night looking utterly raunchy.
One hundred of the English language’s most peculiar etymological histories, precisely like these, are collected here in The Accidental Dictionary.
Here’s a sample to whet your appetite...
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ALCOHOL
originally meant ‘eye shadow’
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There aren’t many etymological stories that begin with the sublimation of a sulphite mineral, but there is at least one. It just happens also to be the story behind one of the most familiar words in the English language. So brace yourself—here comes the science bit.
When a substance changes directly from a solid into a gas with no intermediate liquid phase, that’s sublimation. It’s the same process that turns dry ice into a thick white fog without leaving pools of liquid carbon dioxide everywhere—but that’s not to suggest that sublimation is all about cheap special effects.
Back in Ancient Egypt, the mineral stibnite was heated to produce, via sublimation, a fine smoky vapour that left a layer of sooty powder on any surface with which it came into contact. The Egyptians then collected this powder (antimony trisulphide, should you really want to know) and mixed it with animal grease to produce a thick black paste that could be then used as a kind of eye shadow.
Different coloured eye shadows could be made by crushing, grinding or sublimating different chemicals—galena, a lead ore, produced a rich grey colour, malachite produced a dark green—but no matter the raw ingredients, the name of this cosmetic paste was always the same: kohl, a term derived from an ancient Arabic word meaning ‘stain’ or ‘paint’.
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Now, here comes the language bit. In Arabic, the definite article, ‘the’, is a prefix, al–. That’s the same al– found in names like Algeria (‘the islands’), Allah (‘the god’), and Alhambra (‘the red castle’), as well as words like alkali (‘the ashes’), almanac (‘the calendar’) and algebra (more on that in another chapter), and it gave the Ancient Egyptians’ eye shadow the name al-kohl. The chemists and alchemists of the Middle Ages then stumbled across this term in their ancient textbooks, and began applying it to any fine powder produced likewise by sublimation—and it is in this sense that the word alcohol first appeared in English in the mid 1500s.
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But to all those chemists and alchemists, sublimation was more than just a way of accentuating your eyes. Instead, it was a way of extracting the purest, most absolute essence of something, and it wasn’t long before they began applying the same techniques and ideas—not to mention the same word—to liquids.
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The concentrated, intensified liquors that could be produced by refining and distilling fluids ultimately came to be known as alcohol as well, and because one of the fluids these early experiments were carried out on happened to be wine, by the mid nineteenth century the term had become particularly associated with so-called ‘alcohol of wine’—namely the alcoholic content of intoxicating liquor. Eventually, this meaning, and its associations with alcoholic spirits and beverages, established itself as the way in which the word was most widely used, while its ancient associations with sublimation and Egyptian cosmetics dropped into relative obscurity.
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