The Balderdash & Piffle Collection
of English Words, and
Their Curious Origins
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Text © Takeaway Media Ltd and Alex Games, 2006; Alex Games 2007
Alex Games and Takeaway Media Ltd have asserted their right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published by BBC Books in 2008
This book is published to accompany the television series Balderdash & Piffle,
broadcast on BBC2 in 2006 (Series 1) and 2007 (Series 2).
Series produced by Takeaway Media.
Executive Producer: Neil Cameron (Series 1), Archie Baron (Series 2)
Series Editor: Archie Baron (Series 1)
Series Producer: Caroline Ross Pirie (Series 2)
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 9781846076107
Commissioning editor: Martin Redfern
Project editors: Eleanor Maxfield & Nicholas Payne
Designer: seagulls.net
Production controller: Antony Heller
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Title Page
Foreword by Victoria Coren
PART 1
Introduction
One: Our Mongrel Tongue
Two: Dr Johnson’s Big Idea
Three: From 0800 Number to Zyxt
Four: Desert Island Texts
Five: Local Lingo
Six: Global Lingo
Seven: That’s Entertainment
Eight: The Appliance of Science
Nine: Mind Your Language
Ten: To Er … is Human
Eleven: Changing Times, Changing Terms
Twelve: Origin Unknown
PART 2
Thirteen: One Sandwich Short
Fourteen: Fashionistas
Fifteen: Who Were They?
Sixteen: Man’s Best Friend
Seventeen: Dodgy Dealings
Eighteen: Put-downs and Insults
Nineteen: Spend a Penny
Twenty: X-rated
Wordhunt Results
Further reading
Useful addresses and websites
Acknowledgements
Copyright
Note: Words and phrases discussed and/or defined in the text appear in bold type. Foreign words appear in italic type.
ALEX GAMES studied Classics at university and now teaches Latin. He has been a comedy critic, travel and feature writer for newspapers from the Financial Times to the Evening Standard, and has written comedy for BBC Radio One, Four and Sky TV.
VICTORIA COREN is a well-known freelance journalist. She writes weekly columns in the Guardian and the Observer, and she has written two books, Love 16 and Once More With Feeling. She presents Balderdash & Piffle and several televised poker series.
Balderdash & Piffle, presented by Victoria Coren, was made by award-winning independent production company Takeaway Media
by Victoria Coren
When I was a child, I made a list of my favourite words. Ferret. Tinsel. Quagmire. They were my top three.
I made the more traditional lists too: boys I liked, Barbie outfits, revenges to be exacted on horrible schoolteachers. But, while teachers and Barbies dominate our lives for a limited period of time, and boys become far less enigmatic with exposure, words remain mysteriously fascinating for ever. I still think I picked a good three. Ferret, tinsel, quagmire, all of them strange and perfect in their various ways. ‘Ferret’ squirms slightly as you say it: a mischievous, wriggly little word. ‘Tinsel’ is sharp and silvery against the teeth. You can get bogged down in ‘quagmire’, with its juicy start and claggy centre.
This is why there is no such thing as a perfect translation. The precise relationship between a word or phrase and its meaning is peculiar to every language.
You might say to a friend, ‘I’ll see you at teatime’, meaning only an approximation of four o’clock. But tucked away inside the word ‘teatime’, to a British ear, is a chill winter afternoon: darkness outside, a little orange glow around the streetlamps, and a pile of hot buttered crumpets on a table by the hearth. (And tucked away inside the word ‘crumpets’ is a little parade of Victorian prostitutes, from the time when the word came to mean an attractive woman, for reasons which I can’t possibly spell out here.)
Your plan, when you meet this friend at teatime, may involve neither chill winds nor tea, and I certainly hope it doesn’t involve prostitutes. But every time you use an English word, it whispers a little story. Words are like the best sort of grandparents: still engaged and busy in the modern world, but full of colourful tales about the place they were born, the years of their youth, and the job they used to do. The question is, are we always listening? The reason I wanted to work on the series Balderdash & Piffle, when I usually consider myself far too fat and croaky to appear on television, is the opportunity it offered to investigate some of our more curious words and phrases at first hand. TV producers usually ring up and ask whether I might like to be a guest on their hilarious new panel game, pressing a buzzer and competing with stand-up comics to shout one-liners at a slightly frightened audience.
But this one said: ‘Let’s hire a Mini and travel to the birthplace of “codswallop” and “ploughman’s lunch”.’ It was an irresistible adventure. Off we could go to … ferret out the truth. World-class Scrabble players, I have read, are familiar with literally thousands of words without knowing their meaning. The letters are simply point-scoring symbols, and definitions don’t matter. This is one of approximately fourteen reasons why I will never be a world-class Scrabble player. I can’t imagine hearing a new word without wanting to know its meaning, and knowing its history is even better. We can understand our own history, as a nation, through these little tales.
When you know your etymology, the words ‘ferret out’ should summon you immediately back to 1580, when gamekeepers sent half-tame ferrets down rabbit holes to flush out their tasty occupants. The word ‘ferret’ itself, coming from the Old French fuiret and previously the Latin fur, furis (a thief), speaks to you of people moving across Europe in ancient times, bringing their languages with them and noticing, even then, that there is something suspicious and untrustworthy about ferrets. ‘Look at zem,’ some Old French wordsmith must have muttered, ‘Like leetle thieves.’ Except he probably thought it in French.
It must surely be worth knowing as much of this stuff as possible. Unlocking the history of words gives so much more weight, colour and poetry to every conversation we have. Why not let images of sixteenth-century gamekeepers dance in the mind, and sixteenth-century wives cooking delicious rabbit pies, rather than letting ‘ferret out’ become a flat one-dimensional phrase with no further meaning than its figurative one? Why not keep those stories alive?
After the first series of Balderdash & Piffle (and thanks to the sterling work of amateur detectives all over the country, who helped us to investigate the history of words and phrases), forty-three changes were made to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Why are we so proud of that? It’s partly because the English language is our greatest national treasure, and there is a pure satisfaction in recording it correctly. If you are the kind of person who enjoys the neatness of a finished crossword, the solving of a riddle, or the clear explanation at the end of a Sherlock Holmes mystery, you will know immediately why we yearn to make sure that the dictionary’s entries and dates are completely accurate.
But there is more to it than a geeky desire for properly ordered facts. The history of our language unlocks the history of our culture. Those dictionary changes that our wordhunters helped to make after the first series included ante-datings for the words ‘balti’, ‘cocktail’ and ‘cool’, as well as the phrases ‘chattering classes’, ‘on the pull’ and ‘smart casual’. In tracing the first entry of these terms into the English language, we discover when we first started to act, speak, eat, drink or think in certain ways. They are little souvenirs along the path of social change.
Group words into themes, and we can learn even more. Consider ‘bung’, ‘swindle’ and ‘Glasgow kiss’. Why do we use such jolly alternatives to ‘bribe’, ‘defraud’ and ‘head-butt’? Having one cute, colourful term for a violent or criminal act is a linguistic quirk. Having three begins to tell us something about ourselves. Our love of this colourful slang is connected to our fondness for TV characters such as Del Boy, Arthur Daley, the Mitchell brothers and Norman Stanley Fletcher. Why are we so ready to enjoy the lighter side of crime?
The English language is equally full of light-hearted terms for madness: ‘bonkers’, ‘bananas’, ‘one sandwich short of a picnic’. Such phrases sound rather old-fashioned these days alongside the trend for more serious jargon inherited from America: ‘bipolar’, ‘therapy’, ‘post-traumatic stress’. Tracing a dateline for the demise of one lingo and the rise of the other reveals the genesis of a more sombre and sympathetic society. For better or worse? That is surely not for the amateur lexicographer to say. Delving into the history of comical phrases, such as ‘spend a penny’ or ‘kick the bucket’, we can think about when and why the concept of euphemism took hold. Or rather, when and why it changed; the ancient Greeks used euphemismos to avoid ill omens. We do it to be socially ‘nice’. Were we never able to discuss sex, death and bodily functions frankly? Or was there a particular moment in our history when, like Adam and Eve after eating the apple, we suddenly felt ashamed and started draping everything in fig leaves? If we can discover the exact dates when these fig-leaf phrases were born, we will know more about the history of human behaviour.
If you ask me, the most delightful words from our Wordhunt are those that are (unfortunately) put-downs: ‘wally’, ‘pillock’, ‘plonker’ and ‘prat’. Looking at them all together, enjoying their humorous sound, inspires one to wonder why there is so much more linguistic pleasure to be had from insulting people than praising them. It isn’t just TV and restaurant critics who find this to be true; it’s everybody. Are we all awful? (At least it was the Germans, and not we, who coined a special word for ‘malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others’ – schadenfreude.)
And there may be no better way to demonstrate how wordhunting unlocks our cultural history than by tracing the language of sexuality. The OED currently traces the word ‘kinky’ (in the sense of adventurous sexual practices) back to 1959. If that was indeed the year that experimental sex reached the conversational mainstream, thus requiring its own adjective, then we can almost hear the liberation of the 1960s banging at the door. But if our wordhunters can help us to push it back earlier, that will force us to look again at the 1950s, or even the 1940s. It would mean that, in those supposedly grey decades, people didn’t talk exclusively of rationing and the weather.
When did the dark, technical term ‘sadomasochism’ become the everyday shorthand ‘S&M’? If you think about it, there must have been a moment when people started talking about this tendency so often that they needed to say it more quickly. The linguistic change signifies a notable shift in moral outlook and social conversation. The date of that shift can tell us a lot about our parents – or grandparents.
I’ll be honest: I am hoping not to spend too much time thinking about the possibility of my grandparents’ dark sexuality. Nevertheless, I am excited about unlocking the secrets of our language to find out more about the people we are, and the people we have historically been.
Human beings have their limits. We can’t soar gracefully through the air like an eagle, nor can we swim unaided to the ocean floor like a sea-lion and stay there for hours without surfacing. Our night vision is hopeless compared to that of an owl. Most of us can’t run as fast as an over-excited spaniel, let alone a cheetah, and we can’t change colour according to our environment. Our skin blisters in the sun, we get frostbite if we’re too high up a mountain, and our young are helpless if left to fend for themselves during their first ten years or so.
So far, then, the prospects for the human race are not bright, so what exactly are we good at? Well, we can talk. And we can write and read. We may not be able to talk to the animals, but we can talk about them, and we can talk to each other; and our capacity for self-awareness, for encoding and decoding complex messages, our love of playing games and debunking each other marks us out as distinctive. Of course, some of us are better than others at speaking our own language, but not being a fluent speaker is no obstacle to holding high office (just ask the current occupant of the White House). So it isn’t purely the quality of our speech that counts. In different ways we all have the capacity for writing, and it is that capacity that separates us from the other species with which we share the planet.
There is, inevitably, a bit of a battle to be named the world’s earliest writing centre. We know that the Sumerians of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq – were keeping records of goods and services as long ago as 3400–3300 BC. In Abydos, 400km (250 miles) south of Cairo, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics at the tomb of King Scorpion recording linen and oil deliveries have been dated to between 3300 and 3200 BC. Then, in May 1999, it was disclosed that archaeologists at a site called Harappa in Pakistan had found deliberately-incised marks on pottery which could date back to 3500 BC. The first forms of writing, at any rate, emerged over 5000 years ago. It wasn’t pure literature, then, and it took some time before language evolved to achieve the subtlety of Homer’s Iliad (and then 2750 years later, Nuts magazine) but it all proves that our ancestors were adept at communicating with their fellow beings.
The hunger for language is rooted in our culture. The inarticulate speech of small children is known as babble, a word that, if not purely imitative of the way babies speak, may be related to the biblical tower of Babel. In that famous story from Genesis, the peoples of the world came together to build a tower so that we could have a squint inside God’s living-room, and God – in a striking blow for the right to privacy, which nearly all subsequent celebrities would gladly endorse – knocked the whole project on the head, not with the soon-to-be conventional weaponry of thunder, lightning, disease or slaughter, but with a much wilier ruse. He cast them down with language: one morning, they all woke up unable to understand what each other was saying. End of tower.
The Babel story is one way the ancient world explained the incredible variety of tongues, but these days, our towers reach not up to the sky, but horizontally, across different communities. As long as we’re not trying to puncture the heavens, language can be a formidable means of generating consent. Consequently, words themselves have taken on a variety of different meanings over the years.
Meaningful noises
Words are our most valuable currency, and over the years they have taken on a host of different meanings. Anyone skilled with words is known as a wordsmith, a sense borrowed from the days of blacksmiths, forges and anvils, as they hammer new words out of flexible letters. We give our word of honour, or we say that someone is as good as their word. In the City of London, the Stock Exchange has operated since its founding in 1801 on the principle of My word is my bond, a motto which – Latinized into Dictum Meum Pactum – was incorporated into its coat of arms in 1923. Two simple words, ‘I do’, can commit two people to each other for life when uttered as part of a marriage service. But words can also fail us, and we can be lost for them. They can be honeyed or twisted. They can send us to war, or move us to tears.
Words have power. Prayers are recited every day for the living and the dead, for the rulers and the weak. As religion evolved, some faiths created names for their God so sacrosanct that they cannot even be spoken: so now the fear is not of a physical tower ascending to heaven, but of a simple word on the lips of a mortal scraping the heavenly underbelly by its mere utterance. Words have political significance. To talk of Madras or Calcutta these days is to betray that you are locked in a Raj-like time warp: in modern India you must talk of Chennai and Kolkata. Salisbury used to be the capital of Rhodesia; now Harare is the capital of Zimbabwe. You can say cant and wink on the radio or TV in Britain at any time of the day, but if you change one letter in either of those words, the broadcaster’s switchboard will light up with complaints and hundreds of angry letter-writers will reach for their pens or keyboards. Being stuck for words is a dilemma. Verbal diarrhoea, on the other hand, is a condition that the hearer is usually able to diagnose a lot faster than the speaker. But, then, isn’t the gift of the gab said to be a blessing? The power of words is indisputable. In the beginning, after all, was the word. And it will probably be there at the end, too.
Starting at the beginning
This book is about words and where they come from. It’s not a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, a manual or a textbook. Nor is it about grammar, punctuation or style, though all those elements come into the story at various points. It is an unashamedly personal selection of words which have undergone interesting and unexpected journeys on the way from what they originally meant to what they mean today. It is not intended as an academic study, and it steers well clear of scholarly dialect or specialist language, though we have taken pains to ensure that our definitions and etymological1 explanations are correct. It is, rather, a bit like a chat show in which the guests are not people with products to plug – that really would be shameless – but words with interesting stories to tell. The only make-up we have resorted to is an element of bold type so that it’s easy for you, the reader, to identify the notable word or phrase. And the only time we shall allow ourselves to pause for a glass of water is at the end of the book when, out of sheer goodwill, we shall add a list of further suggestions, to help you to take your investigation of the subject a stage further.
But don’t feel you have to. After all, any fluent English speaker has thousands of words at their fingertips – or, rather, on their tongue. Among friends, colleagues or family, most of us are capable of astonishing fluency. We can talk – frequently for hours – without having to consult a dictionary, thesaurus, vocabulary book or grammar primer. William Shakespeare is said to have had a working vocabulary of between 17,000 and 20,000 words. The linguistics expert David Crystal estimates that most modern professional people have a vocabulary of around 50,000 words. So we’re all experts, and we are all authorities, though few of us will write plays as good as Shakespeare’s. Some of us might make the odd boob on paper, or when typing, but essentially we have an entire dictionary in our heads.
For most British people, English is their mother tongue. But even further afield, English is an amazingly successful language. It is spoken and taught the world over, frequently by people who have never even been to Britain. English is the most popular second language in the world, which goes some way towards explaining why most British people have such an appalling record when it comes to speaking other people’s languages. Across the world, English is the language that most people want to learn. There are more Chinese speakers than the approximately 375 million people who use English as their mother tongue, but most of them are in China. English is the most widely spoken language in the world today, used regularly by over 700 million people in over 100 countries. A recent survey found that more than four-fifths of all international organizations use English as either their main, or one of their main, operating languages, and that more than 80 per cent of all internet home pages are written in English.
Unpacking the language
The power of words derives from their extraordinary economy. Here is a three-word sentence, just about the simplest unit of sense that you can get: ‘Petrol prices soar’. A mere three words, yet each word comes pre-bundled with an entire world of implied meanings. The words conjure up an image of a fully operational world behind those sixteen letters: we may think of petrol stations and long queues, or oil tankers on the oceans. It doesn’t matter what we think of: words draw pictures in our heads. And we can do our own predictive texting too. If we had to choose a word to come after ‘petrol’, many of us (based on our past experience) would probably choose ‘prices’. And, to complete the sentence, many of us would be more likely to choose soar than ‘plummet’. Words relate very directly to the associations that we have already made with them in the past. We also have a sense of familiarity with certain word groups, which is why more of us – at least in Britain – would choose ‘soar’ than, say, escalate. We all have a mental thesaurus, and we are combing through it all the time, making choices in search of the best word to communicate meaning.
Learning such associations is a natural process for children, but acquiring them in a new language at a later age can be difficult. Nonetheless, more people are studying English than ever before. The British Council estimates that English has official or special status in at least seventy-five countries, with a total population of over two billion. The appetite for English is growing fast because it is still the language of business, technology, finance, medicine, travel, scholarship and, to a lesser extent, the media. There are various reasons for this, and they don’t all relate to Britain’s imperial past or to America’s cultural and economic dominance. English is a hard language to master, but an easy language to pick up in some basic sense. Grammatically, it doesn’t have complicated final forms or rules about agreement based on declensions and conjugations. Learning English is a national obsession in some countries, such as Japan. Across Europe, most schools teach English as a compulsory subject, but the evidence suggests that most pupils need little encouragement to learn the language of J-Lo, Eminem, Craig David and Brad Pitt.
Fashion aside, the English language is a fascinating subject even for native speakers, and relevant to us all in our daily lives. Take the word run, for example. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) entries for both noun and verb forms stretch to over 55,000 words, or sixty-one pages – the length of a short novel. Hardly surprising, though, when you think of the number of possible meanings. A sprinter runs, and so does a wet nose. An escaped prisoner is on the run, but a play can run to three and a half hours. A cricketer makes runs, but can be run out. An invalid looks run down, perhaps from an attack of the runs, while a new car needs running in. Commodity speculators might trigger a run on oil, which leads to us running up quite a bill at the petrol station. Are you being evasive? You’re giving someone the run-around. Didn’t hear what was said? Run it by me one more time.
Precision matters
Choosing the right word can make all the difference between making sense and causing offence – or worse. There is a marked difference between bumping into an old friend, and bumping off an old friend (or enemy), and it is one that just about all native speakers of English appreciate. Learners, no matter how adept, have to acquire this skill, and it can take time. A German friend recalls asking a well-known British actor what he thought of the charitable event that they were both attending. Unfortunately, though, instead of asking him, ‘What do you make of events like these?’ she asked, ‘What do you make out of events like these?’ and was surprised when he gave her a very moody stare.
We all know the advice given to a journalist that ‘Dog Bites Man’ is no story. ‘Man Bites Dog’ is news. In English, word order is vital to making sense. Imagine if you saw a newspaper headline that read: ‘Pet Shops Run Out of Hamsters.’ It wouldn’t raise many eyebrows. We might pause to wonder what caused this sudden dearth of pouched rodents. Possibly a flurry of school projects or an unguarded comment by a teen idol who happens to like them. It’s not a major event, at any rate. But change the word order, and the story becomes much more dramatic: ‘Hamsters Run Out of Pet Shops.’ Now that’s news!
You can have great fun looking up words in a big dictionary. English has hundreds of colourfully disparaging terms, so let’s look at two words in the title of this book: balderdash and piffle. Neither is particularly common these days, and in essence they mean the same thing: ‘twaddle’. But what history lurks behind these words?
First we’ll look at the OED entries for them, which show in miniature the skill of the lexicographer,2 the technical term for someone who writes or compiles dictionaries.
balderdash, n.
†1.? Froth or frothy liquid. Obs.
1596: NASHE Saffron Walden To Rdr. 11 Two blunderkins, hauing their braines stuft with nought but balder-dash. 1599: –Lent. Stuffe 8 They would no more … have their heads washed with his bubbly spume or barbers balderdash.
The entry tells us first that the word ‘balderdash’ is a noun. The † means that the definition is obsolete (no longer used in that sense). This is reinforced by the question mark, indicating that the editors were not sure of the meaning from the available evidence, and the abbreviation ‘Obs’. The earliest definition, therefore, however uncertain, is of a ‘Froth or frothy liquid’.
Next comes the evidence from the printed page. The earliest quotation found to back up the definition is from 1596. The author is named as NASHE, and in the OED’s online version, an onscreen hyperlink takes us to the OED’s Bibliography, which tells us the author’s full name, Thomas Nashe, and gives a short list of his works – 15 in all – including the one cited above, Have with you to Saffron-walden. ‘To Rdr’ means ‘to reader’, so this quotation can be found in the part of the book entitled ‘To The Reader.’
Thomas Nashe was born in 1567 and died in 1601. Clearly the word had not yet taken on its modern meaning. The second quotation is from the same author (indicated by the long dash): Nashes Lenten Stuffe from 1599. He obviously liked the word ‘balderdash’ a good deal: we are left wondering what barbers did with it. Was it drinkable, or somewhat like a shampoo or rub?
Those who are, by now, intrigued by Thomas Nashe and can get to their local library might be interested to see more of his contribution to the English language. Using the online OED’s Simple Search button, we can draw down a list of the English words for which Nashe is named as the ‘first cited author’. It comes to a very impressive 705. Although not much known these days, Nashe was obviously a master of offensive words: dish-wash was used first by him, in its literal sense and as a term of abuse. Other Nashe words include conundrum, helter-skelter, grandiloquent, harlequin, impecunious, silver-tongued and – you saw it here first – dildo.
To be a first quoted author in the OED is a considerable feather in any writer’s cap, and Nashe’s score puts him in elevated company. Geoffrey Chaucer has 2018 entries to his name, William Shakespeare has over 1700, Jane Austen has exactly sixty and Charles Dickens has 262.
The second definition of ‘balderdash’ looks like this:
†2. A jumbled mixture of liquors, e.g. of milk and beer, beer and wine, brandy and mineral waters. Obs.
1611: CHAPMAN May-day III. Dram. Wks. 1873: II. 374 S’fut winesucker, what have you fild vs heere? baldre~dash? 1629: B. JONSON New Inn I. ii, Beer or butter-milk, mingled together … It is against my free-hold … To drink such balder-dash. 1637: J. TAYLOR (Water P.) Drink & Welc. (Worc.), Beer, by a mixture of wine hath lost both name and nature, and is called balderdash. 1693:W. ROBERTSON Phraseol. Gen. 198 Balderdash; of drink; Mixta Potio. b. attrib. 1641: HEYWOOD Reader, here you’ll, etc. 6 Where sope hath fayl’d without, Balderdash wines within will worke no doubt. 1680: Revenge v. 68 Ballderdash Wine.
Here we meet such writers as George Chapman, Ben Jonson, Jeremy Taylor and William Robertson. We see the variety of ways in which the word was spelt, as well as archaic spellings of other words, such as ‘filled’, ‘us’ and ‘here’. And we can also see that the word now applies to something drinkable, probably cheap grog, the sixteenth-century equivalent of Tennents Extra or McEwans.
In the next two definitions, the word has set out on what we will soon recognize as a familiar journey from a physical object to something more abstract or figurative.
3. transf. A senseless jumble of words; nonsense, trash, spoken or written.
1674: MARVELL Reh. Transp. II. 243 Did ever Divine rattle out such prophane Balderdash! 1721: AMHERST Terrœ Fil. 257 Trap’s second-brew’d balderdash runs thus: Pyrrhus tells you, etc. 1812: Edin. Rev. XX. 419 The balderdash which men must talk at popular meetings. 1849: MACAULAY Hist. Eng. I. 351, I am almost ashamed to quote such nauseous balderdash. 1854: THACKERAY Newcomes I. 10 To defile the ears of young boys with this wicked balderdash. 1865: CARLYLE Fredk. Gt.II. VII. v. 287 No end of florid inflated tautologic ornamental balderdash.
There, within that short paragraph, are some of our finest writers: Andrew Marvell, Thomas Babington Macaulay, William Thackeray and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the lesser-known Nicholas Amherst, all brought together for a purpose that they could never have anticipated: to attest to the same sense of ‘balderdash’ as the one in which the Edinburgh Review uses it.
And in its final definition, ‘balderdash’ comes to mean:
4. dial. Filthy, obscene language or writing.
Without any further examples, the OED follows this with a longish discussion of the etymological origins (historical formation and development) of ‘balderdash’. It suggests that although the first two definitions mean ‘frothy talk’ or ‘a senseless farrago’ or ‘jumble of words’, the majority of etymologists have taken the third meaning as the original. From this point, they have sought to locate its roots in languages beyond these shores. They find the English dialect word ‘balde’, meaning ‘to use coarse language’, but they want more, so continental Europe is scoured for a time when the language mulch was in a more formative state. The linguists peer into our muddy shared linguistic past. They see the Dutch word balderen, meaning ‘to roar, thunder’. Cousin or coincidence? Next they see the Norwegian baldra and Icelandic baldrast or ballrast, which mean ‘to make a clatter’. Possibly. Back to the UK, perhaps, where they note the Welsh word baldordd, meaning ‘idle noisy talk, chatter’. That explains the ‘dash’ part of the word too, though another linguist conjectured a reference to ‘the froth and foam made by barbers in dashing their balls backward and forward in hot water’. Quite what the barbers were trying to achieve by doing this with their balls, or indeed which balls they were doing it with, remains a mystery. Whatever it was, though, the practice has, mercifully, fallen out of favour amongst contemporary barbers.
Meanwhile, here is the great American writer H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) scornfully dismissing the prose style of US president Warren G. Harding (in office 1921–3):
He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
How about the other word from our title? The OED entry for ‘piffle’ takes us straight to the verb form, as follows:
piffle, v. dial. and slang
intr. To talk or act in a feeble, trifling, or ineffective way.
1847–78: HALLIWELL, Pifle, to be squeamish or delicate. 1896 : KIPLING Seven Seas, Mary Gloster (1897) 146 They piddled and piffled with iron; I’d given my orders for steel! 1897: Sunday Times 2 Jan. 6/7 Their defence is sound, and their attack altogether good, save a tendency to ‘piffle’ in front of goal at times.
That’s more straightforward. Dialect, slang, an intransitive verb (one having no object, such as ‘to stand’, as opposed to a transitive verb, such as ‘to push’, which needs to push something). We note with interest some lines from Rudyard Kipling. It’s also relevant that the popular press, here in the shape of the Sunday Times, has a crucial role to play in the citing of sources. Who, though, is Halliwell? James Orchard Halliwell (1820–89) was a much-admired Shakespearean scholar, who went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, aged seventeen. Widely regarded as a genius, his fame so preceded him that he was granted access to Trinity’s unique collection of priceless manuscripts. Some months after his admission, the college discovered that over a dozen of them had gone missing. The culprit was Halliwell, and his punishment earned him a spell not in Dartmoor High Security Prison but – possibly worse – Jesus College, Cambridge, where he remained a great scholar and married the daughter of the eccentric book hoarder Sir Thomas Phillipps. Here, then, within the skein of a simple word, a thumbnail sketch of an entire family history emerges. Phillipps described his own appetite for manuscripts (written on vellum3) as that of ‘a perfect vello-maniac’, so the two men were obviously well matched, even if Sir Thomas may have had to check his son-in-law’s pockets before he let him leave.
The entry continues:
Hence piffle n., foolish or formal nonsense; twaddle; trash; also used as a derisive retort; piffler, a trifler, a twaddler; piffling vbl. n. and ppl. a.
1890: Sat. Rev. 1 Feb. 152/2 If there is … a certain amount of the ‘piffle’ (to use a University phrase) thought to be incumbent on earnest young princes in our century, there is a complete absence of insincerity. 1900: O. ONIONS Compl. Bachelor ii. 18 He’d talk a lot of piffle, wouldn’t
he? 1914: ‘HIGH JINKS, JR.’ Choice Slang 16 Oh piffle, an exclamation denoting inconsequence of the subject in question. 1920: ‘B.L. STANDISH’
Man on First xviii. 127 ‘The Hawks have the lead on us, still.’ ‘Piffle!’ said Cady. ‘We’ll even things up to-morrow.’ 1959: ELIZABETHAN Apr. 10/1 I gave you a bar of chocolate on the train from London. So piffle! 1892: Star 14 July 1 The nervousness of the other juvenile and titled piffler. 1896: Westm. Gaz. 4 Dec. 2/1 Lord; but this chap is dull… Dull! He’s a perfect piffler. 1864: MRS. E. LYNN LINTON Lake Country 309 Pyklin an’ pyflin, thoo gits nowt doon. 1894: Westm. Gaz. 21 May 2/3 He seems … to have convinced himself that he is an old man, and settled down to a piffling eld. 1916: ‘BOYD CABLE’ Action Front 17 You don’t think a pifflin’ little Pip-Squeak shell could go through his head? 1927: Daily Express 26 July 3/4 The Bench consider that this is a piffling offence, and … that a warning would have been sufficient. 1927: Observer 13 Nov. 10/4 The mechanical parts of the moving-pictures are superb, but the imaginative and intellectual parts are piffling. 1963: Times 12 June 8/7 The sum involved was piffling compared with the firm’s £25m. a year turnover. 1973: J. WAINWRIGHT Pride of Pigs 56 The lesser hooks being pulled in for the piffling crimes, while the big boys work the blinders.
Here is a veritable treasure trove of quotations, all shrouded in the mysterious and sometimes exotic wrapping paper of history. We find university usages, exclamations, the word standing on its own or joined to others. We see a dialect spelling, sporting journals, financial news, war titles, obscure diaries, political journals and film reviews: a body of evidence spanning a period of 83 years.
About this book
The appeal of words is that most of them have been around for a great many years, and, like any sprightly senior citizen, have travelled a bit, seen a lot and have some good stories to tell. As soon as you start looking at words, you find that they have a tendency to veer off in the most curious directions. In fact, this book could equally have been called Make & Do or Tea & Biscuits or Rhubarb & Custard. They all bring their own histories with them, and all are worth the chase. It is about our fascination with language, especially with the English language. It aims to show how English has consistently refashioned itself, or been refashioned, throughout its long history. At every stage of its development, though, the questions we really want to ask are: how does English reflect the period in which it was used, and which words from that time do we still use?
The chapters of this book are arranged by themes. In part one, we deal with the origins of the English language and the varied influences that have shaped our vocabulary over time. Whenever you look out of a window, you are looking straight through a word with Viking roots, and one that represents a victory over two other contenders for the same title. Originally, or at least from 890 (the time of King Alfred, and we have the documents to prove it) to about 1225, we used to look through eyethurls. This word was comprehensively trounced by the Middle English fenester (not a million miles from the French fenêtre, which shows how close the two languages once were), which made its pitch between at least 1290 and 1548. In 1225, the same year of the eyethurl’s last recorded appearance, the word window made its first appearance: as perfect an act of baton-passing as a 4 x 100-metre relay team. It originated from the Old Norse vindauga, which in turn came from vindr (wind) and auga (eye), which was clearly what you would have experienced had you stuck your head out of a window before supplies of glass were readily available in the thirteenth century.
Within the linguistic churn that this book covers – from Anglo-Saxon to Estuary English – we look at the epic poem Beowulf, which is still scaring the faint-hearted over a thousand years after it was written. We find out a little about Celtic place names, and how important it was to have the right ending, such as -dunum, and Saxon endings such as -ham and -stead. And we also meet some Norman barons who brought French across the Channel, and the scholars who reintroduced Latin to Britain.
We look at some of the early attempts to standardize the English language, such as Dr Johnson’s Dictionary. When Johnson turned his London garret into the production office for a book that would ‘fix the English language’, he little knew that it would take him and his small team eight years. But the work they eventually produced – late, over-budget, packed with idiosyncrasies and as lively and provocative as the man himself – was one of the greatest cultural works of the eighteenth century. Following on from this, we look at the extraordinary labour that went into the compilation of the OED, a project begun just over a hundred years after Johnson’s publication and that took seventy years to complete. We look at the pioneering work of Frederick Furnivall and Sir James Murray on the OED in the mid-nineteenth century and at the present-day OED Online, available since 2000.
The Bible – the book that Christians and atheists alike constantly quote, although they may not know they’re doing so. No matter how staunchly secular they are, many people pepper their speech with biblical expressions, ‘such as ‘out of the mouths of babes’’, which comes from the book of Psalms. If they talk of sticking to the straight and narrow or see something as a sign of the times, they are quoting the book of Matthew. If they try to be all things to all men or suffer fools gladly, they are quoting Corinthians, and if they fight the good fight or scorn filthy lucre, they are borrowing from the book of Timothy.
Similarly, the words of Shakespeare live on in daily speech, from what the dickens (The Merry Wives of Windsor) to a foregone conclusion (Othello). The expression all Greek to me is borrowed from Julius Caesar, and playing fast and loose comes from Antony and Cleopatra. And so it goes on: cold comfort is from King John, making a virtue of necessity is from Pericles, and the first recorded use of the word obscene is in Richard III. Without Shakespeare, would we be using words such as accommodation, assassination, barefaced, countless, courtship, dwindle, eventful, fancy-free, lacklustre, laughable, premeditated and submerge? Perhaps not, as Shakespeare popularized them, if not invented them.
Words can mean the same or something quite different, depending on where your feet are planted on these islands. We chart the journey that English took within the British Isles, and the endless varieties of English within Britain. In the past, varieties of dialect speech may have been exploited for comic purpose, and it may even have been thought that standard English would one day supplant the huge wealth of accents and dialects that have given English its colour and character. Fortunately, we have moved away from such ideas, and every variation in speech is now welcomed as part of the family. Whether we wear trousers and trainers, or kecks and pumps, whether you say ‘Do you know?’ or ‘D’ye ken?’, we now recognize that the heart of a language is nourished by its extremities.
All communities feed the body, in the broadest sense of the word. Words that were coined by the Black Community form a discrete language, but many of its distinctive words – from irie to massive, from skanking to spliff – which were coined behind a wall of racial separation, have leaked out and entered the mainstream. Black English, with its roots in creolized forms of English from the days of slavery, has always had a two-way relationship with the mainstream English language. So whereas a word such as mambo comes from Cuban Spanish and then Haitian Creole, words from other gated communities – be they children, women, gays – are entering the English language at an unprecedented rate. Such communities are gated because access to them is not guaranteed, but the gate can be opened at will, and that’s when words – whether invented or with a meaning specific to that community – slip out.
When British explorers travelled the world, they brought back far more than commodities and strange animals. New terms came too, including the Arabic words cotton, marzipan and sherbet. From Calcutta in India came calico, while gauze came from Gaza, ombudsman from Sweden, molasses from Portugal, tycoon from Japan and hoard from Turkey. These words and many others have given English its fascinating variety.
Just as secular people use the Bible, so non-sportsmen and women use the language of sport. Some sports are ancient, but their language remains young. For example, if you’ve ever been hoodwinked, you may not have known that you are using a falconry term that is at least 200 years old. It derives from the practice of covering a falcon’s face with a hood so as to remove the prey from its talons. Similarly, the word boozing is related to the Middle English word bowse, the term used to describe the drinking action of a bird of prey.
We use sporting language all the time, even when we’re sitting down. If you’ve ever crossed a line, hit the ground running, hit a bullseye or fallen short of your mark, you are employing a phrase that was created in a very different context. If you’ve ever been the butt of someone’s joke, that’s an archery term. The old sports have the deepest roots. Don’t confuse today’s quarrel with the one from 1350, which meant ‘a short, heavy, square-headed arrow or bolt, formerly used in shooting with the cross-bow or arbalest’. And if you’ve ever been told to brace yourself, bracing is what used to be done to a bow to make it strong enough to take the arrow.
Popular entertainment is responsible for producing a long list of words in common currency. The 64-thousand dollar question was originally a catchphrase from American television. A boxing manager called Joe Jacobs was the first to utter the immortal words ‘we was robbed’ when his boxer Max Schmeling lost on points to Jack Sharkey in 1932. If you say pass when you don’t know the answer to something, you are using a word which came into prominence on the British quiz show Mastermind.
Of course, if it hadn’t been for science and technology, we wouldn’t have had telly in the first place. We have drawn thousands of words from science, and many are still in daily use. Anyone who says they went ballistic is using an eighteenth-century term that reflects that age’s fascination with projectile science.
When something passes the litmus test, or reaches a critical mass, even when we get to boiling point, we are drawing on scientific vocabulary. And if you park your tanks on someone’s lawn, or bring up the rear, or feel outflanked or ambushed, you’re conscripting military language for non-military purposes. As we shall see, this happens more than we might have expected.
As we scan the wilder shores of language, we must look at the furthest coast of all: taboo words, swear words, obscene and profane language, and words that are designed to hurt. Words uttered in anger or passion: the mysterious origins of the word fuck and its ruder medieval equivalent of swive. Why, when Mrs Patrick Campbell said the word bloody during the first night of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion on 11 April 1914, the event was marked with sensational newspaper headlines. The history of swearing and of blue language occupies a distinguished place in word history.
A more shameful place is rightly given to racist and derogatory language. Some of these pejorative terms have now been appropriated by the intended targets. Queer, dyke and nigger are obvious examples; ‘damn kids’ has not undergone the same transition.
Whizz, bang! Ouch! Er… we regress to the most basic language of all – words that are almost non-words, but that are nonetheless a vital part of our vocabulary. When we say things go pop and splash, we are using onomatopoeia, an elaborate word for describing the most basic of sounds – the sounds of the world around us. From the external to the internal, we come to the sounds we make. We all know how it feels to stub a toe, but when did that inchoate shriek of pain crystallize around the four-letter word ouch? And then there are other words, all sharply expressive in their way but with more coherent and complex meanings.
The French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) said that ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ That may also be true of nonsense words. Once they have been created, they are so evocative that it’s hard to imagine a world without them. Oscar Wilde demonstrated this when he borrowed Lord Bunbury’s name and turned it into an excuse for not doing things. From the pages of the Beano to The Lord of the Rings, we take a look at made-up language that with time and use has become ‘real’.
Words of the month, the week, the day, the year, ‘it’ words, jargon, lingo, slang, the word on the street, in the club, on the net – some have stuck with us, others we have shrugged off as trends move on. Looking at each decade from the early twentieth century to the present, it may come as a surprise to learn just how old some slang words are. We may not often say something we like is ‘the bee’s knees’ these days, but wicked is common currency. Yet both entered the language in the 1920s. You may wish to know the words that were judged our favourites in 1980, and how the rather harsher realities of life in modern Britain caught up with a similar survey twenty years later. This is the history of the way we speak – pins on the map for future linguists to follow.
And that leads us to those historical black holes of the dictionary: those mysterious words marked ‘origin unknown’ or ‘etymology obscure’. The public is invited to get digging, and to share its findings with the editors of the OED in a search for the earliest verifiable usage of words in the English language.