When you come to the end of your stint on this planet, how do you know whether your life has amounted to anything? That thing called ‘legacy’ is so tenuous. Who decides your legacy anyway? For most of us, our children and grandchildren are the custodians of our legacy. At centenary celebrations and memorial services, they will recount our life and achievements in technicolour—how we always lived life to the full, how we liberally lent to the poor or how we had a great sense of humour (We probably didn’t. People almost always exaggerate their ancestors’ achievements.) But by the time we reach the fourth or fifth generation, the technicolour starts fading. How many of us know our great-great grandfather’s name, let alone sense of humour?
But this is not the case for some very lucky people, who have everything from roads to rodents named after them. There are asteroids named after astrophysicists and birds and beetles named after celebrities. Long after Beyonce’s time, the horse flies named after her will live on, carrying forward her legacy.
But Sumanto Chattopadhyay, creator of The English Nut, an award-winning social media channel, is not interested in celebrity beetles. He is interested in words. Most people are addicted to something in life—travel, alcohol, fitness or adventure. There are few, however, who get their kick from etymology and grammar. For Chattopadhyay, vocabulary is his vodka. That’s why he’s written a book on the origin of words and phrases.
For English nuts like him, the book is delightful. What takes one by surprise, however, is how many ancient warriors and medieval knights have lent their names to words we use every day. It is amusing to imagine that, every time one connects one’s mobile with the wireless technology we call bluetooth, the Danish king Harald Bluetooth Gormsson, who united Denmark and Norway in the tenth century, must be smiling from heaven and thanking his dentist for not removing his blue-grey dead tooth. After all, in this dental oversight would lie his legacy.
Excerpts from Stories of Words and Phrases: Discovering the Fascinating Stories Behind Everyday Expressions:
BOYCOTT
It was 1880. After a year of bad harvests, Lord Erne, an absentee landlord, decided to be ‘generous’ and offer his tenants a 10 per cent discount on their rent. The tenants asked for a bigger reduction to help them make ends meet, but the ruthless landlord decided to evict these tenants rather than accept their demand. And for this job he sent his land agent, Captain Charles Boycott.
Aha! So is that where the word came from? Yes! Here is the rest of the story: shortly before this incident, Charles Stewart Parnell, leader of the Irish National Land League, gave a speech encouraging the social ostracism of new tenants who took the places of evicted tenants. Now Captain Boycott had to find other tenants or seasonal workers to harvest the crops. But it was understood by the locals that those who took the place of the evicted tenants would be socially shunned. So, nobody came forward. Finally, Boycott had to bring in 50 men from other areas to harvest the crop. He arranged for a regiment of the 19th Royal Hussars and more than 1,000 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary to protect the harvesters, because it was beyond Boycott’s understanding that this was a non-violent protest. The exercise ended up costing the British government more than £10,000 to harvest crops worth just about £500.
Boycott himself was socially isolated not only by his employees but also by others in the community. His household help abandoned him. Local businessmen stopped trading with him. Shops refused to serve him. Even the postman stopped delivering his mail.
Boycott rapidly became a household name as first the British and then the international press picked up the story. James Redpath of the New-York Tribune was the first overseas reporter to write about the boycott. The first documented usage of the word in its figurative sense is found in the 22 January 1881 edition of The Spectator: ‘Dame Nature arose.... She “Boycotted” London from Kew to Mile End.’
BLUETOOTH
‘Bluetooth’—we all sort of know what it means. It’s the wireless technology that connects mobile phones with computers and other electronic devices. But why is it called Bluetooth? Does it have something to do with a rotten old tooth that’s turned blue?
Apparently, it does. In fact, the original Bluetooth is more than a thousand years old! The Danish king Harald ‘Bluetooth’ Gormsson was famous for two things. One, he united Demark and Norway in the tenth century. And two, he had a dead tooth with a grey-blue colour that earned him the nickname Bluetooth.
In the 1990s, when companies like Intel, Ericsson and Nokia met to standardise the technology, Jim Kardash of Intel suggested the codename Bluetooth because it was a technology that was going to unite the PC and cellular industries, the way the original ‘Bluetooth’ had united Scandinavia. The codename was to be replaced at the time of launch with a snazzier name by the marketing people in these multinationals. PAN (Personal Area Networking) and RadioWire were the two front runners, but by the date of the launch of the technology, neither name had been cleared by ‘legal’. Hence, Bluetooth remained the only viable option. The Bluetooth logo is a combination of the letters ‘H’ and ‘B’, the initials of Harald Bluetooth, written in runes, the ancient letters used by the Vikings, the Scandinavian seafaring pirates and traders.
As it turned out, the name Bluetooth became an overnight sensation and has remained unchanged since the time it was first launched in 1999.
TEDDY BEAR
He is the youngest man ever to become the president of the United States of America. His face is carved on Mount Rushmore. As historical and contemporary records show, he is one of the most popular American presidents, beloved to people the world over.
Yet, arguably, rather than with his robust foreign policy, the great man’s name is more commonly associated with stuffed, cuddly toy bears.
I refer to Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth US president, who assumed office at the age of 42 in 1901 and served till 1909. Soon after he became president, Roosevelt was invited to a bear hunt in Mississippi by Governor Andrew H. Longino. Most of the other hunters on the trip had killed bears already, so Roosevelt’s attendants decided to help the president bag one too. They caught, injured and tied an American black bear to a tree and suggested that Roosevelt shoot it. The former president found this unsportsmanlike and declined.
This story spread like wildfire and, on 16 November 1902, it became the subject of a political cartoon in The Washington Post. Drawn by Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist Clifford Berryman, it depicted a bear lassoed by a handler as the president looked on in disgust. While this original cartoon featured an adult black bear, in later drawings it was replaced with a younger, cuter bear.
Brooklyn candy-shop owner Morris Michtom and his wife Rose also made stuffed toys. They were inspired by the cartoon to create a stuffed toy bear cub. Michtom put it in his shop window with the sign ‘Teddy’s Bear’—‘Teddy’ being the traditional American nickname for ‘Theodore’. The bear was a hit with the public and there was demand for many more. Taking the president’s permission to use his name, Michtom decided to mass produce the toy bears. He soon founded the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co.—which became the largest doll-making company in America.
Apart from fuelling a boom in stuffed toys, Teddy’s bears helped change the image of wild animals in the public imagination. They were no longer dangerous and fearsome beasts, but creatures that should be protected and perhaps even cuddled, thus contributing to wildlife conservation consciousness in America.
Teddy’s bears, which soon came to be known simply as ‘teddy bears’, became a part of the cultural fabric.
SIDEBURN
He gave his name to a gun and a facial hairstyle—though in the latter case, it was back to front!
Ambrose Everett Burnside (1824–81) was a Rhode Island senator and a Union Army general in the American Civil War. By his own admission he was a poor military commander, associated with spectacular defeats in battle. Yet, President Lincoln not only kept him on in the army, but promoted him too.
Perhaps the president was influenced by Burnside’s likeable personality, the gun he invented, and his legendary side whiskers. The general is said to have always had a smile on his face and a knack for remembering people’s names. The gun he designed and patented—the Burnside carbine—was widely used in the Civil War. Which brings us to his third and, in terms of legacy, most enduring contribution: lending his name to a facial hairstyle.
Sideburns are the strips of hair that come down the sides of a man’s face, from the hairline just above the ears to the area just below the ears. When they extend further down towards the chin, they become classified as a beard. Burnside’s luxuriant sideburns were connected to his moustache. His chin was clean-shaven.
Before Burnside’s sideburns became famous, this section of facial hair was called side whiskers or sideboards. Or, if they were particularly thick, like the general’s, they were termed ‘mutton chops’—presumably because they resembled said cuts of meat. My sideburns are, of course, far less impressive!
The Evening Telegraph, May 1866, has the earliest mention in print of Burnside’s hairy legacy: the hairstyle was referred to in it as ‘Burnside whiskers’. In the 1870s and ’80s, people started calling these whiskers ‘burnsides’, but by 1887, the syllables were switched and burnside became sideburn, placing ‘side’ first, perhaps to emphasise the word’s association with the sides of the face.
Excerpted with permission from Rupa Publications India.
STORIES OF WORDS AND PHRASES
By Sumanto Chattopadhyay
Published by Rupa Publications
Price Rs395; pages 296