The Swinging Doors of Death

My big conclusion? People underplay the implications of suicide when they talk about suicide doors.

a regrettable visual aid — apologies

It’s the kind of immediately Google-able question you’d normally have while alone in the car, but fortunately it occurred to me while I had a navigator present, and so we searched out the origin of the phrase “suicide doors” in order to figure out what about these doors was so inherently self-life-ending.

According to Wikipedia, the term presumably originated as a result of two facts:

1. The danger of the suicide door is the possibility of it opening in transit. A car occupant trying to catch the door by the handle to prevent its opening risks being jettisoned out of the car as the door is slammed open by the oncoming airflow. … In the era before seat belts, the accidental opening of such doors meant that there was a greater risk of falling out of the vehicle compared to front-hinged doors, where airflow pushed the doors closed rather than opening them further.
2. Suicide doors were especially popular with mobsters in the gangster era of the 1930s, supposedly due to the ease of pushing passengers out of moving vehicles, according to Dave Brownell, the former editor of Hemmings Motor News.

This is great historical information, but it’s nonetheless problematic that neither of these car-caused death scenarios constitutes suicide in the typical sense. In the former, it’s more accidental self-killing, which might technically be considered suicide but which more broadly might be considered death as a result of the worst human carelessness. (Other examples: mixing ammonia and bleach and making that toxic gas, trying to hug a bear because it looks sad, or using a handgun to drive a bee away from your face.) In the latter, it’s explicitly homicide — people don’t generally choose to have gangsters plug them and then shove them out of moving cars, unless human motivations have evolved that much since the 1930s.

However, in the same way that the English-speaking world has slowly realized how awful it sounds to refer to sleeveless undershirts as “wife-beaters,” the automobile industry seems to have veered away from “suicide doors.” Wikipedia notes that suicide doors are now officially referred to by various auto makers as coach doors, FlexDoors, freestyle doors to simply rear-access doors, the last of these being the most descriptive but also the move provocative. It’s also noticed that in recent years, cars have been made with rear-hinged doors that can only be opened when the front doors are opened, to decrease the awful trend of passenger fall-out. It does make you wonder, however: What the hell was happening in early twentieth-century cars that doors were flying open and people were tumbling out? What advancements in door-shutting technology have slowed this trend?

There’s a second suicide-related phrase that motorists should know, and this one make s a lot more sense: suicide lanes. Here, the name makes sense, even if the lanes themselves exist in order to prevent you from offing yourself. If you meet another car head-on, that could be the end of your story. Personally, I’d prefer not to think about killing myself while driving, but cheers to keeping you alert.

In closing, I motion we drop the phrase “suicide doors” in favor of “danger doors” (which, accurate) or “gangster doors” (which, cool and exciting and also accurate) and also make a group effort to stop falling out of cars (which, obvious).

Be clean and nice. Take your parents’ advice.

Cars, previously:

• The Intelligent Whale
• Dodging the Dodge La Femme
• A weirdly specific word for a car with one headlight

A Vision of Howling Death to Kick Off Your Monday

Modified an image from the Wikipedia page on the Gardens of Bomarzo:

The unpleasant restaurant customer depicted is Ocrus, an early Roman death god, whose name shares an etymological history with ogre, orc and orca. That last one is especially interesting, considering the movement to use call these sea mammals orcas rather than killer whales. The former may sound less predatory, but on the etymological level, it's just as bad.

Roger (Jolly and Otherwise)

Apart from being a proper name, roger can mean other things, I have recently learned. You could use it to mean “to have sex with,” as in, “We rogered in the bathroom before the movie started,” which is a sentence that I feel someone has probably said sometime, perhaps in a think British accent. The etymology might have something to do with the fact that the name literally means “famous with a spear,” and all the subsequent issues of poking and penetrating, which is probably smart of someone to have thought of.

But I’m not actually talking about the sexual kind of rogering, but a stranger definition offered by Wikipedia: “In nineteenth-century England, Roger was slang for the cloud of toxic green gas that swept through the chlorine bleach factories periodically.” No explanation is offered, and the footnote only identifies the term as being used in the 1897 Robert Sherard book The White Slaves of England. Even if this could be one of those things that Wikipedia gets less than factually correct, can we just take a moment to reflect on a situation where human beings are so accustomed to poisonous gas clouds drifting through their workplaces that they have affectionate nicknames for them? I can picture them now, this roomful of factory workers in their sullied rag-clothes, looking up from the workstations they’re shackled to and in unison saying “Roger!” with the warm familiarity of the barflies on Cheers saying “Norm!” And then they’d cough. Or maybe they’d be allowed to unshackle themselves for a quick run about the place as they dodged Toxic Roger. It would be like tag. Or maybe a Scooby-Doo-style “hallway full of doors” chase scene, just with the notable difference of being caught resulting in death by suffocation.

It also gives me reason to mention “Rabbits,” the weirdo David Lynch project that plays like a nightmare sitcom and in which its titular characters are plagued by periodic visits from an evil cloud monster.

It is perhaps easier to imagine this situation in silly pop cultural contexts than in terms of how awful it would have been.

Playwrights, Playwrites and Playrights

I’ve always thought the word playwright looked wrong. If playwrights write plays, then shouldn’t they be playwrites, in the style of bootblacks and shopkeeps and milksops and tosspots?

After years of wondering, I finally looked it up, and no, you idiot, it shouldn’t be playwrite because that second syllable actually comes from the Old English wryhta, “worker.” It’s the same syllable that you see in profession names such as cartwright, wheelwright and wainwright — or wagon worker, wagon wheel worker and different kind of wagon worker, in order. I’m just now sure how playwright got lumped in with the “building something” and “doing something” professions, unless William Shakespeare’s career necessitated more elbow grease than I’d been led to believe.

But there you go — playwright not playwrite. You clod.

Playright, though. There’s something there. It’s too cute not to be used for something.

Pointless word wonderings, previously:

• How did the word bukkake, ahem, come to mean what it does?
• Surprise! It’s onomatopoeia!
• Who put the side in sideburns? Oh, and also the burns?
• Drunkard, bastard, dullard — why do so many words for unpleasant people end in -ard?
• Why we “verb” animal names
• Why we “verb” human body parts, too

Just Dripping With Creativity

Today I learned the subtext of the word seminal. It’s semen. Yep, just like it sounds.

Years spent around the endless praise of arts journalists may have warped my thinking, but I feel like when people use the word today, they’re most often using it in the context of creativity — a seminal book is one so original that it prompts the existence of later works. But even that use — planting a metaphorical seed — goes back to the primary definition listed in Merriam-Webster: “of, relating to or consisting of seed or semen,” as in seminal vesicles. Etymonline says that the generative sense of the word has been in use since at least the 1630s.

So remember: The next time someone refers to a book or album or film or artwork as being seminal, you’re not only allowed but encouraged to ask whether this thing is generative or just covered in semen. If someone objects, just explain, “Hey, there’s thing called etymology, you clod.”

via

While we’re on the subject, is there any way that Donna Summer’s seminal 1980 dance track “Hot Stuff” is also the other kind of seminal as well? If you haven’t listened to it recently, do so, give the lyrics a once-over and then ask yourself just what kind of hot stuff she’s looking for.

Suggested topic of conversation for dinner parties: “Hey, can anyone guess why the disco anthem ‘Hot Stuff’ is doubly seminal?”

Words that are surprisingly sexual, previously:

• bukkake (as a food item)
• looms (not just for prairie grandmas anymore!)
• bracket (March Madness just got more homoerotic)
• vanilla (sexier than its reputation would indicate)
• broomrape (not as bad as it sounds)
• orchid (DO NOT REMOVE)

The Long Tongue of the Etymologist (or — A Collection of Unrelated Trivia Bits)

Occasionally, I come across a bit of information that’s not exactly tweetable, not exactly bloggable. Such info-nuggets get dropped into the cyber-junk folder that is my Google doc that I titled “whatever maybe????” No, really — that’s what I call it. 

These are their stories. Well, no, here are two anteaters first. (Anteaters are unrelated to trivia but still.)

via me; see a larger version

If I had to guess the origin of the word skosh, “a little bit,” I’d say Yiddish, just based on the sound. I’d be wrong, because it comes from Japanese. Yay, wars!

Maleficent’s horned headdress is apparently called an atora, though the internet doesn’t seem to be clear on why it’s called that. It could have something to do with the fact that a British brand of shredded beef once used that name, adapted from the Spanish word toro, “bull.”

ol’ bullhead

Cyndi Lauper wrote “Time After Time” after seeing the movie of the same name, and I think that is neat.

If you’ve ever wondered why west-of-the-Mississippi radio and TV station call letters start with “K” while their east-of-the-Mississippi counterparts start with “W,” know two things: That’s not exactly how it works, boundary-wise, and although we know who assigned those letters, we have no idea why they got picked over any other letter.

When Ricky Ricardo sang about Babalu, he was actually singing about Babalu Aye, an African god of earth, infectious disease and healing. No, really.

Eagleheart was right, more or less: bezoars are actually things that exist. Protip: Don’t do a Google image search for them.

Why use the word twin when you could use the synonym twyndyllyng instead? It is allegedly the longest English word without a vowel, though any sane person can see why that is not true.

There is a crab whose scientific name is Graspus graspus, which alone is pretty good, but even better is the fact that its common English name is Sally Lightfoot, which sounds like someone your mom was friends with in the 70s.

Just based on how it sounds, you might guess that narwhal means “northern whale,” etymologically speaking. Nope. It acuially means “corpse whale.”

In similarly horrible realizations, the word mastodon means exactly what the etymologically-inclined might guess it means: “breast-tooth” — “so called from the nipple-like projections on the crowns of the extinct mammal’s fossil molars.”

the crab called sally lightfoot, via

The bassoon is known in Italy as the fagotto… obviously.

Aguascalientes — literally “hot waters” — is one of the states that comprise the E.E.U.U., or the United States of Mexico. This state name uses agua, which comes from the Latin word for water, aqua. Weirdly, the word for people from this state is hidrocálido, which uses a form of the Greek root for water, hydro. No one knowledgeable about Mexican culture or language has yet been able to explain to be why this is the case.

We’re not sure, but Bugs Bunny may be the reason that nimrod became an insult.

The French word for “werewolf” is loup-garou, which awkwardly translates as “wolf-manwolf.”

Though I guessed many, many posts ago that the Mega Man robo-dog Rush might have been named for the prog rock band of the same name, that is apparently not the case. Mega Man’s creator, Keiji Inafune, explained a few months back that the name results from an old Capcom game, Rush & Crash, plus the fact that the Japanese pronunciation of rush, “rasshu,” sounds a lot like the Japanese pronunciation of Lassie, “rasshi.”

This is all. Please enjoy! Link dumps, previously:

• 33 weirdly fascinating Wikipedia articles on basic concepts
• A list of things you should probably find interesting
• Lunch hour in the slave mines
• Leopard tree dream
• The short futon
• A most perplexing riddle about spaghetti

Oh, the Horrors of Etymology

In the same way that kicking over a rock allows you to see what squiggly, slimy things may be hiding beneath it, tracking down the etymology of words so often takes you into weird parts of history that you may never see otherwise. For example, today I looked up the etymology of the word barber. It goes back to the Latin barba, “beard,” it turns out, but the entry also offers this grim look into early healthcare: “Originally also regular practitioners of surgery, they were restricted to haircutting and dentistry under Henry VIII.”

isaac koedijck, “barber-surgeon tending a peasant’s foot,” via wikimedia

And I even knew that already, but seeing it laid out like that — plainly, matter-of-factly, as if it were no big deal that the same guy who cuts your hair should also cut your skin and dig teeth out of your gums — gave me a shiver. “Yeah, you’re your problem here is that you have too much blood. Here, sit down. This will take a while, because I will have to cut you open a lot.”

On Bukkake

I know, I know — that post title, right? How dare I title something I wrote with that when Joyce Carol Oates' On Bukkake remains the definitive text on the subject?

Know that I'm only writing this to inform you of one simple but nonetheless notable fact: the word bukkake may not always mean what you think. Now if bukkake doesn't mean anything to you, please do not Google it, especially if you're at your work computer. Please also do not inquire about the subject at your local library. Also, please don't go to the Wikipedia page for bukkake, because it's somehow even worse to see the whole explosive process explained in matter-of-fact language and diagrams. It's just one of those things you don't know about until you do, at which point you can never forget what it means and you occasionally wonder, "Wait, how did I learn what bukkake was?"

The word calls to mind some rather vivid imagery, too, and that's what makes the other meaning so strange: It's food — udon, in fact. And I know because a coworker recently wrote about ordering bukkake udon from a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles's Little Tokyo.

Here's the photo:

courtesy kcet food

Surprisingly tame, right? Compared to how you might have imagined bukkake udon, this looks rather savory, I think. (And that's savory in the sense of polite behavior, though I imagine it also tasted savory.) So why must this dish share its name with a sex act? Per my understanding, it's unlike the majority of udon dishes — which arrive soup-style, with the noodles floating in broth — in that the diner is served the noodles and topping and then required to pour the broth-like sauce over it immediately before eating. (Do I have that right? Please straighten out my understanding of the various bukkakes if not.) In case that doesn't make the connection clear enough, know that the word bukkake means "the act of splashing" in Japanese and comes from the verb bukkakeru, "to splash with (a liquid rudely)." Fair warning: that link may well be NSFW, depending on whether you work for squares.

So there you go. Now you know. May all your future bukkakes be the kind you ordered. Just be specific with your server.

Food written about in an unappetizing fashion, previously:

• The yogurt of last resort
• Chicken with merkin
• The penile aspects of vanilla
• You asked for pork faggots
• A spoonful of mystery

Yet Another Five Words With Surprising Etymologies

The long-awaited sequel to “Five Words With Surprising Etymologies,” “Five More Words With Surprising Etymologies” and “Another Five Words With Surprising Etymologies,” of course.

greyhound: I’d imagine that most people would guess that the grey in greyhound referred to color, even though we’ve all seen greyhounds sporting the full range of dog colors. I did (and I have). However, according to Etymonline, the grey actually comes from the Old English grig, meaning “bitch.” So greyhounds are bitchhounds, etymologically speaking. Of course, this doesn’t seem any more appropriate, since not all greyhounds are bitches, just like not all greyhounds are gray. But there you go.

torpedo: The name for the naval weapon comes from the genus Torpedo, which includes various species of marine rays that can shoot out electricity to defend themselves. In Latin, torpedo literally means “numbness,” because of how getting shocked makes you feel, and is related to the word torpor, which I forget is a word and which always looks misspelled.

pinochle: Etymonline speculates that the word could have come to English via the Swiss German Binokel, which in turn comes from the French binocle, “pince-nez.” Pinochle is derived from an older card game, bezique, which uses two decks, and that’s apparently the connection between the game and eyes — two decks, two sides of a pair of glasses. More important than any of that, however, the name can also be spelled peaknuckle, and I insist that’s how we spell it from now on.

soccer: It’s an abbreviation of assoc., which itself was an abbreviation for association, as in football association. The Etymonline author actually gets a little sassy and points out that “they could hardly could have taken the first three letters of assoc.”

squeegee: I would have guessed that it came from a brand name that just became the generic term for that particular item, like xerox or google, but squeegee actually goes back to 1844, when it meant pretty much what it means now. Etymonline guesses that it could have come from the word squeege, “to press.”

The Decidedly Non-Sexual Fruits of Passion

On a hike yesterday, we spotted an extraterrestrial communications antenna that later turned out to be a passion flower — the blossom on the plant that gives us passion fruit.

Coupled with the fact that the passion fruit comes from the tropics, the flower’s ostentatious weirdness makes it easy to think of the passion in question as being sexual or at least romantic — the kind of emotion you find in those places where middle-aged black ladies go to get their grooves back. This purple-fringed beauty is the plant’s genitals, after all, and my friend even pointed out that “passion fruit” doesn’t sound like it’s an actual, organic product. No, it sounds like a flavor derived in a lab, some the same guys in white coats who invented blue raspberry or wintermint or that unplaceable snow cone flavor we call “Hawaiian.” The plant is real, however, but the dreamy, romantic notions we might today make with passion fruit are way off the park when you consider how the plant got its name. It’s the other passion — the Passion of the Christ passion, in fact.

From Wikipedia:

The name was given by Spanish missionaries to South America as an expository aid while trying to convert the indigenous inhabitants to Christianity. One ingenious expository device was using parallels between the parts of this common South American flower and elements of the account of the torture (the Passion) of Christ prior to his crucifixion. The missionaries said that:

• The three stigmas reflect the three nails in Jesus‘s hands and feet
• The threads of the passion flower resemble the crown of thorns
• The vine’s tendrils are likened to the whips
• The five anthers represented the five wounds
• The ten petals and sepals regarded to resemble the Apostles (excluding Judas and Peter)
• The purple petals representing the purple robe used to mock Jesus’ claim to kingship

So the next time you dig into the deep magenta of a passion fruit sorbet following a candle-lit Valentine’s Day dinner, don’t think about engorged genitals; think about poor Jim Caviezel being tormented and then executed by Roman soldiers. (And also please don’t think too much about the whole sepal thing and why you’re pulling both Judas and Peter from the traditional group of twelve.)

In case you’re wondering how passion, as a word, got mixed up both in Christ’s torment and bodice-ripping, blame the martyrs. It originally came from the Latin patior — “to suffer,” in the sense of patients and patience. According to Etymonline, the meaning drifted from “torment of God’s son” to “strong emotion” when Christian conviction led martyrs to similar abusive treatment, and now we just use passionate more or less to mean “totally DTF.” I like that passion (romantic sense) retains the element of suffering, even if on a buried etymological level, since love and hardship so often go hand-in-hand, but at the same time it’s hard not to look at the evolution of meaning and say, “Damn, we really ruined that word.”

Surprise! It’s Onomatopoeia!

Some sound words are obviously onomatopoetic — whack, pow, pretty much anything you’d see during a fight scene on the Adam West Batman show. But here is a list of words that you may be surprised to learn are imitative in origin. Or possibly are. Or partly are. Or at one point were.

• squelch
• peewee
• drone
• barbarian
• whippoorwill
• didgeridoo
• mosquito
• flip
• hurdy-gurdy
• poop
• gong
• frou-frou
• Tartarus
• pachinko
• strum
• balalaika
• gooey
• boffo
• spank
• titillation
• yodel
• tick-tack-toe
• gecko
• grackle
• toucan
• puke
• borborygmi
• kiwi
• pizzicato
• garrulous
• dandle
• bouffant
• mumps
• fart
• canard
• lisp
• rinky-dink
• pogrom
• marmoset
• baboon
• partridge

The jury is still out on whangdoodle, but you have to admit that that is the noise that whangdoodles make, more or less. And yes, there’s more etymological wonderment in my previous posts.

Revenge of the Reverse Toilet

Not that I’m going to make a habit of blogging about bidets, but I’ve already posted about them once today, so why not twice?

I suppose most of you haven’t wasted energy wondering about where we get that word from, and perhaps many of you thought that a better use of your brain juice was trying to figure out how to use this mysterious bathroom presence. That’s fair. I wondered, however, and I found out. Bidet, according to Etymonline, is of uncertain origin, but we know at least that it was previously French for “pony” or “small horse.” That is all.

So the next time you’re abroad and in a fancy evacuation chamber, don’t think of the bidet as an intimidating bathroom appliance. Think of it as a pony! A porcelain bathroom pony! That wants to shoot a high-pressure stream of water into your butt.

There, now don’t you feel better?

Alternatives to Being a Hobbit

I’d always just assumed that J.R.R. Tolkien invented the word hobbit. And while he apparently did, his story about how he came to use it allows for the possibility that he maybe didn’t. As he recalled in a letter to W.H. Auden in 1955, “On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why.” And if that’s the true story, isn’t it wild that what amounts to a nonsense sentence grew into a book that spun off into The Lord of the Rings and was therefore responsible for the movies, worldwide awareness of New Zealand and endless debates about the dramatic strengths and failings of Liv Tyler?

In the same way that embiggen appeared in print 112 years before The Simpsons popularized it, there’s exactly one instance of hobbit appearing in print before The Hobbit was published in 1937. Excerpted on Etymonline, the passage is folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham’s extremely long 1895 list of British supernatural creatures (and thereabouts). And it’s one of those chunks of text that overwhelms language-lovers like me with dueling reactions of “So quaint!” and “So British!” and “What the hell?”

My curiosity got the better of me, and I did some poking around Denham’s list, broken up onto separate lines with links and notes explaining what weird folklore Denham is talking about. In some cases, I had no idea, and in others the term doesn’t need any explanation, but I threw in some history if it seemed interesting. Like in the very first one, for example. But here’s the thing: I could not find anything about the term hobbit, and its presence on this pre-Tolkienverse list makes for a neat little linguistic mystery. (I go on a bit about it at the very end of the post. Hit the jump and scroll to the bottom if you’re interested.)

First, the list, in strange, jumbled order that Denham wrote it:

ghosts (According to Etymonline, we get it from the Old English gast, which could mean “soul, spirit, life, breath, good or bad spirit, angel, demon” but which took on the current meaning, “soul of a dead person,” when it became the word chosen to translate the Latin word spiritus in Christian writing.)

boggles (the critter of the British supernatural world, basically, a word that’s closely related to a ton of others on this list, thanks to the Middle English bugge, “something frightening)

bloody-bones (According to Wikipedia, a boogeyman used to “awe children, and keep them in subjections” and that “lived in a dark cupboard, usually under the stairs. If you were heroic enough to peep through a crack you would get a glimpse of the dreadful, crouching creature, with blood running down his face, seated waiting on a pile of raw bones that had belonged to children who told lies or said bad words.”)

spirits (worth pointing out the connection to the Latin spirare, “breath,” and all the words we get from that, and the very obvious connection to breathing and not being dead yet)

demons (from the Greek daimon — “deity, divine power; lesser god; guiding spirit, tutelary deity”)

ignis fatui (literally “foolish fire,” but referring to the burning methane more often called will-o’-the-wisp, a natural phenomenon that appears many times on this list, with many different names)

The rest of the long, long list after the jump.

brownies (not the mini-Girl Scouts, but about as dependable around the house; a diminutive of the Scottish “wee brown man”)

bugbears (another monster made up to terrify naughty children, it will also go by the name bugboo)

black dogs (a demonic ghost dog along the lines of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and another creature that Denham lists again and again)

specters (literally “a vision”)

shellycoats (river monster whose coat is literally made of shells)

scarecrows, witches, wizards

barguests (more often barghest, and either one particular demonic ghost dog or an elf, so pick your fancy)

Robin-Goodfellows (Puck, essentially, but the name is a euphemism people would use when talking about the Devil so he wouldn’t show up. “Speak of the Devil,” and all that.)

hags (the old women who aren’t your sainted grandmother)

night-bats (as opposed to the other kinds???)

scrags (a very skinny person, apparently)

breaknecks (not completely sure on this one, but given this British adjective meaning “dangerous or reckless,” I’d guess it’s either the person of that or someone who breaks your neck, I’d guess)

fantasms (old spelling of phantasm, a ghost)

hobgoblins (Or as the hurried would call them, goblins, but the take away here is that that word part hob-, according to Etymonline, is a nickname for Rob in that old-timey, British nickname system that also calls Richard Hick or Rodger Hodge, and it’s short for the aforementioned Robin Goodfellow. According to Wikipedia, a hob is just a household spirit.)

hobhoulards (a hobgoblin that howls, basically, but that second part might be related to owlet)

boggy-boes (I’m assuming that it’s the same gang as the bugbears and the bugboos)

dobbies (a “thin and shaggy” household spirit that does cute little favors for servants and children, and yes, it’s what inspired the Harry Potter Dobby)

hob-thrusts (according to the Monstropedia, it’s a brownie which carries an iron pot in which he stirs a dish made from children’s thumb bones)

fetches (“apparition, specter, a double,” possibly coming from a different etymology than the more familiar fetch although we’re not sure, and giving rise to the term fetch candle, “a corpse candle supposed to pass between the home and the grave of the beholder,” etc., etc., Gretchen Weiners)

kelpies (a supernatural water horse — but not a seahorse — that could also look like a pretty lady)

warlocks (the boy of witch, as Cordelia Chase once put it, the word comes from the Old English wærloga, “traitor,” and went from untrustworthy humans to “giants and canniabls” to those in league with the Devil)

mock-beggars (there’s no shortage of places named Mockbeggar, but the origin of those names seem equally obscure, so I’m inclined to assume it’s someone who looks like a harmless panhandler then murders you; that said, beggar may in some cases be an alteration of the French boggard/boggart)

mum-pokers (tempted to say this is an old-timey way of saying motherfucker, but it’s actually a nursery room goblin that stalks its prey silently)

Jemmy-burties (according to this book, it’s another name for ignis fatuus, or the will-o’-the-wisp; the second part may just be a diminutive of burt, Middle English for “bright)

urchins (poor children, as dangerous as ghosts and fairies)

satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs (see, Denham got to the Greek section, though I sometimes forget that Triton from the Disney Little Mermaid is named after a Greek mythological character)

calcars (unsure on this one, though its Latin for “spur” and can mean refer in English to a small oven or furnace)

nymphs (like poor children, loose women are also dangerous; the word actually once meant “wife, young bride” in Greek, but it became more salacious and mythological over time)

imps (went from the agricultural (“young shoot, graft”) to the household (“child”) to the otherworldly as a result of what Etymonline terms “pejorative phrases like imp of Satan”)

incubuses (but curiously not hand-in-hand with succubuses, despite their interlocking natures and etymologies)

spoorns (still confused, but might have some connection to calcar, as spoorn is German for “spur,” and both words appear side-by-side more than once in the 1921 fantasy novel Figures of Earth)

men-in-the-oak (Google is just no help on this one, but couldn’t it be the Green Men?)

hell-wains (a guess: given how wain means “wagon,” which isn’t a creature, necessarily, but still wouldn’t be out of place in the company of all these other weirdos)

fire-drakes (a fire-breathing dragon)

kit-a-can-sticks (will-o’-the-wisp once again, and apparently it can also be kit of the candlestick, kitty candlestick and kitty with the wisp,)

Tom-tumblers (apparently Tom Thumb, but a less pleasant one that the one popularized by the story about the tiny boy, which itself dates back to at least 1621)

melch-dicks (I’d guess anything from a sexually transmitted disease to some mangling of the Biblical name Melchizedek, but it’s actually Melsh Dick and, a “sylvan spirit” and “the protector of hazelnuts.” And what does melsh mean? “Moist.” Yep, dude’s name is “Moist Dick.”)

larrs (Wikipedia says it’s the the lares, the Roman household deities)

kitty-witches (tragically human witches and not little cats who are also witches, though that’s still totally a thing)

hobby-lanthorns (lantern-carrying goblin)

Dick-a-Tuesdays (a goblin, though we’re not sure why a Tuesday goblin, especially because “all goblins and ‘bugs’ were created, imperfectly, on Friday”)

elf-fires (once again, will-o’-the-wisp)

Gyl-burnt-tales (and again, will-o’-the-wisp, though this one is alleged to be a corruption of jinn with a burnt tail)

knockers (mine-goblins, but also ha ha ha knockerselves)

rawheads (“specter” or “scarechild”)

Meg-with-the-wads (will-o-the-wisp)

old-shocks (a nickname for the Devil in the style of Old Scratch)

ouphs (“a fairy or a sprite”)

pad-foot (another name for those black dogs and hellhounds)

pixies (of debated origin, but notable for being responsible for one of my favorite obscure words, pixilated, which is different than pixelated)

pictrees (a ghost)

giants, dwarfs (together again!)

Tom-pokers (The Devil)

tutgots (no clue)

snapdragons (probably less so the flower and more so the mock villain this amazing parlor game in which children snatched raisins from flaming brandy, which, by the way, sounds awesome)

sprets (surely it’s sprite, no?)

spunks (unsure on this one, though it makes sense in the way that we use spunk to mean “spirit, and also you’ll be gratified to know that we’ve been using it to mean “semen” since at least 1888)

conjurers

thurses (a giant, a specter or a giant specter, and no, I’m not kidding)

spurns (which appear to just be an alternate form of spoorn)

tantarrabobs (a name for the Devil, according to Etymonline, and possibly the word that gave us the word tantrabobus/tantrabogus, a Vermont word for “any odd-looking object,” which in turn might have given us the word bogus)

swaithes (perhaps some relation to swath, but I couldn’t guess why)

tints (in the context of shade, I’m guessing)

tod-lowries (“The Yarthkins and Tiddy Muns and Tod Lowries are queer, primeval, dangerous spirits, breathing pesiltelence and having to be constantly placated,” according to this book, though I’ll point out that the Australian footballer Todd Lowry makes researching this one fairly difficult)

Jack-in-the-Wads (the will-o’-the-wisp, yet again, and quite possibly the sibling to Meg-with-the-wads, because why not?)

mormos (a “spirit who bit bad children” and a creature from Greek mythology, says Wikipedia)

changelings (a concept many people my age learned about from The Labyrinth, the word for a baby stolen and replaced by spirits was previously oaf, oddly enough)

redcaps (a goblin said to inhabit castles and murder travelers in order to dye their little hats with the blood, according to Wikipedia)

yeth-hounds (“heath hounds,” and those same devil dogs previously mentioned — “a headless dog, said to be the spirit of an unbaptised child, which rambles through the woods at night making wailing noises”)

colt-pixies (an evil spirit that leads horses astray, possibly into bogs, like what happened poor Artax)

Tom-thumbs (like the tom-tumblers, a more evil version of the Tom Thumb we know and love and celebrate every day)

black-bugs (not insects but otherworldly unfriendlies, in the sense of bugbear and bugboo, though the etymology is apparently the same)

boggarts (according to Wikipedia, either a household spirit that places its clammy hands on the faces of sleeping people or a genius loci inhabiting marshes, holes, bridges or sharp curves in the road)

scar-bugs (a harder-to-Google phrase than you might expect)

shag-foals (according to this site, “a shaggy-haired donkey with fiery eyes from the tales of Lincolnshire, England. It would appear on the sides of lonely roads only at night. When travellers passed nearby it would frighten and chase them. Other than causing terror, it has never killed or hurt its victims.”)

hodge-pochers (a nickname for Rodger plus an alternate form of poker, it looks like, and apparently unrelated to the word hodgepodge)

hob-thrushes (a.k.a. the previously mentioned hob-thrust, who is a horror)

bugs (again, not insects)

bull-beggars (either “goblin” or “bugbear” or “something used or suggested to produce terror, as in children or persons of weak mind”)

bygorns (a long shot: bygorn = bi-corn = “two horns”?)

caddies (not the supernatural aspects of golf, unfortunately)

bomen (just a contraction for bogeyman, Wikipedia says)

brags (“a creature from the folklore of Northumberland and Durham that usually takes the form of a horse or donkey; it is fond of tricking unwary wayfarers into riding on its back before throwing the rider into a pool of water or bush before running off laughing”)

wraiths (a familiar word whose etymology is uncertain)

waffs (“a wraith whose appearance portends death,” and a word that seems like it might be related to the verb waffle though not the noun waffle)

flay-boggarts (the members of the bog family that skin their victims, I’m assuming)

fiends (presumably not being assigned to the elements of earth, water, air and fire, necessarily)

gallytrots (the ghost dog, once again)

imps (again)

gytrashes (a different sort of ghost canine)

patches (current uses of the word patch have made this word pointless to research)

hob-and-lanthorns (not significantly different from hobby-lanthorns)

gringes (unsure, but I’m guessing the similarity to Grinch is coincidental)

boguests (a Yorkshire-specific demon dog; can also be rendered as barghest, bargtjest and several other ways; theories about etymology include the German Berg-geist (“mountain spirit”), Bär-geist (“bear-spirit”), and Bier-Geist, “spirit of the funeral bier.”))

bonelesses (an amorphous, Smoke Monster-y boogeything, described in a 1916 account excerpted here as follows: “a shapeless summat as slides behind and alongside in the dark night. Many’s have died of fright through his following on. They can’t never tell about him except he’s a big shadow and shapeless”)

Peg-powlers (according to Wikipedia, “a hag from English folklore with green skin, long hair and sharp teeth who is said to inhabit the River Tees. She grabs the ankles of those who wander too close to the water's edge, especially naughty children, and pulls them under the water and drowns them”)

pucks (yeah, that Puck, but also Robin Goodfellow, since that’s a name people used for him when they didn’t want to speak his actual name and summon him; incidentally, the name is related to pooka, the rabbit spirit from the movie Harvey)

fays (“fairy,” and it’s actually related to that word, as well as to fate)

kidnappers (supernatural and otherwise)

gallybeggars (a corpse-looking spirit that carries its own head and spooks travelers)

hudskins (seems like I’m only finding hits for this very passage, so I’m guessing that it’s something awful that takes your skin and wears it like a hood)

nickers (probably not underwear but the Scandinavian nykr, a supernatural river horse that’s related, supernatural-wise and word-wise, to the nixie)

madcaps (cap is “head,” and it’s meant to mean “crazy person”)

trolls

robinets (no clue, because it’s just a robin, but weirdly it’s also French for “a small sheep”)

friars’ lanthorns (yet another will-o’-the-wisp)

silkies (usually selkie, they’re seals that turn into ladies to traipse about on land)

cauld-lads (the ghost of a murdered boy that inhabits Hylton Castle and cries, “I’m cauld!” … see, because he’s cold and that’s how he says it)

death-hearses (perhaps not actually the vehicle used to transport dead bodies, since the word originally meant “flat framework for candles, hung over a coffin”)

goblins (And after all that, we come to goblin, which doesn’t need to be explained, I suppose, but it’s worth noting that we’re not sure where the word actually comes from, though it may be related to cobalt)

hob-headlesses (a ghoul residing near the River Kent who would glue people in place so they couldn’t run away)

bugaboos (the more familiar way of writing out boggy-boes)

kows or cowes (presumably the Hedley Kow, an evil spirit that can change its shape at will but prefers the form of a cow, which seems unambitious)

nickies, nacks, necks (the lady in the water, presuming this is just an alternate take on nixie)

waiths (“ownerless property, stray animal,” and apparently related to waif)

miffies (All I’ve got is “a class of spirits.”)

buckies (again, nothing aside from “whelk” or “snail shell”)

ghouls (notably from the Arabic ghul, “an evil spirit that robs graves and feeds on corpses”)

sylphs (coined by Paracelsus when he wanted to invent an air elemental, it’s supposed that it could be a combo of silva, “forest,” and nymph)

guests (probably from the time when the word meant “enemy” or “stranger” as opposed to “person you’re happy to have come over,” and despite what you might guess from this list, Etymonline doesn’t seem to say that there’s an etymological connection between guest and ghost)

swarths (I’m guessing it’s some connection with swarthy and schwarz, both of which mean “black”)

freiths, freits (My only guesses are a variation on fright or the Anglo-Norman freit, “cold”)

gy-carlins, Gyre-carling (both the queen of the fairies in Scottish folklore, with the first part either being either a cognate with the Norse geri, “greedy” or gýgr, “ogress,” and the second part being a Scots or Northern English word meaning “old woman.” )

pigmies (historically, a member of race of dwarves , as described by Homer and Herotodus, and the term is related to pugnacious, for measurement reasons)

chittifaces (one who has a thin, pinched faced; used as a term of contempt)

nixies (the same as the aforementioned nickies, nacks and necks)

Jinny-burnt-tails (a variation on gyl-burnt-tale , which itself is a variation on jinn with a burnt tail)

dudmen (a ragman or scarecrow)

hell-hounds (it’s, um, a hellhound)

dopple-gangers (those famous double-goers)

boggleboes (another variation on bugaboo)

bogies (a mysterious spirit, a hobgoblin)

redmen (unknown, but hopefully not something racist)

portunes (“the wizened and wrinled portune was a typical brownie-type fairy, delighted to help with farm work provided no payment was offered”)

grants (no clue, but maybe… giants? in the sense of grand meaning “big”?)

hobbits (of course, I haven’t got a clue what this was supposed to mean when the text was written, and it’s hard to search for the term separately from the Tolkienverse, especially at this precise moment in pop culture)

hobgoblins (yes, this one is actually repeated from the earlier mention, letter for letter)

brown-men (this also seems a little racist, but Wikipedia says it’s a reference to the Simonside Dwarves)

cowies (the Hedley Kow, again)

dunnies (if not the Hazelrigg Dunnie, which took the form of a cow to irritate farmers and terrify children, then something more or less like it)

wirrikows (more often worricow or wurrycow, it’s “a bugbear, a hobgoblin”)

alholdes (according to this book, it’s the Germanic goddess Holda, associated with spinning, childbirth, witches, hunting, winter and all sorts of fairytale tropes)

mannikins (apparently used to mean “a short person,” it’s also used to refer to those “little men” jointed models that artists use)

follets (seeing how feufollet is the French word for “will-o’-the-wisp,” I’m guessing it’s that… yet again)

korreds (red-eyed creatures who live in megalithic dolmen tombs and guard treasure)

lubberkins (a.k.a. the Lubber fiend, a Puck-like character who performs chores in exchange for saucers of milk)

cluricauns (also cluricane and clutharachán, it’s Irish spirit similar to a leprechaun who wears red instead of green and who “is dressed like a weekend gentleman with silver buckles on his shoes, gold lace on his cap, and blue silk stockings below his breeches”)

kobolds (a Germanic dwarf that occupies the linguistic space between goblin and cobalt; Wikipedia notes that “Kobolds who live in human homes wear the clothing of peasants; those who live in mines are hunched and ugly; and kobolds who live on ships smoke pipes and wear sailor clothing,” and I think that’s a very handy way to differentiate your kobolds)

leprechauns (purveyors of cereal marshmallows and Irish stereotypes; the word literally means “a very small body,” from lu, “little,” and corpan, the diminutive of corp, “body”)

mares (it’s literally nightmares personified, with the second syllable of nightmare coming from the Old English word for an incubus or succubus)

korreds (again)

puckles (Puck, puca or pooka, once again)

korigans (a Breton spirit that can either be dwarves that dance around fountains (but cannot name off all the days of the week) or sexy sirens who lure men to a watery death, so you’ve got options)

sylvans (guessing it’s just sylphs again)

succubuses (and, at long last, the girl incubuses; people realize that succubus and incubus come from the Latin for “to lie beneath” and “to lie upon,” respectively, yes?)

blackmen (for a third time, hopefully not something racist)

shadows

banshees (caterwauling ghost lady; notably, the literal meaning of the original Irish, bean sidhe, is “female of the elves,” and that bean is related to the word queen)

lian-hanshees (more often leanan sidhe, “fairy lover,” is a creature who indulges in ill-fated relationships with humans and who may or may not be a vampire)

clabbernappers (given how clabber is a cheese-like food, I’m guessing the clabbernappers are mean spirits that attempt to foil human’s delicious clabber feasts in the way that butterflies were disguised witches who stole dairy products)

Gabriel-hounds (yet another demon dog)

mawkins (variously a simpleton, a hare, a kitchenmaid, a slattern, a cat, a mop or a scarecrow)

doubles (doppelgangers, again)

corpse lights or candles (like a cross between a will-o’-the-wisp and a fetch candle, it’s a light thought to float from a dying person’s house to the cemetery… and then back again, for some reason)

scrats (Wiktionary states, without any explanation, that it can be a hermaphrodite, but I’m guessing it’s Old Scratch once again)

mahounds (the prophet Mohammed, surprisingly)

trows (a troll-like thing living in the Shetlands and Orkneys, fond of music and prone to kidnapping musicians for in-house performances)

gnomes (important to note that they once supposedly dwelled deep within the earth and not in front yard gardens)

sprites (from the Latin spiritus, which makes your video games seem a lot more spiritual, now that you think about it)

fates (those weird sisters, but in a generic sense)

fiends (again)

sibyls (classy, classical prophetesses who really wouldn’t keep company with demons and goblins, you’d think)

nicknevins (another name for the Gyre-carling)

whitewomen (more often witte wieven, “white women” but “wise women” in Low Saxon, they are “the spirits of wise women or priestesses, and haunt the forest, lakes, swamps, hills and megaliths”)

fairies (Notably, it only took on the meaning of “diminutive winged beings so-called in children's stories” in the seventeenth century, and as it’s pointed out on Etymonline, Tolkien himself notes this transition rather poignantly: “I suspect that this flower-and-butterfly minuteness was also a product of ‘rationalization,’ which transformed the glamour of Elfland into mere finesse, and invisibility into a fragility that could hide in a cowslip or shrink behind a blade of grass. It seems to become fashionable soon after the great voyages had begun to make the world seem too narrow to hold both men and elves; when the magic land of Hy Breasail in the West had become the mere Brazils, the land of red-dye-wood.”)

thrummy-caps (a “queer-looking old man,” with thrummy basically meaning “frayed”)

cutties (more often Cutty Soames, they’re mine goblins who would cut soames, or ropes)

nisses (the Swedish tomtenisse, it’s basically a little psycho who held hostage the occupants of Scandinavian farms)

and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description (the countless others he forgot to include, but let’s be honest — most of them were probably different words for the will-o’-the-wisp)

A note: Initially, I just found the Denham Tracts list as it appeared on Etymonline, and I began looking up the stranger entries in Google Books to see what I could turn up whenever I had a little spare time. Only much later, when I started searching for the hard-to-find entries did I realize that the passage had its own section on Wikipedia, with links explaining the entries. However, Wikipedia doesn’t explain all the entries, and I’m not sure I agree with all of Wikipedia’s connections: shag-foal links to “Black dog,” for example. So I just continued.

Another note: Denham’s list is very strange, and I’m not talking about the subject matter. First, it’s based off an older text: Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft. (Go here and control-F “urchens” to see the original text.) Denham added a lot, but many of his additions are redundant. He had nine entries for will-o’-the-wisp, certain words show up twice, other words reappear slightly misspelled, and he didn’t bother to sort it thoroughly, though there are attempts at grouping — a bunch of Greek mythology creatures lumped together, but not all of the Greek mythology creatures, for example. I’m not complaining, just commenting on how strange it is to have an academic resource that so plainly preserves the author’s disorganization, especially considering that the text was edited in the 1890s.

It’s especially puzzling to me that Denham would have made the list but not explained the creatures he was listing. Had he done so, we might know today whether some form of a hobbit existed before Tolkien dreamed up his big-footed characters, or at least how people used the term before Tolkien made it his own. Until we know, we just have this massively popular cultural entity based around the word hobbit, and a curious footnote predating it all but offering no answers.

And once again: night-bats? Really.

The Sad, Shitty Fact of Living in Des Moines

Really, you present yourself with your own difficulties by living in a city whose name actively thwarts pronunciation by anyone speaking English as a second language. But that’s only a small part of the problem, linguistically speaking, for Des Moines may mean “shitface.”

According to an etymological theory sponsored by Etymonline.com, the name of this Iowa metropolis may derive from the Miami-Illinois word mooyiinkweena, which is fun to say even before you learn that it translates as “shitface” — frommooy, “excrement,” and iinkwee, “face.” According to Etymonline, the name was given to the inhabitants of the region by the Peoria Indians, in a grand Native American tradition of making fun of your hated neighbors. (Etymonline, by the way, points out that Peoria itself has become a dirty word in American pop culture, however.)

There’s another theory that the city name comes from the French des moines — “from the monks” or “of the monks” — but what is the fun in that?

Green, Hairy Balls of Death

So maybe you played Secret of Mana back in the day, and maybe its wonderful mishmash of cultures taught you a thing or two. For instance, when you learned that the fifteenth-century scientist and occultist Paracelsus assigned supernatural spirits to the four natural elements — gnomes for earth, undines for water, sylphs for air and salamanders for fire — you recognized the names, and you realized that while alchemy may no longer be a legitimate field of study, its more fantastical tenets live on in nerd culture. Sure, some of the Secret of Mana simply sprung from the developers’ imaginations, but a lot of it came from somewhere, and that was reason enough to wonder about the stuff you never figured out.

Like Aegagropilon, a borderline unpronounceable boss that looks like this:

via

It’s… a giant, lumbering, toothed plant-thing. And it was a pain to beat, I remember, but what lingered most about this boss was the fact that its name seemed like it must mean something.

It does.

via

Best known by their Japanese name, marimo, spherical, velvety balls of green algae can form under certain conditions that are only naturally met in lakes in Scotland, Austria, Japan and Estonia. From Wikipedia:

The round shape of the marimo is maintained by gentle wave action that occasionally turns it. The balls are green all the way round which guarantees that they can photosynthesize no matter which side is turned upwards. Inside, the ball is also green and packed with dormant chloroplasts which become active in a matter of hours if the ball breaks apart. The wave action also cleans the balls of detritus. As some colonies have two or even three layers of marimo balls, wave action is needed to tumble them around so each ball reaches the light.

The Japanese name comes from a combination of the word mari, “ball,” and mo, a generic term for water plants, according to Wikipedia. The Ainu call them torasampe, “lake goblin” and tokarip, “lake roller.” In Iceland, they’re kúluskítur — from kúla, “ball,” and skítur, “skítur.” But their scientific name is Aegagropila linnaei, and knowing that, it’s pretty clear that someone involved in the production of Secret of Mana knew this fact, saw that the Aegagropilon was a green, round plant thing and was all “Hey, how about this for a name?” And now, nearly twenty years after I played the game, I see what they did there.

Aegagropila, by the way, is apparently Greek for “goat hair.” Logical conclusion: Goats must be different in Greece.