Welcome
to Part 2 of my little wander through the weirder side of names for
parts of the body. In this part we'll start off with measurements.
Probably the most obvious part of the body used as a measurement is
the foot. The main problem with using a foot to measure things is the
fact that feet are generally not the same length from person to
person, so until a foot was defined as twelve inches, it was rather
inaccurate, as all measurements based on body parts must have been.
The
other four measurements in this discussion are all based on the upper
limbs. The most obvious is the “hand”, though this is only used
nowadays as a measurement in association with horses, despite the use
of hands for measurement going back to the ancient Egyptians. Three
other measurements take up more than the hand, stretching some way up
the arm. The first is the “ell”, a word of Germanic origin
related to Latin ulna. The ell was a measurement from the tip
of the middle finger to, naturally, the elbow, which, of course,
takes its name from the ell. The second is the “cubit”, which
denotes exactly the same length as the ell. In fact, cubit comes from
Latin cubitum, “elbow”, which is actually related to Greek
kybos, “space above a cow's hip”, and also to English
“hip” itself. So there we have it: the ell is the same as the
cubit in length, the elbow is the same as the cubitum as a
joint, and the ell is related to the ulna, the bone leading from the
elbow to the hand, while “cubit” is from the same root as “hip”.
So in a real sense, you're elbow's connected to your hip bone.
The
third is actually something which could be alternately the same
measurement as a cubit, alternately a weapon, and which ends up as
being not so much a measurement as an indicator of size. The Greek
pygme, related to Latin pugnus, meant “fist”,
which, of course, usually only exists at times of anger and conflict.
A pygme also represented the same length as a cubit, and this
meaning was applied to a mythical race of people known in Greek as
pygmaioi, reputed to be only the height of a cubit, thereby
giving us modern “pygmy”.
Another
interesting aspect of body terminology is the way we can use parts of
the body to make things happen. Here are some which may never have
occurred to you. First up, what do you say when someone sneezes? Why,
"bless you", of course. However, if you knew the original meaning of
“bless”, you might not be so willing to say it. We think of a
blessing as being a priest making the sign of the cross, but 1500
odd years ago it was something quite different. The pagan Germanic tribes
which came to Britain at the fall of the Roman empire engaged in
animal sacrifice, and blessing involved sprinkling blood on the
object to be sanctified. The ancestor of “bless”, Old English
bloedsian, meant “sanctify with blood”. When Christianity
arrived, the practice changed but the term remained. What's more, the
French blesser, “wound”, is from a Frankish root similar
to Old English bloedsian. Both roots referred to the letting
of blood - in war in French, in religion in English. You could say
that Stephen King's Carrie was blessed in an English way with pig's
blood, and returned the favour by treating her teachers and
schoolmates to quintessentially French blessures.
On
the subject of religion, have you ever thought about the way many
children are taught to adhere to religious dogma? One way to ensure
they learn and never forget the teaching is to inculcate it into
them. Now, you might think that violence is not the best way to
teach, but “inculcate” tells another story, whether literal or
metaphorical. The Latin calx meant “heel”, and inculcare
meant literally “stamp in”, the idea being that once stamped in,
knowledge would remain. However, if a child did not want to be
inculcated, he or she might do a little stamping of their own by
being recalcitrant. Calx also produced the verbs calcitrare,
“kick”, and recalcitrare, “kick back”, rather like a
horse or a donkey. “Recalcitrant” was borrowed from Latin in the
19th C with the meaning of “obstinately disobedient”,
rather like a kicking donkey. Stamping and kicking - who would have
thought that the education process could be so violent?
If
all that stamping and kicking has taken it out of you, have a rest.
And what better way to have a rest than to doss for a while? And
while you're dossing, looking up at the stars or the ceiling, you can
think of the best way to doss and why it's called dossing at all –
because you're on your back, which, of course, is dos in
French, from Latin dorsum. So there you have it – if you lie
on your front, you can't be termed a dosser. Another thing you can do
with your back is to write on it, or rather, let someone else write
on it, especially if you want to be a bank cheque. “Endorse”
comes from the Old French endosser, “put on the back (of)”
(with the spelling changed later). So if you're a politician running
for office, you can always get important supporters to endorse you,
perhaps with a giant stamp on your back saying “The Next
President”.
Of
course, if you do run for office, you'll have to persuade enough
people to give you their vote to make sure you win. So you'll spend
days consulting the polls, until the day when the real poll comes –
the only one that matters. That's when everyone lines up and
officials count their heads, usually one per person. OK, that would
be rather time-consuming and impractical in a modern democracy, but
that's how polls started out – head counts. “Poll” in Middle
English originally referred to the head, or just the hair of the
head, before it came to mean “head count”, and later “election”.
The old meaning can still be seen in that much-reviled term
“poll-tax”, literally a tax per head of population. Now, let's
move from the head to the other end of the body, at least for
quadrupeds - the tail. Latin coda, “tail” has produced
three words in modern English. The tail-end of a musical piece is
termed the “coda”; the tail that you wait in is a “queue”,
which comes via French; and the tail that you use to hit balls on a
table is a “cue”, an alternative spelling of “queue”.
One
other part of the body can prove useful in amusing the public, as
long as you know how to use it for speaking - your belly, venter
in Latin. That's precisely what a ventriloquist does – speak from
the belly, though in a sense, we all speak from the belly from time
to time, with sounds that say “I can't eat another morsel”.
Part
3 coming up soon.
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