‘The Etymologicon’ by Mark Forsyth
An otherwise interesting tour through the origins of some English words and expressions is spoilt by a lack of editorial attention.
At the risk of testing the patience of my friends, I once conducted a survey to see how the expression ‘The exception that proves the rule’ was understood. The answers I received fell into two categories. The first was nonsensical but I have heard many people say that the exception is something that doesn't follow the rule but yet makes it stronger, thus proving it. You’d be surprised how many people think this is the correct interpretation. However, some of my friends were aware that ‘prove’ also means ‘test’, and so the exception tests the rule, and if the rule still applies then it must be a good one.
On the face of it, this makes a lot more sense, yet it is still not entirely satisfying. It seems that most people have forgotten, or never learned, what the expression means, and this is a shame since it is so clear and useful. Let’s say that you want to park on a particular street. You see a sign that says ‘No parking on Wednesdays.’ It happens to be a Tuesday (why not), so you are free to park. The rule is: you can park here every day. The exception is: but not on Wednesdays. Thus the expression.
One of the admirable qualities of Mark Forsyth’s book is that he dispels so many language myths and misunderstandings – though not the one I have just mentioned. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss’ is an expression that had always left me wondering, until Forsyth came along to explain that ‘rolling’ here refers to the use of the stone, and not its motion. A ‘rolling stone’ is a garden or lawn roller, a large heavy cylindrical roll that gardeners push in front of them like a wheelbarrow and that smooths down the grass, giving that wonderfully English striped pattern of light and dark green. Think of Wimbledon during tennis season.
(Edit: as Derek Beyer points out in the comments, this might be a spurious etymology. The expression probably dates back to Roman times, and is quoted in a work of John Heywood’s in 1546 as being in common usage. Whilst it’s possible that Forsyth is right in his assertion, we would do well to notice that the word ‘lawn’ as an area of grassy ground kept mowed only dates to 1733.)
Like Bill Bryson, whose ‘Mother Tongue’ and ‘Made in America’ are fine studies in etymology, Forsyth aims to flavour his writing with a generous dash of wit; unlike Bryson, he is usually unsuccessful. He is, however, especially good on the subject of sausages, producing these two charmers:
“Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.”
“Frankfurt is now best known as a financial centre, but also gave its name to a kind of low-rent sausage called a frankfurter.”
The use of ‘low-rent’ there to describe the sausage is, if you will forgive the pun, delicious.
From those rare heights Forsyth soon falls, providing grammarians with a rich seam of semantically ambiguous sentences.
First, on the topic of sausage poison and the etymology of botulism:
“In 1895 there was a funeral in Belgium. Ham was served to the guests at the wake and three of them dropped down dead. This must have delighted the undertakers, but it also meant that the remaining meat could be rushed to the University of Ghent.”
How many funerals were there in Belgium that year – just the one? And whilst I can see what Forsyth means about rushing the meat to the university for a closer analysis, I hardly see the need for the modal ‘could’.
Then, discussing the word ‘turkey’:
“But those aren't the turkeys we eat at Christmas with bread sauce and relatives.”
Surely this sentence should have been spotted by the editor and rewritten. At first I thought it was meant as a joke, but though I reread it many times, I saw no intentional humour.
On executions and the etymology of the word ‘derrick’:
“Thomas Derrick was a nasty man. There hadn't been enough applicants for the role of executioner and so the Earl of Essex pardoned a rapist on condition that he would take on the job. That rapist was Derrick.”
How many applicants does one want for the job of executioner? Just the one would have done, unless he happened to have no arms. I can imagine the Earl sitting there, saying to himself, well, we only had five applicants; I shan't bother looking through them, but instead I’ll go and find myself a convicted rapist to give the job to.
On programming languages:
“Monty Python is, for reasons best known to nobody, rather popular with computer programmers. There’s even a programming language called Python, based on their sketches.”
How would you integrate the Ministry of Silly Walks into a computer programming language — as a way of accommodating arrays? Perhaps he meant to say ‘named in the series’ honour.’
One more. Here is Forsyth in an otherwise excellent chapter on mathematics, introducing the equals sign:
“Most mathematics used to be written out in full sentences, which is why the equals sign was invented by a sixteenth-century Welshman who rejoiced in the name of Robert Recorde.”
There is so much to say that I should rather say nothing.
When it isn't joyously misleading, Forsyth’s writing is either unfunny or leaden. Here he is talking about William Minor and the OED (a story much better presented by Simon Winchester, and which takes up more space than strictly necessary):
“[Minor] read and read and read and took note after note after note, and sent the notes to Murray [the editor].”
At least this is Forsyth’s own style. Compare his preface:
“I would start with a single word and then connect it to another word and then to another word and so on and so forth until I was exhausted and could do no more.”
It is sad to consider that somebody with such an obvious love of language should be so poor at employing it.
There are many redeeming aspects, however, that save this book from the charity shop. Ironically for a book that reads like an over-long series of footnotes, the footnotes themselves are excellent. There is an outstanding one that briefly mentions the ‘merkin’, whose meaning I will leave it to the reader to discover.
The trouble is that Forsyth never takes advantage of the book form. ‘The Eytmologicon’ is clearly the product of a website – in this case, one called ‘The Inky Fool’, which sounds like a second-rate Gilbert and Sullivan character. The chapters are too short to be properly called chapters, and Forsyth spins from one etymology to the next with such speed that it truly leaves the reader feeling dizzy. I often felt like I was reading a year’s worth of RSS feeds, though without the spacing between them to appreciate Forsyth’s rhetorical questions. If he is going to ask me, “[Can] you guess what butterflies have to do with psychiatry and pasta?”, he should at least give me a day to come up with an answer.
There is no index or bibliography, which again suggests that Forsyth is more comfortable leaving such things to Google. This, strangely, reveals Forsyth’s greatest strength, and a unique selling point of sorts: he is at home with technology in a way that other more venerable writers are not. He mentions ‘Mozilla Firefox’, ‘Bluetooth’, and ‘Wikipedia’, as well as ‘pwned’. Now imagine Bryson or Melvyn Bragg referring to the word ‘pwned.’ Hard to, isn’t it?
I came extremely close to ordering an etymological dictionary from Amazon recently, but when I considered its cost and its bulk I decided that it might put too great a strain on my relationship with my wife. ‘The Etymologicon’ is a short, tidy book that sits well on my bookshelf. I feel guilty for having sped through it as I did, but for all Forsyth’s failings as a writer he does know how to infect his reader with an enthusiasm for words, and that’s all I really wanted anyway.
