Category Archives: word tasting notes

sequacious

Posted on March 21, 2024 | Leave a comment

Lead is the most sequacious metal. 

I’ll prove it. What metal is quite ductile, and yet not too costly? Easily lead. What metal can be melted readily and formed into whatever model is required? Easily lead. What metal will behave as you want without oxidizing excessively or otherwise reacting and altering? Easily lead. And what is a good definition of sequacious? ‘Easily led’. 

You see how neatly it follows? As well it should. An argument that is sequacious follows neatly, with tidy reasoning tending in a single direction like a smooth sales pitch. Music that is sequacious has notes that follow neatly in entirely regular order. A person who is sequacious is one who follows neatly – one who is credulous and will adhere without second thought to the dictates of their leader. And a thing or object that is sequacious is ductile, yielding, and easy to shape. …Well, sequacious is not commonly used in that last sense anymore, but, then, it’s not very commonly used at all – though there are many occasions where we could use it.

I won’t say that sequacious is itself a sequacious word in form – it does have all the vowels, but not in exact order, and the u repeats; it also ends as it starts, with s. But its etymology follows neatly enough. It starts with Latin sequor ‘I follow’, which gains -ax ‘inclined to’ to make sequax ‘follower’ (sounds like ducks in a row, doesn’t it?); that has a combining form sequac-, which mixes with -ious and there you have it, a nice tidy sequence.

Tidiness is appealing, and can be a good thing. However, a certain amount of resistance, complication, and thought can also be valuable. Being easily led is great for myrmidons and myrmecoids, and perhaps for dogs and ducks and ductile metals, and it’s true that being excessively reactive or unstable is often undesirable – though there will always be elements that are, such as potassium and cesium – but persons of a sequacious mettle will never be able to get the lead out, steel their resolve, and brass their way through to iron out difficulties. And while lead’s sequacious properties may seem a useful model, when looking at the public sphere, we should extend the analogy even farther: What metal is known to be damaging to the healthy functioning of the brain? Easily lead. And what metal is famously of low value? Easily lead.

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flibbertigibbet

Posted on March 14, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Daddy told me to tell you that I don’t know what he hired you for and not to tell me. That I’m totally untrustworthy. I’m a flibbertigibbet. Come on, let’s get out of here.”

That scene from Joe Versus the Volcano is what always comes to my mind when I think of flibbertigibbet. Others think first of The Sound of Music:

“How do you find a word that means Maria? A flibbertigibbet? A will-o’-the-wisp? A clown?”

I have to wonder where else in popular entertainment flibbertigibbet has been used. It’s such a lovely, lively word – like a flapper fluttering in furs and taffeta, or a flivver’s flat tire flip-flopping on the tarmac. (Or, I suppose, like a gibbeted robber babbling deliriously for a final filbert, though that’s rather unpleasant.) It’s a word that expresses in sound the idea “Why say one thing when you can say two? Why say two when you can say three?”

It expresses it in its history, too. In its earliest forms, flibbertigibbet seems to have been just flibbergib, a kind onomatopoeia of bafflegab, folderol, rigmarole, and ad libitum hocus pocus – the daily verbal traffic of the average gossiping tattletale: a merge of flibber and gib, two and one to make three to make one. But why have one syllable of gib when you can have two of gibbet (with that little diminutive – a creditable derivative, though indubitably punitive, with its adventitious baleful overtone), and why have two of flibber when you can have three of flibberti (we could as readily spell it flibber-de-gibbet, which would make it rather oojah-cum-spiff)?

And that is the basic origin of the flibbertigibbet: someone for whom words multiply, a person who simply can’t not say – originally a flattering sycophant or a gossip, but now evolved to mean a flighty person, one who may well babble endlessly but who in any event is as firm and easy to follow as a butterfly. And, of course, social stereotypes being what they are, a flibbertigibbet has generally been thought of as a woman.

There were, to be sure, attempts to turn flibbertigibbet another way. Shakespeare and Walter Scott both gave it as a name to a demon or imp – in Scott’s Kenilworth, what the OED calls “an impish-looking, mischievous, and flighty urchin.” Meaning, perhaps, a sort of devilish ragamuffin. But it didn’t stick. Now it’s not the Artful Dodger or Puck, or a little Beelzebub; it’s Meg Ryan or Julie Andrews. Well, I’d rather adorable than abominable.

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hobbledehoy

Posted on March 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

What does a ragamuffin become when he hits that awkward age? A hobbledehoy.

Strictly speaking, hobbledehoy just means any awkward youth, in those gawky years between childhood and adulthood – though it typically implies is a boy. A girl, if she was not sufficiently “ladylike,” might in times past have been called a hoyden or a tomboy (hobbledehoy, hoyden, and tomboy? oy, oy, oy). I would like to suggest that an awkward but boisterous adolescent girl might be called a hobbledehoyden… but the words are not related, as far as we know.

Mind you, we are hobbled by incomplete etymological information. There are various guesses as to the origins of both words, but, as the words were confected not in the hallowed halls of academe or at the cramped carrels of the law-clerks but in the wide wild world, where writers simply put down what they heard and later readers tried to fit it with what they recognized, what we get is an awkward trail that has little more direction, reason, or consistency than a foolish fourteen-year-old.

In particular, we may note that most of the older appearances of hobbledehoy – in the 1500s and 1600s – are more like hobber-de-hoy or hobby de hoy or even hobbadehoy. They all have the hoy and they all have the hob and they even all have the de, but that first off-beat syllable is variable. It’s unlikely that the word has any original relation to hobble, but it’s clear to see that hobble drew the word to it. After all, hobbling is awkward, and hobbledehoys are awkward, and it just made sense, right? 

Not that the word always implied that the person was awkward. It may have come from an old French word for a country squire (perhaps also applied to apprentices) plus another old French word for ‘today’, but that’s based on sound resemblance and has no real trail of evidence. Some suggest that it originally meant ‘today’s young upstart’, but all the recorded uses seem simply to signify a teenage boy, with all that is normally expected from one. The hobble just happened to be around, and the word’s development of form and sense has been hobbled by it.

What if it had been drawn into the gravity of some other word? One could imagine a historical circumstance in which the word instead shifted to hoppity-hoy, which would have been more lively. Well, when words are in that awkward period, you don’t always know just what they’re going to end up as. Just like awkward youths. For all you know, your hobbledehoy might end up happily matched to a flibbertigibbet.

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ragamuffin

Posted on March 8, 2024 | 2 comments

Oh, that Oliver Twist! What a perfect ragamuffin. Making mistakes like any little boy, but so colourful, always improvising, and always worth a song, too – but always in want of a little bread, and all in tatters… the little devil!

You see what a perfect ragamuffin he is? We have all the parts, and then some. Make mistakes: muff. Little boy: ragazzo. Colourful, improvising, song: raga. A little bread: muffin. Tatters: rag. Little devil: also muffin.

Of course not all of those actually relate directly to ragamuffin. But if I can sniff and taste a wine and get things that definitely are not actually in the wine (leather, chocolate, tobacco, and pencil shavings, or petrol, or gooseberries), I can taste a word and find things that fill it out in my mind, and you can’t stop me. It’s a process not of deduction or induction but of abduction. And, look, we know words by association anyway.

So let’s look closer at all these abducted bits. First: muff, as in make a mistake. It seems to come from muff meaning ‘clumsy or incompetent person’, which may come from muff meaning ‘handwarmer’, coming from a sense meaning ‘mitten’, which is likely related to muffle and muffler. No indication that it has any etymological relation to ragamuffin.

Next: ragazzo. That’s just Italian for ‘little boy’. When you think about it for a moment, though, it’s kind of an odd word; I mean, Italian comes from Latin, but Latin for ‘little boy’ is puer. It seems that the Italian word comes either from an Arabic word for ‘courier’ or ‘delivery boy’ or, perhaps, from Greek ῥάκος rhákos ‘rag, tatter’ – as Wiktionary says, “suggesting the clothing.” Weirdly, the Greek ῥάκος doesn’t appear to be related to English rag (what? I know, right?), and the Italian ragazzo has no known relation to ragamuffin. I mean, for heaven’s sake, but you can’t just say that it has to be so. As linguists love to say, etymology by sound is not sound etymology. You need a chain of evidence, and ideally a plausible morphophonetic route. Words may run loose in the world like little Dickensian orphans, but if you want to give a word an inheritance, you need a birth certificate.

OK, how about raga? Strictly it’s rāga, even more strictly राग. It means, literally, ‘colour’, but in music it refers to a particular musical form. It’s hard to explain raga to people used to European forms of music, because it is less fixed than a symphony or other scored composition and both more and less fixed than a jazz jam session. A raga will have a specific scale associated with it, or sometimes two, because the descending scale can be different from the ascending scale; it has a prescribed structure of parts, and within each part it has specific time signatures (which are more complex than European ones, and I’m not going to start on them here) and certain associated motifs. Within that framework, each performance is like an ex tempore musical essay, improvised within a framework. It can be sung or played by an instrument such as a sitar. For a good example, try Roopa Panesar’s performance of Raga Bhairavi (with Dalbir Singh Rattan on table) at Stornoway, Scotland. Needless to say, there’s no etymological connection between raga and ragamuffin. But you can eat a muffin while listening to a raga, and so – in a twist – can Oliver.

Speaking of which, there’s muffin, the little bread we all know and love, though somehow the English muffin is nothing like the American muffin. Either way, it probably comes from a Low German word muffe ‘little cake’, the source of which is not forthcoming. Is it related to ragamuffin? It is not, but you can have some more if you say “Please, sir.”

OK, well, how about rag, as in tattered clothes? That comes up from old Germanic roots referring to fur and frayed fabric. And it is assumed to be the source of the rag in ragamuffin – it’s rag-a-muffin, with an added syllable for connection (as in thingamajig, or as some people do with rigamarole).

And, finally, the muffin, the one that in some historical uses has meant ‘little devil’ or ‘mean creature’ or similar. It may come from Middle French malfé or maufé ‘demon, evildoer’ or Anglo-Norman malfelon, maufelon ‘devil, scoundrel’ (per the OED). It doesn’t seem to be related to the pastry. It may or may not be the source of the muffin in ragamuffin, but if it’s not, we’re all out of leads. Will the poor little ragamuffin come into its etymological inheritance? Dickens only knows. But at least it’s picked the pockets of a few other languages along the way.

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bathos

Posted on March 4, 2024 | Leave a comment

Drop down, ye heavens, from above,
And drench with tears of broken love
This sad grey world, once bright, now lorn,
Its golden edge dull, brassed, and worn:

A world that lately housed a spark
Of joy and fun, now snuffed and dark;
For there shall be no glee here for us
Who have lost my hamster, Doris.

O Doris! Furry ball of glee!
What evil hand stole you from me!
Was it bad grain or rancid nuts
That spurred the torsion of your guts?

Nothing is right, nothing is real
Within the stillness of your wheel…
I water your wee casket’s plot
With my abundant tears and snot.

Wow… that’s deep, eh? Deep like the ocean. Or a lake. Or anyway your bath. Well, it is bathos…

You know bathos, right? It’s like pathos, but bad. But we don’t get bathos from bad plus pathos, though that would work too. We get it from an official writing of the Pope.

Well, OK, we get it from an essay by Alexander Pope. In 1727 he wrote “Peri Bathous,” which, let me say right away, was not about a bathhouse frequented by Persian pixies. No, it was a satirical essay looking at – to quote its subtitle – “The Art of Sinking in Poetry.” Note the spelling carefully: Sinking, not Stinking. Poetic bathos is like the Vasa, which was a grand Swedish ship that was launched to much fanfare and, after cruising less than a mile, sank – a battleship become a bathyscaphe.

And yes, the bath in bathyscaphe is the same as in bathos: it’s from Greek βάθος bathos, which is of course our word du jour. (Oh, and in case you’re wondering, officially in English the a is “long,” as in Baywatch, though in Greek it certainly is not.) This word, in Greek, means ‘depth’. It is not related to πάθος pathos, although of course the resemblance is striking and was used to good effect by Pope – and has since reinforced the sense of bathos as meaning specifically ‘bad pathos’ as opposed to the flight path of Icarus, reaching for the heavens but sinking disastrously.

It is also – you may be surprised to learn – not related to bath. Bath comes by way of Germanic from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning ‘warm’ (which means I categorically deny the existence of cold baths, and if you try to get me into one I will categorically deny you too). But bathos is related to benthic, which refers to the greatest depths of the ocean. And perhaps the bottom of your tub, if it – unlike mine – is deep enough.

The most important trait of bathos is that the person creating it must be oblivious; it must be done in all sincerity. There shall be no taking the piss. Which means that deliberate camp doesn’t really count – and neither does my poem above, because I wrote it quite consciously to sink from the sublime (or an aspiration to sublimity) to the ridiculous. But if you think I was going to do a deep dive on the poetry of my angsty adolescence to find a genuine example… well, no.

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carminative

Posted on February 26, 2024 | 1 comment

Fabæ fructus musicales
Canitis tubas ventrales
Plenas flatus divinorum
Fabæ cibi angelorum

Does that look like it might be from the Carmina Burana? It’s not, though it would fit, specifically in the “In Taberna” section. It’s actually a Latin version* of that old favourite rhyme:

Beans, beans, the musical fruit
The more you eat, the more you toot
The more you toot, the better you feel
So eat your beans at every meal!

You may be thinking, “Ew. Why do you have to be such a card?” But consider that today’s word is carminative, which is a name for a substance (such as simethicone) that relieves intestinal gas – either by reducing how much is made, or by the more traditional and more musical means of release.

And why bring in the Carmina Burana? Well, it happens that carmina and carminative both come from carmen – not Carmen as in the opera by Bizet, but the Latin noun. Carmina is simply the plural – it means ‘songs’ – while carminative is an English derivative.

So… a carminative makes your guts sing songs?

Heh. No. It turns out there are two identical Latin nouns carmen. This is from the other (somehow unrelated) one, which refers to a card for combing flax or wool. It’s not that a carminative literally scrapes the knots out of your guts (ow); the theory of the humours held that winds (i.e., farts, burps) arise from gross humours (gross in more than one sense, clearly), and a carminative substance combs them out like knots. So… from knotty to naughty (like that old joke: What did one burp say to the other? “Let’s be stinkers and go out the back way”).

So it makes your guts busy, though it doesn’t make them Bizet. But even if it doesn’t bring to mind medieval monk business, you’ll know something’s gone Orff.

* Not an exact translation; it more literally means

Beans musical fruit
You play the belly trumpets
Full of divine breath
Beans food of the angels

And yes, I made the Latin version. I really wanted to make the second line play on “carmina” but that’s a neuter noun and the adjective would have been “ventralia,” which I couldn’t make rhyme.

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scruple

Posted on February 22, 2024 | Leave a comment

We all walk with little rocks in our shoes that twinge our soles and stop us short, cause us to pause a mere shaving of an inch and sliver of a minute before our goal, to leave the last fraction of a dram in our glass. We suffer with our little rocks and are impatient with others for theirs, and yet we despise those who lack them.

Those rocks are, literally and literarily, scruples: from Latin scrupulus, diminutive of scrupus, ‘rough or sharp stone’ – a word that shares a Proto-Indo-European root with short and curt. Scrupus was also, figuratively, ‘anxiety’, and so a scrupulus, a sharp little pebble, was a misgiving – and we call those who are free of such misgivings unscrupulous.

Ah, but how we long to take off the shoe and fling the pebble away! To make a scene as described by Rachel Wetzsteon in “After Eden”:

and when one too many led
to wise judgements too few, “I’m trying
to break up with you!” he shouted as
stockings and scruples flew

And how we dread and resent scruples, and see them as so much more and less and other than a simple hard little piece of earth, like Anna Lætitia Barbauld in “To Mr. [S.T.] C[oleridge]”:

Scruples here,
With filmy net, most like the autumnal webs
Of floating gossamer, arrest the foot
Of generous enterprise; and palsy hope
And fair ambition with the chilling touch
Of sickly hesitation and blank fear.

And how we are impatient with those who demur and “make scruples,” and how we, like Countess of Winchilsea Anne Finch in “The Spleen,” have distaste for those who inflict them on others:

By thee Religion, all we know,
That should enlighten here below,
Is veiled in darkness, and perplexed
With anxious doubts, with endless scruples vexed,
And some restraint implied from each perverted text.

And how we know that however much ground there may be to a scruple, it is too nice – and not nice enough – a distinction, too much discretion and not enough valor; like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we scorn

some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward

But how, too, we know that loss of scruples can lead us astray, and not always in ways we will enjoy remembering. Edgar Allan Poe’s victory over scruples in “To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad” leads to a baleful discovery (and I don’t just mean his rhyme scheme):

Thus I pacified Psyche and kissed her,
      And tempted her out of her gloom—
      And conquered her scruples and gloom:
And we passed to the end of the vista,
      But were stopped by the door of a tomb—
      By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said—“What is written, sweet sister,
      On the door of this legended tomb?”
      She replied—“Ulalume—Ulalume—
      ’Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”

And yet scruples are such little things. It’s not merely that a scruple is a short sharp shock in our sock, a tiny pointed pebble. It’s that scruple also, on the basis of littleness, names (or has in past times named) small units of measurement: a third of a dram (and thus a twenty-fourth of an ounce), a sixtieth of an arc degree, an eighteenth of a minute, a twelfth of an inch. 

So a scruple is to an inch as an inch is to a foot, but a scruple is to a foot an intolerable impediment, not to be stood for or on. To make scruples is to argue on the finest little points, but the finest little point of a scruple in your shoe is simply not to be argued with. And yet there must be some point to having scruples, for when unscrupulousness is afoot it simply cannot be allowed to stand.

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chumming

Posted on February 18, 2024 | Leave a comment

“Looks like some friends are joining us!”

That’s the sound of someone who’s been chumming. But chumming is two different words, and the sentence has two different connotations.

You certainly know the more common chum, verb and (more often) noun. “Why so glum, chum?” “Who’ve you been chumming around with?” It’s of murky origin, but might be related to chambermate; the oldest use (from the earlier 1700s) refers to having someone as roommate: “We chummed together in university.” More recently and generally, it has come to mean ‘be on friendly terms with’; chumming around tends to imply being on widely and extravertedly friendly terms with various persons, and it often has a negative tone: “He’s been chumming around with some rather shady sorts”; “He got the contract? What do you expect – they’ve been chumming around together”; “You can tell a lot about a person by who they’re chumming with, and just look who she’s having for dinner at her place.”

You may or may not know the other chum, noun and (more often) verb. It’s from an American language, perhaps Powhatan or perhaps Chinook Jargon, and it refers to the kind of stuff you distribute in the ocean to attract sharks and other marine predators: the often rancid remnants of desecrated marine life – fish blood, fish guts, fish bits – and the distribution thereof in the water. If you’re in a fishing vessel rather than a cruise ship and you’re “chumming around,” it probably means not literally making new friends but more wryly “making new friends”: drawing the attention of sharks, bass, and similar carnivorous sea creatures.

And so you have a sort of mirror “never the twain shall meet” relation between the two: are you chumming, or are you chumming? Except… what if someone is socially baiting to attract friends who are, figuratively, sharks? Let us imagine that someone is making public statements on social media or in the press that are “just asking questions” about something that non-vicious people had settled a long time ago. “No, I’m not committing to a position; I just want to know whether you really think this kind of people are truly equal human beings.” They’re not attacking, but by raising the topic, they are treating it as an open one, one for which either answer might have some merit. And in so doing they’re attracting the responses of people who they are happy enough to be generally friendly with – they’re chumming for people to chum around with – people who approach such “debates” about the same way as sharks approach discussions over who to have for dinner.

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hopscotch

Posted on February 14, 2024 | 1 comment

Hopscotch, as you can tell by the name, is a kind of whisky made with beer.

You doubt me? It’s made in Vermont by Mad River Distillers. They use “Triple Sunshine” IPA (a kind of beer that has a lot of hops in it) made by Lawson’s Finest Liquids. Now, obviously, as they are in Vermont, it is not truly Scotch; it would have to be made in Scotland for that. But it is a single malt made in the same style.

So we’ve cleared that up.

What?

Children’s game? Are you serious? With hops and Scotch whisky?

I see: in the Oxford English Dictionary they have a quote from 1886 referring to “the well-known boys’ game of ‘hop-scotch’” and another quote from 1801 saying “Among the school-boys in my memory there was a pastime called Hop-Scotch.” So it was boys playing with a bitter plant and…

No?

OK. Scotch that. Apparently it has nothing to do with those kinds of hops or that kind of Scotch. (And lately, at least in North America, it seems to be thought of more as a girls’ game.)

In fact, this word, hopscotch, is a fun little lexical grid game because it is made of two parts, each of which has an unrelated homonym:

  • Hops, the plant (which can be in the singular, hop, though it seldom is), comes from Proto-Germanic *huppô and has cognates in German Hopfen and French houblon. 
  • Hop, the action, comes from Proto-Germanic *huppōną and has cognates hoppen and hoppa in several Germanic languages (and also hobble in English). 
  • Scotch, the beverage, is formed from Scot plus ish distilled together, and Scot is from Latin Scōtī, which named both the Scottish and the Irish peoples. 
  • Scotch, the noun and verb meaning ‘scratch, cut, score’, referring in this case to the markings on the ground for the game (now often done with chalk or even paint) – and, as in “scotch a rumour,” using the metaphor of scratching out – comes from Anglo-Norman escocher, from Old French coche ‘notch’, apparently from Italian cocca ‘notch, corner’.

So, it stands to reason that there are four options:

 hop ‘bitter plant’hop ‘leap’
Scotch ‘whisky’Hopscotch (1)Hopscotch (2)
scotch ‘scratch’hopscotch (3)hopscotch (4)

If hopscotch (4) can be leaping around a scratched court, and Hopscotch (1) can be whisky made from beer featuring bitter herbs, then there should also be a Hopscotch (2) that is leaping around whisky – perhaps a whisky bar (yes, in Saint John, New Brunswick) or a whisky festival (yes, in Vancouver) – as well as a hopscotch (3) that is something made by scratching bitter herbs (well, there’s a whole beer company by that name in Auckland, New Zealand, and there are also I’m not even sure how many beers by that name made by various companies, including one made sometimes across the street from me at Goose Island, though I don’t see any that are of the type of beer called Scotch ale; there is also a hopped cider called Hopscotch made by Saltbox Brewing Company in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia).

And if you want to know about the rules of the game hopscotch, there’s a whole Wikipedia article on it. Look there. I’m just the word dude. Besides, I’ve never played it. When I was a kid in Alberta, it was for girls only. Oh, and if you want to know about the Vermont whisky? Never had that either, but I’ll take the next chance I get.

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rigmarole

Posted on February 12, 2024 | 1 comment

Ugh, those friggin’ regulations. Whatever you do, it’s not enough. It’s like some kind of deranged quadrille or cotillion – every step you take, there’s another step to take, all being called by some man running you ragged. It saps morale. It feels rigged, like you have to know the right strings to pull. It’s just more and more rigmarole.

Rigmarole. It could be such a nice thing, like eating rigatoni to the sound of a barcarolle. But no, it’s nothing but multifarious regulations made of murky regurgitated legal blither.

Or… well, how would you define rigmarole? Like the big runaround? A long litany of hocus-pocus? Legal blah-blah-blah? A verbal mugging? Or simply beleaguering gibberish? Or some other kind of verbal thingamajig?

Speaking of which, you may know this as rigamarole, with the extra a syllable to give it a rhythm like thingamajig or gobbledegook. But that’s just a needless addition – though, for that very reason, rather apposite. And the truth is that rigmarole is already an altered form. It is from – get ready for this – Ragman roll.

That’s kind of confusing or suspicious or disappointing, isn’t it? How is there rhyme or reason in that? What, for that matter, is a Ragman roll?

As it turns out, it’s two things, and there is disagreement about which of them it came from, and how the two are related and how either of them gave rise to rigmarole, and the various often lengthy discourses on historical minutiae never give a fully satisfying explanation.

The first Ragman Rolls are the… oh, here, I can’t even, I’m just going to quote this rigmarole from Wikipedia:

the collection of instruments by which the nobility and gentry of Scotland subscribed allegiance to King Edward I of England, during the time between the Conference of Norham in May 1291 and the final award in favour of Balliol in November 1292; and again in 1296. Of the former of these records two copies were preserved in the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey (now in the National Archives (United Kingdom) at Kew), and it has been printed by Thomas Rymer. Another copy, preserved originally in the Tower of London, is now also in the National Archives. The latter record, containing the various acts of homage and fealty extorted by Edward from John Balliol and others in the course of his progress through Scotland in the summer of 1296 and in August at the parliament of Berwick, was published by Prynne from the copy in the Tower and now in the National Archives. Both records were printed by the Bannatyne Club in 1834.

Whoever all those people are, not one of them is Ragman. The further explanation, quoted from Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, is that Ragman Roll “originally meant the ‘Statute of Rageman’ (De Ragemannis), a legate of Scotland, who compelled all the clergy to give a true account of their benefices, that they might be taxed at Rome accordingly.” Which still does not explain the etymology.

But then there’s the second thing. There was a game of chance called Ragman, in which the key instrument was a roll of writings, called the Ragman roll, which had verses within it with strings attached to them, and you pulled a string and read the verse, which described some personal character (like a roll-playing game?). And… yeah, I don’t really get the picture either. But why the name? Merriam-Webster explains, “The roll was called a Ragman roll after a fictional king purported to be the author of the verses.” Which explains nothing. A ragman was someone who collected and dealt in rags, which was not a high social position, so applying the name to a king or noble seems to have been a derogation.

So perhaps the game is named after the Scottish records described above. Which, it has been suggested, are so called because the original was a number of rather ragged pieces of paper or parchment sewn together. And also perhaps to insult the king in question, Edward I (insults not being out of the ordinary when dealing with questions of royalty between Scotland and England). At the end, though, the histories and explanations, once unrolled, remain ragged, the connection between all of that and what we have now seems roughly stitched without further justification, and so we’ve learned a whole lot of not much.

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