Guten Morgen, as they say in Münster, and welcome to the mongermonger! I hope you brought your money.
Come examine our menagerie of mongers, from organic and grammatical to mongrels in the manger. We’ve had mongers in English for as long as we’ve had English – and before. Old English mangere traces through Old Saxon and Old High German all the way back to classical Latin mango, which meant ‘dealer’ or ‘trader’ – it’s not related to the mango you put in your smoothie (that’s a Dravidian word via Portuguese), but it certainly has borne fruit.
The fruit is sometimes marginal, mind you, more for ragmen than for royals, but so it goes: the life of a trader is sometimes meagrely managed. And the smirch of filthy lucre has clung to it; even half a millennium ago, monger was more associated with dealing in dodgy goods – sometimes fish, but sometimes fishy things.
But if you hunger for a monger, there will surely be something on the shelf to fill your bill. The available kinds of mongers are effectively endless, since you can always make new ones; if you want to call someone a meme-monger, you may. Here are all the kinds of mongers listed in Wiktionary (I’d show you the Oxford English Dictionary list, but I’m not trying to give you a migraine) – choose among them:
airmonger
alemonger
applemonger
balladmonger
barbermonger
beermonger
bloodmonger
bookmonger
boroughmonger
breadmonger
buttermonger
caremonger
carpetmonger
ceremony-monger
cheesemonger
coalmonger
cockmonger
cornmonger
costermonger
deathmonger
defeatmonger
dictionary-monger
doom-monger
doubtmonger
dramamonger
eirmonger
fadmonger
fancymonger
fashionmonger
fearmonger
feathermonger
fellmonger
feltmonger
fictionmonger
filthmonger
fishmonger
flashmonger
fleshmonger
flourmonger
foodmonger
foolmonger
fruitmonger
garlicmonger
ghostmonger
gospelmonger
gossipmonger
grievance-monger
hairmonger
hatemonger
haymonger
horrormonger
horsemonger
hypemonger
ideamonger
ironmonger
ironmongery
jestmonger
jobmonger
lawmonger
lease-monger
lightmonger
loanmonger
lovemonger
mass-monger
maxim-monger
mealmonger
meritmonger
miracle-monger
money-monger
mongeress
muck-monger
murdermonger
musicmonger
muttonmonger
mystery-monger
newsmonger
noisemonger
nostrum-monger
panicmonger
pardonmonger
peacemonger
pearmonger
peltmonger
phrasemonger
placemonger
pleasuremonger
poisonmonger
powermonger
prayer-monger
profitmonger
prophecy-monger
pupil-monger
pussymonger
questmonger
race-monger
relicmonger
rulemonger
rumourmonger
saltmonger
scandalmonger
scaremonger
shitmonger
sleazemonger
smutmonger
species-monger
spoilsmonger
starmonger
statesmonger
stockfishmonger
system-monger
talemonger
trouble-monger
twaddlemonger
versemonger
warmonger
watermonger
whoremonger
winemonger
wiremonger
witchmonger
wit-monger
wondermonger
woodmonger
woolmonger
woo-monger
wordmonger
Quite a megascopic list, isn’t it? I prefer the very last one, though I have been known to engage the trade of some of the others. I can’t say they mong to me, because we lost the simple verb – we had mangian in Old English, but by Modern English that had been sold down the river, and we had to reuse the noun.
So here I am, mongering mongers. (What a monster!) Do you want to take some home with you? Come along, I’ll ring you up.
…well, we’ve read that bit. Let’s flip to the back of the Bible. In the end, there was vermouth.*
Yes. Allow me to quote Revelation 8:11 in Martin Luther’s translation:
Und der Name des Sterns heißt Wermut. Und der dritte Teil der Wasser ward Wermut; und viele Menschen starben von den Wassern, weil sie waren so bitter geworden.
If you know German, you know that Wermut can be translated as vermouth. In fact, the word vermouth is what French (of its time) made of the German word Wermut. Here is a translation of the above:
And the name of the star was vermouth. And the third part of the water was vermouth; and many people died from the waters, because they were so bitter.
Hmm, that’s kind of a negative opinion of vermouth, isn’t it? I mean, I know a lot of people don’t like the stuff. There’s a famous comedy routine by Hudson and Landry in which a guy is ordering a lot of liquor from a store and says “no vermouth” because “it makes my wife sick” (“She’s out of town but I do it just in her memory”). There is also an anecdote of a famous bartender (there is such a thing?) who, when making a martini, in place of adding vermouth simply nodded in the direction of Paris. And yet, it gets used.
Not just the dry (“French”) kind in a martini.† The sweet kind in a Manhattan too. And a negroni. And quite a few other cocktails. People in some countries (Spain, for example) also enjoy sweet vermouth on ice, unmixed. Sweet, bitter, and strong together make a great drink.
Vermouth isn’t the only sweet and bitter beverage out there, either. There are various herbal bittersweet liqueurs, and gin and tonic also follows the same pattern – and all for the same original reason. You know the song “a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down”? Tonic water was created because the British invaders in India took quinine to deal with their malarial fevers, and sugar and fizz helped it go down. And, as Ogden Nash said, “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”: if tonic, why not gin? On the same principle, vermouth was also created – centuries earlier – as a means of getting people to take a bitter medicine.
What medicine was that? Let me give you a hint, in the form of the King James Version translation of Revelation 8:11:
And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
Yes. Wormwood. That is in fact what English translations of the Bible pretty much all say in that passage. Wermut is German for wormwood as well as for vermouth, the wine-based beverage that originally contained wormwood.‡
Let’s leave aside for the moment that these people were dying of the bitterness; there are in fact several plants called wormwood, and the species that was probably being referred to by John of Patmos, Artemisia herba-alba, was not actually the same as the one used in vermouth. To be fair, even the one named in Revelation was commonly used for medicinal purposes; I guess the thing is just that it was bitter, and, you know, some people really would rather die than have that. But the Artemisia that our vermouth was made from and named after is claimed to have, to quote Wikipedia, “antifungal, neuroprotective, insecticidal, antimicrobial, anthelmintic, acaricidal, antimalarial, antidepressant, and hepatoprotective properties.”
The Latin name of the genus is Artemisia after Artemis, the goddess of childbirth, because of its use for gynecological conditions. But you might have noticed that wormwood has “anthelmintic” properties. That means it’s good for treating parasitic worms. And that is… not why it’s called wormwood. Ha, sorry.
I had indeed long thought that vermouth was a French interpretation of English wormwood. That’s linguistically plausible, but, as I have mentioned, vermouth is in fact an older French rendition of German Wermut (the modern French is vermout without the h). And German Wermut comes not from modern English wormwood but from the source of the modern English word: Proto-West Germanic *warjamōdā, which arrived in Old English as wermode. Which, by the 1400s, had been reinterpreted as wormewode, which made modern English wormwood.
Yes, wormwood is an eggcorn, a reconstrual based on folk etymology, like sparrowgrass for asparagus. But what does *warjamōdā mean? We’re not sure, but it might be from *warjan (‘defend against’) and *mōd (‘mind’) – that is, mental defense: the “neuroprotective” and “antidepressant” properties.
Which is kinda funny if you know the reputation of wormwood for its effects on the mind. And if you don’t, let me give you a clue in the form of a French translation of Revelation 8:11 – this is from the Nouvelle Édition de Genève:
Le nom de cette étoile est Absinthe; le tiers des eaux fut changé en absinthe, et beaucoup d’hommes moururent par les eaux, parce qu’elles étaient devenues amères.
Absinthe. Yes, absinthe names the exact same plant as wormwood (and Wermut). The Latin name of the species of wormwood used in vermouth is Artemisia absinthium. Here’s Revelation 8:11 in the Tyndale version of the Koine Greek Bible:
You see that Ἄψινθος? That’s Apsinthos, which (via Latin) is the source of the word absinthe.
Perhaps you know about absinthe. The Green Fairy. Renowned as a mild hallucinogen; maligned (perhaps unjustly) as the cause of mental breakdowns among artists of the Belle Époque. It has the anise flavour you find also in pastis and ouzo, but with the strong bitter presence of – obviously – wormwood.
So is absinthe the same as vermouth? The same herb, yes. The words also have in common a th that in French is said “t” but has been taken in English as “th.”§ But the beverages are starkly different (though neither of them today contains any appreciable amount of thujone, the psychoactive ingredient of wormwood): vermouth is based on wine (with many other flavouring agents added as well), while absinthe is a distilled spirit (with flavouring). Vermouth is 15% to 17% alcohol; the absinthe I currently have is 62%, and I’ve had stronger. Vermouth can be used in cooking where wine is indicated; absinthe can only be used where you want absinthe! Vermouth is consumed straight and used in many cocktails; you can drink absinthe neat, but things may get messy – and when it is used in cocktails, is often just sprayed or rinsed in, as in a Sazerac.
And while both beverages may (temporarily) lift the mood,¶ absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.∞
* In the beginning, too, for me; Martini & Rossi sweet vermouth was the very first alcoholic beverage I ever tasted.
† Leave it to the French to take the sweetness out. The first pale dry vermouth was made by Joseph Noilly in the early 1800s. Kinds of vermouth have proliferated in many places in recent years, but nearly all of them are sweet.
‡ Many countries prohibited the use of wormwood in beverages in the early 1900s, so your vermouth may not contain any now. And so once again a name peels away from its origin.
§ The one in absinthe does come from a “th” in the Greek original, but the one in vermouth is entirely under the influence of orthography transmogrified.
¶ Yes, mood comes from the same Old English mōd that meant ‘mind’.
Why do colonel and kernel sound the same? It’s because of a minor coronal peregrination.
I don’t mean colonization – it’s not that somewhere has been invaded by order of the crown. It’s just… well, it’s on the tip of my tongue.
And yours too. Coronal (not said like colonel or kernel; it’s “co-ro-nal”) refers, in phonetics, to sounds involving the tip of the tongue. In other places and ways it involves other high points too, of course – as in other crowns, but we’ll circle back to that. The point here is that the /r/ and /l/ phonemes are both made with the tip of the tongue, and not only that, they’re both “liquids”: they don’t stop or even seriously impede the airflow through the mouth. And they’re not dissimilar; in fact, in some languages, they’re not considered different sounds. But in other languages, they can be subject to dissimilation.
Take, for instance, the word peregrine and the word pilgrim. Both trace back to Latin peregrinus. But in some varieties of some languages, notably some descended from Latin, it is (or was) dispreferred to have two identical liquids too close together. So the first /r/ became /l/ and peregrinus became Old French pelegrinus, which became modern French pèlerin and modern English pilgrim. But we also grabbed the unaltered Latin and made peregrine and peregrination.
But let me not wander too far. The point is the tongue – specifically, the point of the column of the tongue, which is circling back. And I don’t mean circling back just because coronal comes from Latin corona, which refers to a crown (and from that the top of something) but comes ultimately from the circlet shape of a wreath (consider a corona in a solar eclipse), from Ancient Greek κορώνη(korṓnē), which referred first to the shape and then to the object.
No – although there is a kernel of truth in that, it’s that colonel traces to Old Italian colonello, from Latin columna, referring to the column of men that the officer was at the head of. The first l was pronounced /l/, as it was written. But in early French, the column retreated – that is, it circled back, by which I mean it dissimilated: rather than have two /l/ sounds too close together, the first one became /r/, in a sort of photo negative of the dissimilation in pelegrinus. And the resemblance to corona reinforced the effect: a coronel would have been one at the crown, meaning the head, yes?
And indeed in English for some time we wrote it coronel, but then in the 1500s a fascination with the vaunted classical etymology of words took hold. The same affectation that led the o to be stuffed into peple to make people to show its root in populus, and the b to be stuffed into det to make debt to show its origin as debitum, and several other similar instances, led the spelling to become colonel. And for a time a spelling pronunciation (“col-o-nel”) was also current. But ultimately we have kept the changed sound and the reverted spelling. And over time the vowels reduced and merged into the liquid, so “coronel” came to sound like “kernel.”
But what, then, about kernel? This is a word for a grain of corn, one of the columns of grains that grow on the column of the cob. Is that where it comes from?
Not at all. The kern in kernel is none other than corn in a slightly turned form, and corn is originally just an old Germanic word for ‘seed’ or ‘grain’; the -el is a diminutive, and so a kernel is a little grain or the soft seed at the centre of something. The Old English word was cyrnel; the front vowel of -el led the back vowel in corn to assimilate forward. Which is the same movement as happened in colonel, and rather the opposite of the consonant dissimilation between /l/ and /r/. And so, like opposing columns, colonel and kernel have marched towards each other. Or, rather, we might say that the two have slowly sidled towards each other, until they have attained kernel knowledge.*
* Sorry for the corny joke. Oh, and neither colonial nor carnal is related to either colonel or kernel.
When the summer air near the shores of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie starts to thread with coolness, and the Concord grapes grow heavy, and the leaves start to shiver and fade a little, my mind slips back to when I would drive down to Gerry, New York, and visit my grandmother, who has been gone more than a decade now. There is no cure for old memories, loss, and nostalgia, but there are prescriptions, and I have one here:
StreuselConcordPie
Unbaked 9″ pie shell 4½ c. (1 qt.) Concord grapes 1 c. sugar ¼ c. flour 2 tsp. lemon juice ⅛ tsp. salt OatStreusel
Wash grapes, remove skins by pinching end opposite stem. Remove skins.
Place pulp in saucepan, bring to boil, cook a few minutes until pulp is soft. Stir often. Put thru strainer while pulp is hot, to remove seeds. Mix with skins. Stir in sugar, flour, lemon juice, salt.
Place mixture in pie shell. Sprinkle on Oat Streusel. Bake at 425° for 35–40 mins.
OATSTREUSEL: Combine ½ c. minute oats, ½ c. brown sugar and ¼ c. flour. Cut in ¼ c. butter or margarine.
The recipe does not add that, after eating a slice of the pie, you should smile at whoever you are eating it with so you can show your purple teeth. That is not part of the recipe that my grandma wrote out and gave to me. But it is part of the instructions I received from her when she served me pie at her kitchen table. This recipe will not bring back my grandmother, but it will recall her. Proust had his Madeleine; I have my Concord grape pie.
And I have many other recipes. I have quite a few cookbooks: the Larousse Gastronomique I received (on my request) for my fourteenth birthday; my own copy of the Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook, my mother’s copy of which was so important to my culinary education; and a decent shelf full of others, the most used of which is probably How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Several of them are ones I received as gifts, often from my cousin (on the other side of the family), who shares with me a love for food and wine and who (with the advantage of being much older than me) helped my education in the subject.
Humans have passed down instructions for preparing food since time immemorial, of course, and we have had cookbooks for centuries at least. Among the oldest extant cookery books is The Forme of Cury, dating to 1390, a new (and uncorrected) edition of which was published in 1780. I enjoy perusing its recipes for such things as “Pygge in sawse sawge,” “chykens in hocchee,” “Connyng in clere broth,” and “laumpreys in in galantine,” though I haven’t made any of them, in part because some of the ingredients and instructions (and the very English they’re written in) present a challenge for the modern cook. You can find a lovely collection of online versions of old cookbooks at MedievalCookery.com. Cooks nearly a half millennium ago (let us say ten grandmothers back – your grandmother’s grandmother’s etc.) set down instructions such as these:
To make egges in moneshyne
Take a dyche of rosewater and a dyshe full of sugar, and set them upon a chaffingdysh, and let them boyle, then take the yolkes of viii or ix egges newe layde and putte them thereto everyone from other, and so lette them harden a lyttle, and so after this maner serve them forthe and cast a lyttle synamon and sugar upon thẽ.
How big were the dishes of rosewater and sugar? The person who wrote this down surely knew. And surely knew when the appropriate occasion was to serve this, and who would enjoy it, and how. That was understanding that was received in person and through experience, though not written down as part of the recipe.
There was, naturally, a great diversity of foodstuffs. Take this, if you have the guts:
Garbage.— Take fayre garbagys of chykonys, as þe hed, þe fete, þe lyuerys, and þe gysowrys; washe hem clene, an caste hem in a fayre potte, an case þer-to freysshe brothe of Beef or ellys of moton, an let it boyle; an a-lye it wyth brede, and ley on Pepir an Safroun, Maces, Clowys, and a lytil verious an salt, an serue forth in the maner as a Sewe.
Junk food had a different valence in the 1400s.
As you read these recipes, you get to know the general style of the cooking of the time, which favoured a few spices (such as galangal, saffron, cinnamon, cloves, and pepper), tended to rely on boiling and baking, and used more sugar than you might expect. A recipe typically ended with the instruction to serve it forth (in more recent times, that seems to go without saying). And one more thing they had in common: these recipes were not recipes.
By which I mean they were not called recipes. It was only in the early 1600s that instructions for cookery were commonly called recipes; starting slightly earlier, they were called receipts, a usage that persisted to some degree in British English until quite recently. The term recipe did exist in English before that, but it was used first for such sets of instruction as these:
Take half a handfull of Rue a handfull of isop ix fygges gardynn mynttes a handfull & boyll all thise in a quart of condyte water with thre sponefull of hony & skym it clene then streyn it thorugh a clen cloth into a close vessell & drynk therof half a pynt at ones blod to arme so contynue to it be done.
Here is a translation provided by Margaret Connolly, the author of the article from which I got this recipe:
Take half a handful of rue, a handful of hyssop, 9 figs, and a handful of garden mint. Boil all these in a quarter of water from the conduit with 3 spoonfuls of honey and skim the liquid, then strain it through a clean clothe into a vessel and seal. Drink half a pint at once to fortify your blood. And continue until it is finished.
It is a recipe, yes, and it involves things you would eat as food, yes, but in this case it is meant to treat a medical problem. We’re not at grandma’s table for dessert, not this time. But these were the original recipes, because they were the first kinds of things for which was written Recipe – Latin for ‘receive’: this is what the apothecary will prepare and you will receive. Over time, this word Recipe came to be abbreviated as a simple R with a long tail and a line across it: ℞. These days it’s usually written Rx, though there’s no x, not any more than, say, there’s a letter I in $.
This is also why recipes have been called receipts: originally, a receipt was a thing or amount received; it could be money or property, or it could be a medical preparation. Over time, as we know, the word has mainly – though not exclusively – come to be used for the record of the receiving. But we received receipt as a word for a formula, with ingredients and instructions, and it had considerable shelf life. And recipe persists, along with the decocted grammatical stylings of the genre, which originated on the bench with the chemist’s crucibles.
The spread of recipe from the apothecary to the kitchen was not even a leap. In medieval times, there was not such a sharp division between the medical and the culinary; the things that you took to make you healthy were, by and large, things that you also ate to keep you healthy, though in different combinations and servings. The restorative value of food is recognized even in the word restaurant (from the French for ‘restoring’), which named first a restorative beverage or soup, and then transferred to the places that served such. And while we in Canada and the US today can readily buy many kinds of food (including junk food) at most drug stores in sections separate from the pharmacy counter, in times past the foods and drugs were not even administered separately. Remember even the fairly recent beginning of Coca-Cola, in 1886: as a health tonic served up by the druggist, originally containing cocaine as an active ingredient.
CONSERVES AND PRESERVES. Every apothecary’s shop was formerly so full of these preparations, that it might have passed for a confectioner’s warehouse. They possess very few medicinal properties, and may rather be classed among sweetmeats, rather than medicines. They are sometimes, however, of use, for reducing into boluses or pills some of the more ponderous powders, as the preparations of iron, mercury, and tin.
Then turn the page and read this recipe:
Conserve of Red Roses.
Take a pound of red rose buds, cleared of their heels; beat them well in a mortar, and, adding by degrees two pounds of double-refined sugar, in powder, make a conserve.
After the same manner are prepared the conserves of rosemary flowers, sea-wormwood, of the leaves of wood-sorrel, &c.
The conserve of roses is one of the most agreeable and useful preparations belonging to this class. A dram or two of it, dissolved in warm milk, is ordered to be given as a gentle restringent in weakness of the stomach, and likewise in pthisical coughs, and spitting of blood. To have any considerable effects, however, it must be taken in larger quantities.
The compounding apothecary would not, perhaps, say “Recipe” when giving you this preparation. But when you paid, you might get a receipt. And if you receive a dram or several of it, I think you might feel better.
Most of the things you will receive now when you hand a pharmacist a prescription have little or nothing to do with what you will receive when you order in a restaurant. But the heart of health is the kitchen, and many a recipe is a key to a healthy heart. I am happy that my grandmother pre-scribed her recipe. It was indicated as a memory aid, and it does help me to recall her; and on preparing and receiving it, I am – and in a way, she is – restored.
How do you disparage a member of the peerage? Perhaps you cast aspersions on their asparagus? Prejudge their pargeting? No – you merely say they married beneath them. Or, better, arrange for them to marry someone of inferior station.
Those at capstone of the class pile are not famous for gender egalitarianism, but in marriage, parity is paramount. This is why we got the term parage – a noun, etymologically ‘pairing’ and a doublet of peerage, that refers to equal social rank… but, to be precise, among those who are more equal than others. That is, equal with those of the top rank, for not to be equal is to be inferior. And so if you matched someone unequally – and, back in the medieval times, this typically meant matching a noble maid to a commoner – they were disparaged. (On the other hand, you could say that if they married equally, they were apparaged, but it seems this term was not really used in English, though apparagé did exist in French.)
We don’t use the word that way anymore. It’s not that princes William and Harry weren’t disparaged by some for marrying outside of the nobility – anyway, they’re princes royal and their station is quite secure, by dint of both royalty and maleness – it’s simply that it was not seen as disparagement. And even the daughter of a duke can match with a milkman and still retain her station, if not her social circle. In truth, it’s been at least two centuries since disparage was used in its original sense, and by that time its use had long since extended.
You can see how it got from there to where we are now, right? From lowering in status specifically by marriage, it came more broadly to mean lowering in esteem, credit, or honour by any of various means. If you did a disgraceful thing, you would disparage yourself and your family. And then from that it spread to taking someone down with words – not necessarily actually lowering their state, but speaking of them as lower. And now, of course, it’s not limited to persons: you can disparage asparagus, or pargeting, or any other thing. Disparaging is effectively a synonym for casting aspersions.
Which, by the way, is unrelated. All three are: asparagus (from Greek for the plant), pargeting (via French from Latin, probably the same ‘throwing’ root as in jet and reject), and aspersions (which comes from the same Latin root meaning ‘sprinkle’ that we see in disperse). But pair and peer (the noun, not the specular verb) and their derivatives are, as I have suggested, of the same esteemed stock as the heart of disparage. And now that we have come to a less stratified understanding of society, we are free to disparage the peerage and the very concept of status differences in marriage without seeming any the less for it.
When, in the 1500s, Western Europeans came to what we now call Newfoundland, they saw the people who were already living there and called them “Red Indians,” because those people – the Beothuk – painted themselves and their dwellings with red ochre every spring.
The red ochre was made from the soil there. So, as the Beothuk were the autochthonous people of Newfoundland, and as autochthonous comes from Greek αὐτόχθων autókhthōn meaning ‘from the land itself’, you could say that they were covering themselves in the earth that was their mother. Of course, we know that the Beothuk came from other peoples on the North American continent, and they in turn came from others in other places, and so on. But they were sustained by that red soil, and it became part of them too; there are many shades of “autochthonous.”
But that is not the only potential lexical perplexity here. If you are familiar with the many names of art pigments, you may not think of ochre as red at all. And you would be perfectly reasonable in that.
Ochre, as you will find if you look in Wiktionary, is “a somewhat dark yellow orangish colour” – they show you RGB #E3A857 ; if you look in Wikipedia, it declares it to be RGB #CC7722 . Either way, it is no redder than French’s mustard. It does look like a certain kind of earth, but not the kind of earth that produced the ruddy pigments used not just by the Beothuk but, subsequently, by European-descended people throughout Newfoundland to paint – among other things – fishing stages (mainlanders call them fishing sheds or boat houses or such like).
The resolution of this is that ochre is a family of pigments, all containing ferric oxide and the various other things that make up dirt, and typically bound together with oil (from fish or seals or whatever else you may find). There is red ochre, purple ochre, brown ochre, sienna, and umber – yes, umber is of the ochre family (would you have bet on that? what’s the ochre-umber on that, do you think?). But the ochre that is “ochre ochre” is yellow ochre.
That’s not just from commonality or history of use; it’s from etymology too. Although we may be tempted to think that ochre comes from some chthonic word to do with earth – or perhaps, since it sounds like “oaker,” from something that grows in the earth (not okra, though) – it comes, in fact, from ὠχρός ōkhrós ‘pale’.
Which, I suppose, when I compare it with umber, and sienna, and red ochre, it is. But when I compare it with my own skin, which is around the colour of the skin of the Western Europeans who called the Beothuk “Red Indians,” it occurs to me that yellow ochre is not nearly as pale. But yellow ochre also a bit too yellow, as if jaundiced. Not necessarily a healthy colour for a person.
Nor, as I find, was it a colour esteemed by the Greeks, at least when used to describe people. Aristophanes, in The Clouds, used χροιὰν ὠχράνkhroiàn ōkhrán “pallid complexion” as a sign of moral weakness; Euripides, in The Bacchae, used turning pale as a sign of fright: οὐδ᾽ ὠχρός, οὐδ᾽ ἤλλαξεν οἰνωπὸν γένυν oud’ ōkhrós, oud’ ḗllaxen oinōpòn génun “he did not turn pale or change the wine-dark complexion of his cheek”; and Plutarch, in his life of Julius Caesar, quoted Caesar as saying οὐ πάνυ τούτους δέδοικα τοὺς παχεῖς καί κομήτας, μᾶλλον δὲ τοὺς ὠχροὺς καί λεπτοὺς ἐκείνους ou panú toútous dédoika toùs pakheĩs kaí komḗtas, mãllon dè toùs ōkhroùs kaí leptoùs ekeínous “I am not much in fear of these fat, long-haired fellows, but rather of those pale, thin ones” (by which he meant Brutus and Cassius).
Those yellow-bellies! Perhaps it’s that dirty people do dirty deeds? But the pigment is named for its colour, not the colour for its source. And ochre is called many things in many places; it’s been used since before the beginning of recorded history all around the world, anywhere there is soil with iron ores in it that can be made into a paint. It is common in cave paintings from up to 75,000 years ago. It is, truly, as old as dirt.
And we, whatever colour we may be said to be – red or pale or any other – will return to dirt as well, as we always have, and as the Beothuk, all of them, eventually did due to starvation, pestilence, and murder. Who can say for certain that the ochre we dab onto the stages of our lives and the walls of our histories does not contain bits of our distant ancestors and distant ancient cousins? And just as we come in many colours, so does ochre – indeed, ochre comes in colours we don’t: after all, the Beothuk weren’t actually red. Look at the portrait of the last known Beothuk, Shanawdithit, who died of tuberculosis in 1829: her skin was a medium light brown.
But just as the blood that runs through the veins of every one of us is red from the iron in it, so does all ochre gain colour from the iron in it. And so, when the Europeans saw the red ochre on the Beothuk and thought it was different from their own pale colour, it was doubly ironic.
In the dark cellar you see a shadowy figure. It can’t be the plumber; it’s someone humble and unencumbered, not lumbering but slumbering, numb and number, numbering one. Ah, yes, now, no monkey business: it’s a monk, a simple Franciscan friar. He was hard to make out at first because of his simple robe dyed the colour of dirt.
That is why Franciscans’ robes are brown: not so much because “you are dust, and to dust you shall return” but because they literally do – or anyway they did – return to dust and dirt to sleep, and if their robes were going to be the shade of dirt anyway, they might as well make them that way. But there are many kinds of brown. What kind of brown are they? There is no official prescribed brown for all Franciscans, but since Saint Francis was from Assisi, in Umbria, I’m going to say they can be thought of as umber.
Ah, umber! That dark shadowy brown. According to Wiktionary it is RGB #635147 , but a colour that is old as dirt cannot be confined to one number. And umber is old as dirt, both figuratively – it’s one of the oldest pigments known – and literally: it’s made from natural earth. It’s a mixture of iron oxide and manganese oxide. It can be gotten from the ground in many places, but one of them is Umbria, which may be where the word umber comes from. The name Umbria comes from the people who lived there before the Romans took over: the Umbri. (There is no certainty as to the origin of their name.)
Or perhaps the word umber comes from Latin umbra, ‘shadow’ (which you may recognize from umbrella, ‘little shadow’). That seems reasonable, as the colour is dark and has been used by painters for shadows and similar sombre subjects, especially in the warmer tones. Not everyone likes umber; Edward Norgate, a contemporary of Shakespeare, cast some shade on it as “a foul and greasy color.” But Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Vermeer would have taken umbrage at that – they all used umber.
There are other versions of umber, too. Raw umber, taken directly from the Umbrian dirt, is more yellowish; burnt umber, made by heating raw umber, is more reddish. And in turn, while the Franciscans have not given their name to any colour, there is one subset of them, named for the hoods on their robes, who have become a byword on the basis of the colour of their habits. We call these hooded monks Capuchin, but in Italian that’s Cappuccino. Which is somewhat lighter than umber – and better tasting too.
I mean without saying “It’s the colour of Chartreuse.” Come on. Not that many people have a bottle of it at home. Let’s see – how does Wikipedia describe it?
Chartreuse (US: /ʃɑːrˈtruːz, -ˈtruːs/, UK: /-ˈtrɜːz/, French: [ʃaʁtʁøz]), also known as yellow-green or greenish yellow, is a color between yellow and green.
Oh, come on. If you were trying to convey the essence of it to someone, what would you say? “Like a highlighter that retired to the south of France to write novels” perhaps? If it were a person, you could say that it’s the exact opposite of, um, any of the kickboxers in Kings of Combat (or, for that matter, the colour scheme on their promo posters). If it were algae, well, Wikipedia is here to help you with the “In nature” section of its “Chartreuse (color)” article:
Yellow-green algae, also called Xanthophytes, are a class of algae in the Heterokontophyta division. Most live in fresh water, but some are found in marine and soil habitats. They vary from single-celled flagellates to simple colonial and filamentous forms. Unlike other heterokonts, the plastids of yellow-green algae do not contain fucoxanthin, which is why they have a lighter color.
Uh, thanks? That won’t help you describe the colour to someone. I guess you could buy them a bottle, if you can find one – the supply train is becoming as ineluctable as the recipe, which, supposedly, is known to only three people at a time, all of them monks of a notoriously solitary, peaceful, and taciturn order (they mix the 130 herbs in the monastery and send them to the distillery in big bags).
But then a bottle of which kind? You see, there’s more than one kind. Generally speaking, there are two, green and yellow, but there are other varieties too, such as the MOF kind I have a bottle of, which is yellowish but not a reference yellow. (To be clear, the yellow of yellow Chartreuse is called chartreuse yellow. The green of green Chartreuse is called chartreuse.)
But then, say you get a bottle of green Chartreuse and pour a glass of it: is that really the chartreuse of, say, a vase or a scarf or an office divider? No it is not. For one thing, definitions vary widely; look at Wiktionary, for instance, and you will see the HTML chartreuse as RGB #7FFF00 and the much dimmer Pantone “bright chartreuse” as RGB #B0BC4A . But whatever you take it as, the real thing will always seem lighter. It’s pellucid, after all, unlike the recipe, the definition of the colour, and, for that matter, the origin of the word Chartreuse.
It’s not that they don’t know where the liqueur got its name. It’s made by the monks of Grande Chartreuse Monastery (or, now, by their hired distillers). They are monks of the Ordre des Chartreux – or, in English, the Carthusians. Their monastery is in the Chartreuse Mountains, north of Grenoble. (Are the mountains Chartreuse in colour? Parts of them, sure; they’re covered in vegetation, after all. See for yourself. But the colour is named after the liqueur.)
So are the mountains named after the monastic order? No, the converse. Bruno of Cologne started the order in the Chartreuse Mountains in 1084, at the site of the current monastery. The English name Carthusians is based on a Latinization of the place name: Ordo Cartusiensis. Their monasteries are called chartreuses in French, but in English they are called charterhouses. Why? Because English speakers looked at chartreuse and said “um, charter-house.” I’m not kidding.
The French novelist Marie-Henri Beyle, who went by the Scandinavian-sounding pen name Stendhal, wrote a book in 1839 called La Chartreuse de Parme, which in English is The Charterhouse of Parma. And, fittingly, it does not take place in a charterhouse. In fact, the only time one is even mentioned is on the last page – the protagonist ends up there. Also, no one in the book drinks Chartreuse.
They could have, to be sure; it had been available since the 1600s. But if they had, it wouldn’t be the green Chartreuse we know now; that was first made in 1840. So was the yellow kind. The original Chartreuse was stronger (at 69% ABV! Green Chartreuse is 55% ABV, and a little goes a long way in a cocktail; yellow Chartreuse is 43%, but doesn’t taste like it, so watch out) and was a slightly deeper version of the green, more 1910-era than 2010-era, décor-wise. Also, in case it matters to you, the monks haven’t been continuously in the monastery since 1084; they were expelled more than once (generally to Spain) and returned thereafter, most recently after World War II. The buildings of the monastery don’t date all the way back to the origins either – avalanches have guaranteed that.
Ah, yes, avalanches. From the mountains. The Chartreuse Mountains. So how did they get their name? From a village in them, Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse. And how did it get its name? It is an ancient Gaulish name (Chartreuse, I mean, not Saint-Pierre); it may trace to the tribe of the Caturiges, who also gave their name to the nearby town of Chorges.
And what does Caturiges mean? It traces to Celtic roots catu- ‘combat’ and riges ‘kings’. So, yes, you may have guessed it: Kings of Combat.
Today I’m tasting burgundy. You may notice that I haven’t capitalized the word. No need to be high-and-mighty; my current theme is colours, and the name of the colour is lower-cased. Not that I can limit myself to the colour with this word, naturally, but it is a good place for me to start, because it was the colour that was my introduction to burgundy – specifically, the burgundy Oldsmobile Delta 88 two-door sedan that my parents bought in the mid-1970s.
It’s been even more personal than that for me, too; in my early 20s, for a time I dyed my hair burgundy. I know this would not have met the approval of Lola in Kinky Boots, whose disdain for the colour was quotable: “Please, God, tell me I have not inspired something burgundy. …Red is the colour of sex! Burgundy is the colour of hot water bottles!” But I have had many agreeable experiences with the colour, though most of them when it was in a glass.
About that, by the way. When I look at the official RGB version of the colour burgundy, #800020 , it seems rather darker and duller than the wines of Burgundy. But when I look at photos of Burgundy wine in a glass, I have to admit it’s pretty spot on. It’s just that red Burgundy wines, being made from Pinot Noir grapes, are more translucent; in many lighting conditions they fairly shine and glow, and so they seem lighter.
Not on the pocket-book, though. Burgundy wines are among the highest and mightiest; the most expensive wines in the world are Burgundy – prices run well into the five figures for a bottle and leave even the top Bordeaux wines in the dust. Part of this is that the grapes they’re made with, Pinot Noir, are hard to work with; they grow in tight pine-cone-shaped clusters (hence the name) and are as thin-skinned as some of their most ardent partisans. Part of it is that Burgundy isn’t all that large a growing region, and it’s the farthest north of any major red wine region in the world. Part of it, certainly, is that the best Burgundy wines are indeed extremely good (though they’re not everyone’s favourite; I for one fancy the Bordeaux style more). And part of it is marketing – a campaign that has been going on for most of a millennium, since Philip II the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, declared that only Pinot Noir grapes could be used to make red wine in his lands. Gamay was banished to Beaujolais. There’s nothing like message discipline, eh? The fact that the Dukes of Burgundy were among the highest and mightiest in France certainly helped.
Of course, Pinot Noir grapes had been in the region since time immemorial. Which is more than you can say for the name Burgundy. Oh, it’s not that Burgundy is the English version and Bourgogne the French; in point of fact, the French is farther from the original. In Latin it was Burgundia, but that came from an older Burgundi, which traces back to the Proto-Indo-European *bʰérǵʰonts, which meant ‘high, mighty’. This Burgundi was the name of a Germanic tribe.
Germanic? In the heart of France? Yes, indeed. France has plenty of Germanic and Celtic historical influence. But, although modern Bourgogne has its high points, the Burgundi didn’t get their name from that. Nor did they get their name from the even higher Massif Central of France, further south, where they were before they moved north into the area that now has their name (they also had land as far south as the coast). They only moved there in the 400s, in fact, after having been resettled there from the middle Rhine region, around Alsace.
The middle Rhine region? That’s not very high at all. But wait. Were they from there originally? It’s harder to trace before that, but it’s thought they (or, you know, the core part of their ancestors; people do intermarry over time with others in the area) may have come from the valley of the Vistula – the river that runs through Kraków and Warsaw. In Poland. Which would not explain how they came to have a high-and-mighty Germanic name. But there’s one more dot to connect.
Well, maybe. There is a place called Bornholm that has in the past been ruled by Norway and Sweden but now belongs to Denmark, and its name historically was Burgundaholmr. The Burgundians might – might – have originally come by way of there, possibly from even farther north. Or it could just be coincidence. After all, the Burgunda part can be taken to refer to a high rock, which Bornholm does have. And the holmr means ‘island’.
Yes, Bornholm is an island in the Baltic Sea. It is one of the most eco-friendly places in the world; its power is mostly generated from wind and sun and by other eco-friendly means, and their rate of recycling is very high. They don’t grow grapes there, however. And their flag has no burgundy in it… though it does have red, lots of red. But you can get some Burgundy there. Go to Kadeau, their Michelin-starred restaurant; it has a mighty list of them – of course, the prices are rather high.
Ah, the old curiosity shop on the corner, with its owner, who looks a little like Henry Winkler, and its near-infinite assortment of finds. Look around the store. What shall you pick up today? Perhaps that pretty flower vase with a painting of Persian sprites? Or this weird little winch? Or a set of picks for escargots? No, something less practical… You peer into a corner and spy a pair of tightly laced periwinkle winkle-pickers. You raise an eyebrow; you glance at the shopkeeper and he winks at you. You’re not sure how to take it. He nods to a sign on the wall that says “Sometimes words have two meanings.” Sense spirals in on itself like a snail. Are you convinced?
Let’s unpack these periwinkle winkle-pickers. The trick is that periwinkle isn’t really a word that has two (or more) meanings; it’s two quite different words that just happen to have become identical in form.
The first word – the one that has been in English since Old English times – was at first pervince or pervincle; it came from Late Latin pervinca, from Classical Latin pervica, which is apparently per- ‘thoroughly’ and a form of vincio ‘I bind, I conquer’ (as seen in convince and in “veni vidi vici” too). The Latin form also seems to be shortened from vicapervica, which has an incantatory quality to it, and it is likely also related to pervicus ‘stubborn’. This pervinca was – and in Italian still is – the name for a low-lying flowering plant (a few kinds thereof, of the genus Vinca) with long trailing stems that tend to take root wherever they touch the ground: they are thoroughly bound, and thus stubborn (pervicacious).
Which does not matter when it comes to the usual point of reference for this word. It is the plant’s flowers that are focal: they have five petals and are a light purplish blue with a white centre. This light purplish blue, which in RGB terms is standardized as the very tidy #CCCCFF , is called periwinkle for this reason.
But, because the world is full of complications and wonders, there is also another flowering plant called periwinkle – it was thought to be of the same general kind, but it turns out it is not. It also has five-petalled flowers; they have been cultivated in various colours. The genus is now named Catharanthus. Its most widespread species, Catharanthus roseus, was formerly called Vinca rosea, and it is from this old name that alkaloids produced from it are called vinca alkaloids; two drugs that are used to treat cancer are vinblastine and vincristine, which clung to the vin- though the plant has been uprooted from it. Thus they are related to the colour periwinkle – etymologically but not in any other way.
And then there is the other periwinkle. We’re not completely sure, but it seems that it started with Latin pina, from Greek πίνη (pínē), variant of πίννα (pínna), ‘mussel’, plus Old English wincel ‘corner, bend’ from an Old Germanic root referring to turning or bending. It names a kind of sea snail (‘bendy mussel’, I guess), similar in size to a periwinkle flower but otherwise with nothing in common. Somehow pinewinkel, which could easily have been pennywinkle (as indeed it was, but only in regional variants), became periwinkle. The fact that it evolved to the periwinkle form around the same time as the flower name did, in the early 1500s, suggests some cross-influence or mutual influence. Yes, one is a snail (and not a bluish-purple one either) and the other is a flower, but that doesn’t defeat the mutual lexical attraction – the “sounds familiar” effect. And anyway, periwinkle is a rather winsome word form, if you ask me.
But the little snails turned a corner, so to speak, and left off the peri- in common use: as often as not, now, they’re just called winkles. Which adds a wrinkle, especially if you go shopping for them, because this same root became Dutch winkel, which first meant ‘corner’ but, by metonymy, became a name for a corner store (or a storage corner), and so now Dutch winkel means ‘store, shop’ (and periwinkle seems like it could mean ‘around the store’ – or, if you wish, ‘shop for Persian fairies’). Meanwhile, German Winkel still means ‘angle, corner, nook’. The name Winkler comes from someone who was a shopkeeper, or who lived on a corner. And there are some other words in English that are also related more distantly, from the root meaning ‘bend, turn’: winch, wink, and wince.
Winkles, as you may know, are edible (when cooked), and in Scotland and Ireland you can buy them by the bag; when you get a bag of them, you get a little pin for picking out the winkles from the depths of their shells. The Latin name for them, Littorina littorea, gives a clue that they are found along the seashore – they can be caught in a drag net, but they can also be picked by hand at low tide.
And do you, when picking winkles from the seashore, wear winkle-pickers? Hmm, no, don’t take it so littorally. One ought not to use such fancy shoes for perambulating the damp strand. The point of winkle-pickers is the toe: that is, the toe is long and pointed, and so, wittily, the name suggests you could use it as a winkle-pick, to pick winkles out of their shells. They got this waggish name somewhere around the 1950s, when their popularity peaked with the Teddy Boys.
And so your periwinkle winkle-pickers are a colour named after a flower named for how its stem takes root, and a style of boot named after a device for eating little sea snails. Will you buy them? Where could you wear them? But you are not impervious to their pervicacious charms; you have grown fond of them already, and they sit there saying “pick me!” So, with the slightest rueful wince of convincement, you do.
Sesquiotica 