Anonyponymous (10 page)

And yes, he had facial hair. In fact, his sideburns were so long that they met each other via the mustache, a nineteenth-century fashion that has yet to come back into vogue. This muttonchops-to-mustache style was called the Burnside, or burnsides; at some point the word did a flip-flop, and sideburns receded from the nose until they stayed firmly hugging the ears, where they belong.

sil·hou·ette
n. A shape distinctly outlined by background.

While living in London, Étienne de Silhouette stumbled onto the black-magic secrets of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and fiscal responsibility. He returned to Paris spreading the dark gospel, no more popular on the Champs-Élysées in the mid-1700s than now. Silhouette, however, had the ear of the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour, through whose devices he was elevated to be
Contrôleur général des
finances
. To pay down the crushing debt being incurred from the ongoing Seven Years’ War, Silhouette suggested what amounted to an import of the British Window Tax, although he wanted to tax doors too, and just about everything else he could think of. Silhouette also proposed slashing the pay of bureaucrats—again, never a way into the Gallic heart—and even ordered the king to melt down the royal plate.

The most amazing thing about Silhouette’s departure after nine months in the office was that he lasted so long. Parisian ridicule of the finance minister didn’t stop with his fall from grace, and anything made on the cheap was said to be done
à la silhouette
, including the then-popular method of producing a portrait without having to draw, in which the “artist” traced the subject’s shadow onto a piece of black paper, cut it out, and stuck it in a frame.

so·lon
n. A wise and august legislator; generally used
mockingly.

Unable to live with the despised legal code of Draco, Athens voted to give another legislator dictatorial powers to correct it sometime around 593 b.c. As
Archon Eponymos
*
Solon imposed a basket of laws that would come to be regarded as the world’s first constitution and earn Solon honor as one of the Seven Sages. Solon erased capital punishment for most crimes save murder and lessened legal distinctions between rich and poor. According to Draco’s laws, a debtor who fell behind on payments became a serf or was forced into slavery, even if he was an honest farmer and Athenian citizen. Under Solon such persons were freed.

Solon is also said to have set up state-sponsored brothels, wanting to make sex “democratically” available to all. Not for nothing was he known as the people’s champion.

While
draconian
has entered the wider vocabulary,
solon
is mostly relegated to wonky political reporting. Maybe that’s because
draconian
is evocative of
dragon
and
Dracula
; when draconian action is taken, you know that’s not a good thing. Plus, draconian just sounds cool. Solon, on the other hand, rhymes with colon.

THE ANCIENT WORD

The best and brightest of the ancient world live on in the English language. The term
epicurean
derives from the live-and-let-live theories of the philosopher Epicurus, while
platonic
of course comes from Plato, who began the first academy in a grove named after the mythic Athenian hero Academos. Thespis is said to have been a great actor who created masks with built-in megaphones so that even spectators in the nosebleeds could hear what the actors (or
thespians
) were saying onstage. Sapphic love is woman-on-woman love, after the great poetess Sappho, whose connection to that sexual orientation is so strong that we borrow not only her name to identify it but her birthplace, the island of Lesbos.

Then there are some less familiar words, for those who want to build their vocabulary, or already have one:

A philippic is a bitter tirade, usually condemning a particular individual. The original philippics took place in Athens and were made in denunciation of Philip II of Macedon (Alexander the Great’s daddy) by Demosthenes, who argued that the foreign king was taking on too much power. He was right.

Mithridatism
means to build up a tolerance to poison by taking gradual amounts of it (usually used metaphorically), a strategy employed by Mithridates the Great. Mithridates aspired to an Alexander-like Hellenic empire, fighting—at times with remarkable success—the greatest Roman generals of his day, including Sulla, Lucullus, and Pompey. He failed.

A lucullan feast is over the top in lavish luxury and sumptuousness, like every meal Mithridates’ foe Lucullus ever ate after returning from his great victories in the East. Cicero and Pompey were frequent party crashers.

A cicerone is a learned tour guide, after Cicero, the Roman senator renowned to be the greatest Latin orator of all time, but whose brilliant tongue caused his downfall. In the series of speeches he called the Phillipics (in reference to Demosthenes, thus coining the term), Cicero viciously attacked Mark Antony, the wrong man to piss off at the time. After Cicero’s execution and dismemberment, Antony’s wife stabbed Cicero’s vaunted tongue over and over again with her hairpin, just in case he hadn’t gotten the message.

spoon·er·ism
n. Swapping the beginning of words in
speech, as in getting it bass ackwards.

You may never have heard the term but you’ve surely made the mistake. Reverend William Archibald Spooner spent more than sixty years at Oxford as a student, teacher, and dean whose error-prone speaking style made for some pretty entertaining lectures.

“The Lord is a shoving leopard,” he supposedly uttered in one class. Among his other alleged flubs are “It is kiss-tomary to cuss the bride,” his telling a wayward student, “You’ve tasted two worms,” and his famous toast, “Let us raise our glasses to our queer old dean!”

Small, pink-faced, and nearsighted, the beloved Spooner was the Mr. Magoo of Oxford, but he could get prickly about his odd fame. “You don’t want a speech,” he said to a group of clamoring students. “You only want me to say one of those . . . things.” Unlike many of the other folks in this volume, Spooner eventually became a good sport about his eponymous fame, even if he maintained he only ever made his trademark mistake
once
.
*

syph·i·lis
n. A type of venereal disease.

Syphilus was a New World shepherd descended from the lost race of Atlantis who began losing his copious flock of beasts during a terrible drought. Cursing Apollo, Syphilus smashed the sun god’s temples and started worshipping someone else. Miffed, Apollo struck the shepherd down with a horrendous new affliction.

First felt strange pains and sleepless passed the night;

From him the malady received its name,

The neighboring shepherds caught the spreading flame.

Writing sixteen years later, Dottore Fracastoro used his fictional shepherd’s name as the clinical term for the disease in his treatise
On Contagion and Contagious Diseases
. In this work, Fracastoro theorized that certain types of sickness were spread by tiny “seeds” traveling person-to-person through bodily contact, the air, or a contaminated intermediary. Although often hailed as the father of germ theory, Fracastoro had zero conception of microscopic organisms; rather, he thought these poisonous seeds resulted from a bum planetary alignment of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars. Still, his description of how infectious diseases traveled represented an advancement in the field of medicine.

tan·ta·lize
v. To tempt with the unattainable.

Tantalus was one of Zeus’s many half-mortal progeny, and his worst-behaved. Invited to Olympus for a feast of the gods, Tantalus embarrassed his dad by stealing nectar and ambrosia from the table and smuggling it back down to the mortal plane to share with his fellow nondeities. This crime cost him big-time in the afterlife. Tantalus was banished to Tartarus, the deepest part of the underworld, and forced to stand in a river up to his chin surrounded by trees full of ripe, low-hanging fruit. If he tried to drink, the water would flow faster and dip, and if he reached for the fruit, wind would draw the branches up out of his grasp.

Forever.

taw·dry
adj. Slutty, in a cheap and sordid way.

Once upon a time (the middle of the seventh century), there was a young English princess named Æthelthryth, or, as the Normans would later call her, Audrey. Princess Audrey was widowed after a marriage that, we are told, was never consummated. She took a vow of chastity but her father the king required that Audrey marry again; her new hubby, understandably less than thrilled about her promise to God, bribed the local bishop to make the vow go away. The bishop instead helped Audrey escape, but hubby got wise and gave chase. Divine intervention in the form of a prolonged high tide provided Audrey cover for her getaway, causing her husband to give up and find himself a more ready gal to marry. Becoming a nun, Audrey founded the Abbey of Ely. Many years later, as she lay dying after a life of good works, Audrey developed a red, burning tumor around her neck, which she gladly accepted as just punishment for the many frivolous necklaces she had worn in her youth. As a reward for Audrey’s extreme devotion to not having sex, she was sainted, and her feast day was celebrated with an annual fair held at Ely.

In a show of medieval irony, a certain kind of frilly silk neckerchief was known as the lace of Saint Audrey, or “Taudrey Lace.” This item was a top seller at the Taudrey fair, especially amongst “country wenches” who bought the cheapest and gaudiest varieties, paying little heed to Audrey’s cautionary neck-tumor-for-necklace tale.

As for how
Audrey
got to be
tawdry
, similar contractions happen with ’twere, ’tis, and another initial-A saint, Anthony, in the archaic terms
tantony bell
,
tantony crutch
, and
tantony pig
. Saint Anthony was the patron saint of swineherds, and the tantony was the runt of the litter;
tantony
came figuratively to mean one who follows too close behind, as in,
Don’t tantony me!

A
mackintosh
is a raincoat, named after the Scotsman who first successfully marketed the stuff it was made out of. In 1823 Charles Macintosh patented a material made out of India rubber and naphtha, a tar by-product, with the purpose of creating waterproof clothing. A mackintosh is now more commonly called a mac, and in either form it has become slang for a condom.

Titchy
means something really small, as in tiny, and derives from Little Tich, the stage name of Harry Relph, a fourish-foot-tall English music-hall comedian famed for his “Big Boot” dance, performed in twenty-eight-inch-long shoes. His nickname “Tich,” however, came from the Tichborne claimant, a man who in 1866 convinced the mother of Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne that he was the son she had lost to the sea twelve years earlier, never mind that he had put on a couple hundred pounds, changed hair color, and mysteriously lost the ability to speak French. The Tichborne scandal filled London papers for a decade, until the claimant—real name Arthur Orton, formerly a butcher from Wagga Wagga, Australia—was convicted of perjury and sentenced to fourteen years’ hard labor. Relph, a pudgy young child at the time of the trial, was called Tich for his resemblance to the enormously obese Orton.

In 1829, Home Secretary Robert Peel established the first police force in London—one of the first such groups in the world—and made further history by choosing Scotland Yard as its base of operations. Peel had begun his law-enforcement career in Ireland, where he organized the Royal Irish Constabulary (later muscle for the potato-picking scabs of Charles Boycott), earning him the nickname “Orange Peel.” His foot soldiers were known derisively as
peelers
, a term adopted by Londoners, who also called the policemen
bobbies
. Unpopular though they may have been, Bobby’s boys proved hugely effective, helping to launch a political career that saw Peel get elected prime minister twice before coming to grief over the Potato Famine.