Etymology is the study of the origin of words. I love knowing where words come from, particularly unusual words or words that are hilarious.

A well known joke is that the person who decided on the spelling for ‘dyslexia’ must have been having a laugh. But, as is the case with many words, ‘dyslexia’ is derived from Latin and Greek and Germanic languages. ‘Dys,’ meaning ‘difficult,’ coming from German and ‘lexis,’ meaning ‘speech’ in ‘Greek.’ So, as you can see, there’s nothing funny about that. It’s pretty boring.

Some words are just lifted directly from another language, particularly French. Think of how many French words we use in English – ‘restaurant,’ ‘information,’ ‘comfortable,’ etc. There’s a German word used in English that my friends and I love: ‘Schadenfreude’ – that feeling of pleasure you derive from seeing bad or unfortunate things happen to someone, particularly your friends.

You’d be forgiven for thinking etymology is boring. But buckle up kids, because a lot of words have great stories behind them. Whether these stories are true or false is irrelevant sometimes, especially if the story is good enough. My favourite example of this is the word ‘marmalade.’ Apparently the origin of ‘marmalade’ – the word used to describe that minging old granny jam – comes from royalty.

King Henry VIII’s daughter, Queen Mary, was a mental yoke. She loved having Protestants executed as she tried to re-establish Catholicism as England’s primary religion. Burning people at the stake was a favoured method of Mary’s. As a result, she became known as ‘Bloody Mary,’ which also lends its name to that minging tomato based vodka drink. But back to ‘marmalade.’

Mary was once terribly ill, so the story goes, and she couldn’t stomach any food without vomiting. Her servants began to worry about her feeble state, so her chef – a French man – decided to make her something tasty and easy to eat. He made a sweet concoction of boiled oranges – Mary’s favourite fruit – and sugar. Mary loved the dish and was soon back to her old self, ordering the deaths of countless innocents and just having the all round craic. Her French chef decided to name his creation ‘sick Mary,’ which in French is ‘Marie malade.’ True or false? Who cares, it’s a good story.

Another example of fascinating word origin is ‘kangaroo.’ Apparently English settlers in Australia – when they weren’t busy butchering natives – wanted to know more about the strange animal, so they asked some natives what the animal was called. Obviously there was a language barrier, so the English men couldn’t get their question across. They pointed at the animal and asked the aboriginals for the name of the animal, who understood that a question was being asked, but didn’t know what the question was. So in their own aboriginal language the natives replied ‘I don’t know,’ which is ‘kangaroo.’ If you’ve seen the film Arrival you’ll have heard that story before. True or false? I think it’s false, but again it’s a good story.

English settlers have a history of misunderstanding native words from languages of the places they conquered. Irish people know that as well as anyone. Think of our town names. They’re meaningless in English – Dublin, Belfast, Malahide. But in Irish they have significance, and their meanings are often quite literal descriptions of the places. ‘Dubh Linn’ or ‘The Black Pool.’ ‘Béal Feirste’ or ‘The Sandbar at the Rivermouth.’ ‘Mullach Íde’ or ‘The Hill of Íde.’ The British couldn’t pronounce those Irish words though so they just anglicised them.

Place names often come from people, with ‘Rome’ being named after the mythical Romulus who was raised by a wolf before building the famous city. Or ‘America’ being named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci etc. So place names are less interesting, or at least, more straight forward. They’re often named after whoever ‘discovered’ or conquered the area, or for whoever sponsored such expeditions. Like how the English in America named some of the first states; Virginia (Elizabeth I), Georgia (George II), and New York (Duke of York).

But do you remember being in school and learning about Iceland and Greenland? That was some buzz, no? I’ll refresh your memory.

Viking explorers went in search of fertile land. They ended up in Greenland which is basically a giant glacier. Bollocks, they thought. So they left. Soon enough though, they came across Iceland. Lovely buzz, they thought, because there was fuck all ice there compared to Greenland. They didn’t want other people knowing that though, so to confuse other explorers they named the place with all the ice ‘Greenland’ and the place with all the green ‘Iceland.’

The Iceland and Greenland story is like when in 1488 Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias named the bottom tip of Africa – where the Atlantic Ocean begins to merge into the Indian Ocean – the ‘Cape of Storms,’ because the area was a hotbed of crazy weather that often destroyed ships. However, who wants to travel through a place called the Cape of Storms? Exactly. So the name was changed by the Portuguese king, John II, to the ‘Cape of Good Hope’ to encourage further expeditions.

‘Assassin’ is a good one. It comes from the crusades. During the crusades, apparently there was a hardy bunch of lads who were members of a Muslim sect that loved smoking hash before going out to kill Christians. They called themselves the ‘hassishiyyin,’ basically meaning ‘stoners’ in Arabic. And over time, as is often the case, the world evolved.

And who could forget the famous origin of the word ‘sandwich’? I’ve heard variations, but most of the tales boil down to the 4th Earl of Sandwich asking his valet to bring him some beef between two slices of bread, because he liked to eat on the go, or because he liked eating while playing cards and didn’t want to get grease on his paper cards. Either way, his friends liked his style and began asking their own servants for ‘a Sandwich.’

The word ‘hokey-pokey’ is often associated with a dance move. For me it’s always been the name of an ice-cream shop in Malahide village when I was a kid. The shop used to be where Malahide cabs is now. Last year when I was doing research for my MA dissertation that I wrote on Italian immigrant settlers in Scotland and their influence on British and Irish culture, I learned the origin of ‘hokey-pokey,’ and it actually does mean ice-cream, in a way. Long story short, Italians were the ones to bring ice-cream to Britain. It was sold from steel push-cart vats that Italian men would wheel around Georgian and Victorian London while ringing a bell and shouting in Italian, ‘Gelato, ecco un poco!’ or ‘Ice-cream, here’s a little bit,’ offering tasters to customers. These men became known as the ‘hokey-pokey men,’ derived phonetically from ‘ecco un poco.’

‘Clue’ is a cool one and has its origins in Greek mythology. Theseus, founder of Athens, was a famed Greek mythological hero like Heracles and Achilles. One of Theseus’ most famous stories of heroism was his defeat of the Minotaur – the half-bull, half-man monster that lived in the labyrinth. Theseus’ lover, Ariadne, had given Theseus a ball of yarn before he entered the Minotaur’s labyrinth. This was so that Theseus could unravel the ball of yarn as he travelled through the maze. Ariadne hoped that once Theseus had killed the beast, Theseus could then trace his way back out of the maze using the line of yarn, much like Hansel and Gretel with their breadcrumbs that helped them find their way back out of the witch’s forest. A ball of yarn in Greek is ‘clew,’ and so the word came to mean something that points the way, or something that can help us figure out the origin of something by working backwards, like a modern detective using clues to solve a crime.

Another well known example is ‘caesarean,’ or a ‘C-section’ as it’s commonly referred to. This is the method of delivering a newborn child by cutting a woman’s stomach open. The famous Roman Emperor Julius Caesar was born this way, hence the name.

When writing or spelling, we’ve all heard of uppercase and lowercase letters – basically, capital letters or normal size letters. The origin of the words ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ comes from the beginnings of the first printing presses used for making books. Manuscripts were first printed using press machines that used carved out metal tablets and individual letters that could be arranged in whatever way needed to form words, before being covered in ink and then pressed onto paper. It was a bit like how names and numbers are printed onto football jerseys today in Lifestyle Sports. The individual carved out metal letters of the printing press were stored in a large cases; Big letters in the top part of the case, small letters in the bottom. Hence, uppercase and lowercase.

There are so many more. I won’t go on though. But here’s a final example and one that Irish people love to tell foreigners. ‘Whiskey.’ Irish people love to wax lyrical about how whiskey in Irish is ‘uisce beatha,’ meaning ‘water of life.’ This meaning makes our love of a drop of drink quite poetic, so we like to believe. But apparently the Romans got there before us. The Romans used to refer to hard alcoholic spirits as ‘aqua vitae,’ or ‘water of life.’ This phrase got adopted and translated into early Gaelic. The phrase was then translated again into early English as ‘usquebae,’ which over time evolved into ‘whiskey,’ thanks to the English anglicising the Irish word for water, ‘uisce.’

Actually here’s another last cool one. ‘Bankrupt.’ It comes from Italian, ‘banco rotta,’ which means ‘broken bench.’ Medieval Italian bankers, like the unfortunate and ill-fated Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, used to trade in public squares from wooden tables or benches. When a banker ran out of money, their wooden bench was broken. This practice was both metaphorical and literal. It meant they could no longer trade as a banker, because they were ‘bench broken,’ or ‘banco rotta.’ The English word derived from this Italian phrase also has some Latin influence, with ‘rupt’ meaning ‘to break’ in Latin.

Ah sure look, how about one more for the road?

Apparently ‘vanilla’ comes from ‘vagina.’ Firstly, vagina is a Latin word. It means ‘sheath’ – a protective covering. In the 15th century, Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés led an expedition to South America that resulted in the fall of the Aztec Empire and the establishment of Mexico. During that expedition, Cortés’ men came across the vanilla plant. The word they gave to the plant was derived from ‘vagina’ because of the appearance of vanilla pods, and because you have to split vanilla pods open to get to the sweet spot.

I’ll finish there, with the vagina one. Google some yourself though. It’s a roller-coaster of fun.