But before we get to talking of pagan festivities, let’s take a little detour to another springtime celebration: Passover – I promise, if you stick with me, it will all tie in together in the end.

The Time of Year Easter is celebrated is related to the celebration of Passover

Around the Spring time, Jews celebrate the holiday of Passover
(in Aramaic: פסחא or Pascha). Part of the Passover story is that the blood of sacrificial lambs was used to indicate to God to pass-over the God-abiding Jewish houses, to protect them from the plague that God cast over the area. Early Syrian Christians living alongside the Jews saw a connection between the blood of the sacrificial lambs in the Passover story and the figurative sacrificial lamb of Jesus Christ, so they celebrated the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ at the same time of the year as the Jewish celebration of Passover.

This ancient Easter-Passover-connection explains why in many non-English countries, the word for Easter is a variant of the word “Pascha” (Passover).
Examples of these related names for Easter:
Bulgarian: Paskha
Danish: Passke
Dutch: Pasen
Greek: Pascha
Italian: Pasqua
Finnish: Pääsiäinen
Indonesian: Paskah
Portuguese: Páscoa

How celebrating Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection at this time of year led to the naming of “Easter”

Ok, so what does this Passover connection have to do with pagans and the very different looking word “Easter”?

Well, around 325 AD, Christian bishops held a council (“the Council of Nicaea”) to help set a standard date to celebrate the resurrection of Christ. Prior to this council meeting there had been some confusion amongst Christians regarding when the holiday should be celebrated and Christians in different countries held the celebration at different times. The Passover-related date that was being used in Syria and Alexandria, helped determine that the celebration should be held in the spring time.

It would seem understandable that the fact that spring time and the Spring Equinox is a time of rebirth for plants and flowers may have helped tie in the symbolic link to resurrection, though this is speculation and there is no evidence that the bishops in the council took this into consideration.

In any case, the result of this council meeting was that the holiday celebrating the resurrection of Christ should be celebrated in the spring time, on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring Equinox.

Meanwhile, in Northern Europe and in Anglo-Saxon England, another festival was being held around the Spring Equinox: The festival of Eostre.

Thanks to an ancient English scholar called Bede, who lived around 673-735 AD, we know that Anglo-Saxon English pagans worshipped a pagan goddess called “Eostre” (sometimes called Estre, Estara, Eastre or Ostara) and Eostre’s festival was celebrated in the Springtime during the Spring Equinox. Eostre was the goddess of dawn (the rebirth of a new day), fertility and spring (rebirth of plants & flowers), and it is believed that the word Easter originates from her name.

It is likely that since the Christian celebration of Christ’s resurrection was also celebrated during this time of year, Christians who were living alongside pagans, were influenced in seeing this time of year as being the time of the festival of Eostre. And so the name of this Christian holiday that was celebrated alongside Eostre’s festival, came to be called Easter.

With the popularity of emails, SMS messages, online chat and the TV show Gossip Girl, it’s very common to see people signing off with “x kisses” or xoxo hugs and kisses. But have you ever stopped to wonder the origin of the xoxo hugs and kisses symbols?

X kisses: Why does X stand for a kiss?

There are two main theories about why X stands for a kiss:

Theory 1: X kisses evolved from Christian traditions

Since the Greek word for Christ is ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (Xristos), which starts with the letter “x”, and since the letter “x” also resembled the Calvary cross on which Jesus was crucified, this letter was often used as a holy symbol amongst Christians. Because of its association with Christ, the letter “x” soon evolved to have new purposes.

Around the Middle Ages, most common folk on the street didn’t know how to read and write, so if there was a document or important contract they had to sign, they would be unable to write their name. Instead they would draw the letter “x” since it had an association with being a holy symbol that was closely linked to Christ. This seemed appropriate particularly in documents that involved the need to promise something by “swearing to God” with the utmost sincerity. To demonstrate that the “x” they drew was drawn with earnestness, the cross would often be kissed to show that their intention was heartfelt. The habit of solemnly kissing holy artefacts like the Bible or a crucifix was also already a well-practised tradition.

Eventually the “x” became so closely associated with the kiss that is became the symbol for being a kiss.

Theory 2: X looks like two people kissing

I’m not sure about the validity of this theory but some have suggested that X came to symbolize a kiss after someone in history decided that the letter X looks like two people touching lips in a kiss, and this idea caught on:

. . .

O Hugs: Why does O stand for a hug?

The origin of the letter “o” as a hug is not so clear, though its use in the famous “hugs and kisses xoxo” seems to have arisen in North America.

Some suggest that it got its meaning from resembling the arms encircling someone in a hug.

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Acid Test Meaning

In the world of finance and banking, the term “acid test ratio” is a number that tells you about the financial integrity of the company. It tells you how likely a company is to pay its short-term debts and obligations on time. Typically companies with low ratio numbers (especially those less than 1) are considered risky, whilst those with a higher number are in better stead and pass the figurative acid test. Have you ever wondered why such an assessment would be called an “acid test ratio”?

In non-financial terms too, why do we use phrases like: ” The acid test for your friendship is seeing if a friend will agree to take you to the airport at 5:30am!” How did “acid test” come to mean “the ultimate test of genuineness, quality and worth”? How did the phrase “acid test” arise?

The Rise of the Acid Test Phrase

It is interesting that the term “acid test ratio” is often used in the world of finance because its origin is based on the testing of something financially very valuable: gold.

Between 1848-1855 the famous California Gold Rush occurred, where a man named John Marshall discovered gold in Coloma, California. The people who were trying their luck to strike it rich and search for gold had to have a way of finding out if the metals they found were indeed gold and not some inferior base metal. One simple, quick and cheap chemical test used to affirm that the metal was indeed gold, was the Acid Test.

A drop of acid such as nitric acid was applied to the metal. Gold is a stable metal and resists corrosion in most acids. If the metal fizzed and showed corrosion after the acid application, it was a clear indication that the metal was not pure, genuine gold and was likely made of less precious base metals like iron, copper, nickel and zinc.

Ever since the widespread use of the Acid Test in the Gold Rush days, the meaning of “acid test” was popularized as the definitive test of something precious, genuine and important.

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Other etymology articles you may enjoy:
- Pitch Black: Why do we say something is “pitch black”?
- Beefy: Why do we say someone is beefy?
- Bobby Policemen: Why are British Policemen called Bobbies?
- Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth: Why do we say “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth“?
- Sick as a Dog: Why do we say someone is “as sick as a dog”?
- Sleep Tight: Why do I say Sleep Tight?

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The phrase “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” is one of the most misunderstood phrases in the English language. Some people think it is used to mean that a person is sweet and innocent whilst others are adamant that it means that a person is a manipulator or a liar. It seems a bit surprising to find one phrase with such polar opposite interpretations. So which is it? And what’s it got to do with butter melting? What’s the story behind the idiom “butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth”?

The original meaning of the phrase “butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth”

Originally, around 1530, the phrase was far less obscure than it may seem today, because when it first started being used, it was directly related to a person having a cold, detached and emotionless manner (where “cold” used in this way is an older metaphor itself). The idea was that a person was so cold that his mouth was at a temperature at which butter wouldn’t melt.

Evolution of the phrase

Throughout time the phrase “butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth” evolved.

From cold and detached, it came to be used to refer to people who were prim and proper, who acted by society’s rules regardless of their own feelings about any situation. (This disregard for their feelings is where the cold, emotionless side of the phrase came into the equation). For the purpose of doing the socially-determined “right” thing, girls may have pretended to be modest and shy, or high society men and women may have pretended to be interested in politics or theatre or whatever society deemed as the “proper” things to be interested in.

This is where the confusion of this phrase began:

The meaning of the phrase began to branch in two directions:

1.     Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth meaning “liar”:
   Some people began associating the phrase with phony people in society who were putting on an act to fit in and be seen favorably. They lied about their true feelings and were therefore seen as insincere, liars or manipulators.

2.     Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth meaning “sweet and innocent”:
   Other people focused on the “prim and proper” nature that was a result of ignoring personal feelings for the sake of fulfilling society’s expectations. Throughout much of history, it was the prim and proper thing, especially amongst young ladies, to appear sweet and innocent; hence this new meaning became attached to the “butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth” phrase.
   When used in this sense however, there is often a negative twist on the phrase. When used to describe someone as sweet and innocent, it is almost always followed by a “but”.
   A good example of this can be seen in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Pendennis (1850): “When a visitor comes in, she smiles and languishes, you’d think that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth: [BUT] the minute he is gone, very likely, she flares up like a little demon, and says things fit to send you wild”.
   Over time, some people have forgotten the “but” and have begun associating the phrase with genuine sweet innocence, even though this isn’t the strictly correct use of the original phrase.

In essence, both of these definitions have some truth to them, but both definitions only tell part of the whole story. The full story is that “butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth” only if you are at some level acting in a way which is cold and detached from your true emotions.

Other articles you may enjoy:
Check out our other etymology articles including:
- Why do we say “eat your heart out”?
- Why do we someone has “egg on the face”?
- Why do we have the phrase “in a nutshell”?
- Why do we say we tie the knot when we get married?

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The idiom, “in a nutshell” is used when you want to say that the description you’re giving is concise, to-the-point and brief. It is the information boiled down to its simplest form. The question is: where do nuts enter this equation?

In a nutshell origin

It is thought that the first use of the phrase “in a nutshell” was a literal one. It was used by Pliny the Elder around the 1^st century AD. In the text, Pliny’s Natural History – Book 7, (xxi 85), Pliny tells us that fellow famous Roman, Cicero told him that he saw a copy of the famous poem, Homer’s Iliad, being miniaturized so that the whole text, written on tiny parchment, could fit into a walnut shell. Why would anyone do such a thing? Some people have unique hobbies. My guess is that they probably do it for the mere challenge and satisfaction of success that it brings.

In any case, throughout history this incredible feat was repeated with various other texts being miniaturized including the Bible. Later one man named Huet, Bishop of Avranches, tested the miniaturization of the Iliad, fitting the whole thing onto a piece of parchment sized 27cm x 21cm. To achieve this he had to write 80 verses of poetry in a single line! When the final paper was filled with minute writing and was folded up, it could indeed fit in a nutshell.

Although this is all very interesting, copying the whole of the Iliad in full detail is a far cry from how we’d describe the Iliad “in a nutshell” today. Using today’s phrase, the Iliad in a nutshell would be written in an abbreviated, shortened form, where the text would only contain the paraphrased, brief, main gist of it. So how did the phrase “in a nutshell” come to mean “brief and concise”?

The idea of having a detailed amount of information containing all the facts, neatly contained in a small, compact nutshell somehow evolved into the idea of having *just* the facts you need, minus the superfluous waffle. In a nutshell gradually became connected to the idea of the information itself become compacted.

So next time you’re writing something “in a nutshell” you can be glad that you’re writing it according to today’s interpretation of the phrase rather than literally squeezing your words into a nut!

References
Ayto J. 2000. Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Collins; 16th edition
Forsyth M. 2011. The Etymologicon. Icon Books

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Today, whilst making an observation about the imaginative talents of youtuber John Green for his creatively named computer-game football team, the Swindon Town Swoodilypoopers, my companion laughingly said “Eat your heart out Dr Seuss!”. Mid-laugh I suddenly realised what he’d just said: Eat your HEART out? Why on Earth would you wish that upon anyone?! Curiosity peaked; I began looking into this strange phrase:

Eat your heart out definition

When you are “eating your heart out”, it implies that your heart is being “eaten up” and disintegrated by some painful emotion, usually jealousy or grief.

So when my friend said: “Eat your heart out Dr Seuss” he was light-heartedly implying that Dr Seuss, master of imagination and creativity, should experience feelings of jealousy which would then go on to eat up his heart, upon seeing the creative talents of John Green.

Eat your heart out origin

Where does this hearts-being-eaten-up-from-negative-emotion imagery come from?

There seem to be a myriad of varying answers for the exact origin of the phrase “eat your heart out”, but the earliest reference dates all the way back to 850 BC in Ancient Greece, where it has been found in Homer’s classical text: The Iliad. This seems to suggest that this phrase which we still commonly use today was also uttered by our Ancient Greek ancestors thousands of years ago, and it’s possible that it originates from Greek Mythology.

The Greek myth which may have given rise to the phrase is the story of Bellerophon, who is described to be “eating his heart out” in grief when the gods Ares and Artemis kill his children.

Since the days of The Iliad, the idea that grief eats at the heart expanded to include a range of other negative emotions, the most common of all being jealousy.

Why did Homer describe Bellerophon as eating his heart out? It’s likely to be because the heart has long been linked with strong emotions. Since the days of the Vedic scriptures and Ancient Chinese texts which pre-date Ancient Greece, the heart has been connected to emotional well-being. There are several hypothesized reasons for this:

• We feel the heart beat faster when we experience intense emotions: Various strong emotions like jealousy, shock, grief, fear and even love release hormones like adrenaline, and these can make our heart race. Before anything was known about stress hormones, all people knew was that strong emotions were linked to racing hearts, so it’s easy to understand how they might have thought that the heart was responsible in some way for emotions.
• The heart is known to be crucial to our survival, and when we feel intense grief, as Bellerophon must have felt upon losing his children, it can make people feel as if they no longer want to live. The grief-linked feeling which can sometimes take away the desire to live is linked to the idea of grief eating up the heart.
• Spiritually channelled information: For the more spiritually inclined, there is a theory that the idea of the heart being connected to the emotions was received via spiritual channelling by our ancient ancestors.

Whatever the origin, I for one am going to refrain from wishing it upon anyone to eat their heart out!

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A toast is a piece of lightly scorched bread, right? So why do we call the raising of our glasses at events like weddings, a toast?

Toasted bread and raising a wine glass in a toast really do have more in common than it first appears. Both words originate from the Latin word, tostus which means “scorch” or “burn”. This makes sense for the toasted bread, but how does it relate to the other variety of toast? Well, it’s because the wine glasses people used to raise as they said their good wishes, contained pieces of toast.

People put toast inside their wine glasses?! You’re joking!

No, I’m not pulling your leg. In the past, people really did used to stuff a piece of toast in their wine glasses.

Why on Earth did people put toast in their wine?

There are a few possible reasons behind this habit:

Reason 1: To keep the dregs at bay

Before the days when wineries had sophisticated filtration systems able to make beautifully clear wine, build-up of bitter sediments in wines was common. This meant that unsavory bits and pieces were often found at the bottom of the glass. Sticking a piece of bread or toast at the bottom of the glass helped soak up the residue, acting as a sort of filter to ensure you didn’t get a mouthful of bitter granules.

Reason 2: To take away some of the wine’s acidity

Some believed that burnt toast made the wine less acidic, making it more palatable.

Reason 3: To flavor the wine

For several centuries, around 1500-1700, it was customary in Britain to add flavor to wine by sticking a piece of spiced toast into the glass.

Reason 4: To soak up some unpleasant flavors and chemicals

When bread burns, one of the chemicals that is formed is a type of charcoal. Plain old charcoal from burnt food doesn’t have a great reputation where health is concerned, but it does share some qualities with a chemical that is used today to clean our water in water filters. This chemical is “activated charcoal” or “activated carbon”. Due to the shared properties between food-charcoal and activated-charcoal, it is possible that the charred bread was able to absorb and crudely filter out some of the unpleasant flavors and chemicals within the unrefined wine.

Ok, so toast was put in wine glasses. This still doesn’t explain how the phrase “to raise a toast” came into being…

The process by which the toast got its name is through a process called metonymy. This is when you associate one object (object A) with another thing (object B) to such an extent that eventually you stop calling object A by its name and instead call it “object B”. In our case, object A was the wine glass, and object B was the piece of toast it contained. Eventually when people raised their wine glasses, they began calling it “raising a toast”.

This metonymy can be traced back to around the 1700s, which is where the word “toast” was first seen to be used in this new context.

Related Articles
- Origin of the Toast: Why do we toast?

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Behind every name is a story, and this goes for place names too. Although each individual place has a unique specific definition, there are some common components and terms for the names of English-speaking cities, towns and settlements. Knowing the meaning of these recurrent, generic root components can help you decipher the original meanings of place names.

Here follows a small dictionary of place names, or more specifically, of their components:

Place names based on surrounding hills, mountains and valleys:

Many places are named after nearby land features such as hills and valleys:

HILLS:
Synonyms for hills include:

Berg
Usually found at the end of a place name, “berg” means hill or mountain, and is derived from Germanic origins. It can be seen in the place names Falkenberg and also in Bergen, the second largest city in Norway. The term “berg” has even reached non-place name words like the word “iceberg” which literally is ice-mountain.

In some cases “berg” has evolved into berry, bury, and borough, although usually these are derived from a different root, “burg”, which has another meaning as will be discussed below.

Bryn or Vern

These mean hill in Celtic e.g. the place Malvern which literally means “bald hill”.

How or Howe

“How” (originally spelled haugr) is an Old Norse word for a hill or a mound. Examples of places with “how” in them: Greenhow, Gledhow, Howe

Tel

“Tel”, as in Tel Aviv, means hill in Biblical Hebrew. The full phrase “Tel Aviv” means Hill of Spring.

Don or Dun

Places with the suffix “–don” or “–dun” come from the word dun which means hill in Old English.

For example:

• Swindon means Swine Hill
• Hendon means Highest Hill

Note that sometimes don became corrupted to “–den” which has a different meaning as is addressed below. Corruption of the word is what happened for the name of the London area of Willesden which should really be Willesdon because it got its name as a result of being situated on a hill.

VALLEYS:
Places that are named for their valleys may include the following synonyms for valleys:

Den
“-den” on the end of a place name is either a corruption of “don”, or it comes from the word “denn” which means valley or pasture in Old English. Examples of place names that use –den:

• Camden – The “cam” is from the same root as the Old English word “campas” which means an enclosure, and “den” means valley. So Camden means: enclosed valley.
• Harlesden

Sometimes places with “–den” were misspelled as “don” and the incorrect spelling was kept, as in the case of the London area of Croydon which is in a valley despite having the word for “hill” (don) as its suffix.

Dale
A dale is an Old English word for a valley and several place names like Rochdale, Bairnsdale or Colindale utilize this word component. In other languages Dale becomes Tal (Germanic), as in the place Wuppertal or Otztal.

Combe or Coomb
The terms combe or coomb come from the old Saxon word, “cumb”, meaning valley. Examples of place names with this word element include:

• Compton where the Comp was originally Cumb (valley), and the ton means farm; Valley Farm.
• Ellacombe, Babbacombe, Watcombe and more.

Hope
“Hope” means valley in Old English, as in the place name Woolhope and Bramhope. Sometimes it becomes corrupted to “-op” as in Glossop.

Place names based on nearby rivers and other bodies of water:

Burn, Born or bourne
The terms burn, born or bourne which are often seen at the ends of place names as in Melbourne, Cranbourne, Gisborne, Goulburn, Eastbourne or Blackburn come from the Old Anglo-Saxon English word meaning brook or stream. It is likely that these settlements arose around streams.

Beck

A place name that contains the element “Beck” in it refers to the Old English word for a stream that may have Viking origins. In Germany “beck” is sometimes seen in place names as “bach”.

• The place Boosbeck in Northern Britain means the cow shed (boos) near the stream
• Birkbeck may translate to “birch tree by the stream”, or to a market (byrck) by the stream.

Fleet
Fleet as in the famous Fleet Street in London comes from the Old English word flēot which means a river or estuary. Fleet Street is indeed not far from the river Thames.

Ford
Places that have the Suffix “-ford” were often places that had fords, which were portions of a stream that were shallow enough to cross by foot or horse. Examples of places with this name:

• Bradford – Literally it means broad (= brad in Old English) ford.
• And others: Oxford, Trafford, Milford, Gosford

More or Mere
A “mere” or “more” is an Old English word for a pond, lake or pool. Examples of place names with this term:

• Windermere which literally means Vinandr’s lake”, from the Old Norse name Vinandr.
• Stanmore which means stoney (Stan) lake or pool (More) in Old English.

Mouth
Places with “–mouth” on the end are likely to be talking about the mouth of a river. Such places include Plymouth and Bournemouth. The German equivalent is the suffix –mund.

The mouth is not the only body part that is used to describe certain locations. The term “ness” as was made famous by Loch Ness and also Iverness literally means “nose”. This alludes to the portions of land that jut out into the open water like a nose into the open air.

Names based on specific nearby rivers
Some places are named after specific rivers, for example:

• Aberdeen is named after the river Dee and literally means “Mouth of the Dee”.
• Cambridge is named after the river Cam and literally means the area where there was a bridge over the river Cam.

Places named by nearby woodland

There are many examples of these including:

• Hurst means wooded hill in Old English. Places with this word element include Dewhurst, Bromley Hurst and Woodhurst.
• Holt is also a wood or a wooded hill, as in the place Northolt
• Ly, ley or leigh are all from the same root for a word (leah) that means a wood or clearing in a wood. It is used in many place names including Barnsley, Hadleigh and Crawley. In some place names it is seen as “loh” or “loo” as in Waterloo.
• Shaw is an Old English word for a woodland area, as in the places Grimshaw, Birkenshaw, Penshaw and Openshaw.
• -try: The suffix –try as in “Coventry” or “Daventry” is the Saxon spelling of “tree”. So Coventry translates to Coffa’s tree.
• Wold or Wald are the Old English words for woods. The quaint Cotswolds in England are named after their location near woodland.

Place names based around a well or a spring

The obvious place names based on wells or springs are those that have these words within their names, as in Bakewell, Stawell, Clerkenwell, Shadwell, Shaklewell, Muswell.

Places named after roads

Having “gate” in a place name comes from the Old English word gata which means a street or road. Examples include Highgate and Billingsgate.

Places named after the fact that they were near or resembled islands

-ey on the end of a place name comes from the Old English word “haeg” which means “enclosure” or “island”.  The place names Orkney (a small island in Scotland), Jersey, Guernsey and Alderney are clear examples of how this was used for actual islands, but it can also be used to describe enclosed inland settlements, as in the place Hornsey.

Place names based on fortified areas or settlements

Burg / Burgh / Borough/ Brough / Borg
The suffix “burg” or “burgh”, as in Pittsburgh, Salzburg, Johannesburg, Hamburg, Gothenburg and Edinburgh, means a fort or fortified settlement from Germanic roots. Fortified places were often towns or cities which made the term “burg” synonymous with both forts and cities. For example Salzburg came to mean “Salt City”.

Later burg and burgh became corrupted into bourg (e.g. Strasbourg), borough (e.g. Scarborough, Marlborough), brough (e.g. Middlesbrough), borg, and even bury (e.g. Salisbury) or berry, although it is likely that they all come from the same origin.

Chester / Caster / Caer / Car / Cester
All these place name elements come from the Latin root for camp, “castra” and are derived from the days of the Roman Empire to describe a Roman town that was often fortified. Examples of place names with these elements:

• Chester in northern England
• Cardiff which literally means fortified city (Car) on the River Taff (diff).
• Gloucester which literally means “bright” (glou from the Celtic word Glevo) “fortified town” (cester).
• Chichester which literally means Cissa’s fortified city (where Cissa was a Saxon landowner)
• Doncaster which may mean a fortified city (caster) on a hill (don).

In some cases “caster” can also mean “castle” as in the place Lancaster which means “castle on the Lune river”, although Lune became modified to “Lan”.

Ham
Places with “–ham” on the end refer to the Old English word for farms, villages, homes or estates. It may be linked to the word heim which is the Germanic word for a home.  Examples include Birmingham, Rotherham and Newham.

In some place names this heim element is sometimes shortened to –eim, -im, -um, or –m.

Stoke
Stoke comes from the Old English word, “stoc” meaning small settlement or hamlet.

Examples:

• Stoke-on-Trent literally means the small settlement on the river Trent.
• Basingstoke translates to Basa’s people’s (ing) settlement (stoke).

Worth
In Old English, “worth” translates to “enclosure” and would refer to settlements that were often enclosed by a wall or fence of some sort. Examples include Tamworth and Warkworth.

-by

Places that end in –by are from the Old Norse word for village or settlement. Examples:

• Derby is Deer (der) Village (by)
• Grimsby,  Tenby,  Corby,  Selby, Lumby

Places named for simply being places!

Stead
The suffix “–stead” comes from the word “stede” or staddt if you look at the Germanic version of it, and it translates simply to “place”. A good example is the London area of Hampstead which ties in the word components “ham”, meaning home, village, estate or farm, with “stead”, meaning place so that the full word means Home Place.

Stow
The word “stow” or “stowe” found in several place names including “Stow-on-the-Wold” and Walthamstow, simply means “place of assembly”.

The British town Bristol was originally Brigg Stowe meaning the place of assembly (stowe) by the bridge (brigg).

Thorp or Thorpe

These are from the Danish word for settlement. A few example places with “thorpe” in them include: Kellythorpe, Langthorpe and Burythorpe.

Place names based on the landowner’s name or of the people living there

Many place names seem to be named after previous landowners. A few examples are:

• Johannesburg: Johannes’ town or fortified place
• Petersburg or Peterborough: Peter’s town or fortified place
• Frederiksberg in Denmark

An “ing” in the middle of a name also indicates that a place belongs to someone. Some examples:

• Birmingham is likely to translate to “village belonging to Birm”, although Birm is likely to be a corruption of the name Beorma.
• Sheringham is likely to translate to “village belonging to Sher” or its uncorrupted equivalent.
• Nottingham translates to “village belonging to Nott”, (or as history books tell us, to Snotta. Good thing Nottingham is no longer called Snottingham, eh? ).

Other places are named for the people living there. For example the ending “ing” comes from the Latin word “ingas” which means “people of”. So a place like Hastings is named for the people of Hast, and Kettering is named after Ketter’s people.

Sometimes “ing” also comes from the Old English word used to describe a place or a small stream.

Place names based on nearby farms or estates

If an area was mostly defined by a farm being there, it often got named after this farm.

Tun or Ton mean farm in Old English but can also mean someone’s estate too. Later on some people extended the use of “ton” to refer to towns. Some examples:

• Skipton is a corruption of Shipton which means Sheep Farm.
• Preston means the priest’s farm or estate
• Kensington means Cynesige’s estate or farm, where Cynesige is an Old English personal name.
• Bickerton means bee keeper’s farm
• Washington means settlement or farm of Wassa.
• Brighton means Beorhthelm’s farmstead
• Others: Wellington, Islington, Clapton, Newington, Paddington, Hamilton, Shepparton, Frankston

Ster
Having “ster” on the end of a place name indicates that it was a farm, because “ster” is from the Old Norse word for a farm. Note that these are not places with a “cester” suffix, but just a “ster”.

Wich or Wick
These endings of place names can have several different meanings but one possible translation is “farm”, as in Chiswick which translates to “Cheese farm” or Gatwick which was once a “goat farm”.

Others interpretations of wich or wick may be “place” (from the Latin word vicus which became “wick”), or it may mean “bay” if the place got its name through Norse origins from the word vik.

Place names based on whether a place had a market

Names with “cheap”, “chep” or “chip” in them are from the Old English word for market. Examples of places that use this name: Chipping, Chepstow, Cheapside, Chippenham

We’ve all known Smart Alecs in our time. And most of us have been Smart Alecs at least once in our lives too! It’s those moments when you take joy in sharing something clever you’ve learned and inadvertently come off quite smug and gloaty about it so that you end up irritating your listeners. But all this talk of smart Alecky-ness does raise a curious point: Just who was this smart Alec and what made him so smart?

Who is Smart Alec?

Smart Alecs are named after a man called Alex Hoag, a clever thief who lived in 1840s New York. Or at least this is the best theory we currently have, as put forward by Professor Gerald L. Cohen of the Department of Arts, Languages, and Philosophy at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

Why was Alex Hoag bestowed the honor of being so smart that every smartypants thereafter was named after him?

His thieving was intricately planned
Alex wasn’t just an ordinary thief. He would come up with elaborate schemes to steal from his subjects. His most famous technique was to use his prostitute wife Melinda to entice the subjects into their “lair” which had a bedroom containing secret panels. Once the unsuspecting mark was suitably distracted in bed, Alex would sneak in, rifle through his clothes and steal everything he could.

He managed to get some policemen on his side
His expertise was to steal from subjects even if they were right under the noses of the police, and he did this by cleverly establishing ties through a couple of corrupt policemen, who turned a blind eye to his escapades because he paid them off with a percentage of the stolen money.

Eventually he tried to be too smart…
Everything was going well for Alex until he got greedy and tried to short-change his allied policemen from their share. The policemen cottoned on to his tricks and he was soon imprisoned. It was believed to be this final failed attempt to outwit the policemen which led to his mocking nickname “Smart Alex” or “Smart Alec”; an ironic name for being too smart for his own good that it landed him in jail. His excessive attempts to outsmart others led to his downfall and he ended up outsmarting himself.

References
GL Cohen. 1995. Studies in Slang. Peter Lang Pub Inc
Oxford English Dictionary
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition
Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, 18th edition

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Whether we’re going into an exam or a meeting unprepared, or whether we are blagging our way through a conversation where we’re trying to seem knowledgeable about a subject we haven’t studied in great depth, we know we’re flying by the seat of our pants. We hope to use whatever knowledge and experience we have gathered in our lives to get through the ordeal unscathed. But how did “flying by the seat of your pants” come to mean this process of putting faith in your instincts and internal resources to do a good job, even if you have no pre-determined plan?

You might have already guessed that the “flying” reference in this idiom indicates that the origin of this term comes from the early days of aviation. The term dates back to around the 1930s.

Before planes were as technologically advanced as in our day and age, they lacked some of the gadgets and instruments which pilots today use. Piloting an aircraft was partly aided by the various dials and readings and partly by engaging with the feelings the plane fed back to the pilot, be they certain vibrations, tilts and other perceivable sensations. Many of these sensations, especially the vibrations, were felt primarily through the seat of the pilot’s pants, the body part most in contact with the plane. Using his ample experience, the pilot would be able to respond to whatever sensations he gauged in order to fly the plane safely.

Even today, some “flying by the seat of your pants” may be resorted to by the pilot at certain times, like when flying through particularly bad weather.

So next time you’re flying by the seat of your pants, take comfort that as long as experience is on your side, you’re standing in good stead. Pilots have been flying by the seat of their pants successfully for decades.

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