To listen to this episode and find out more about it, visit theallusionist.org/nightmare
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, wipe the fog off language’s glasses.
In today’s episode, for Halloween, we get into the etymologies of some scaaaaary words.
But before we get into that, an announcement: the Allusionist has left the Radiotopia network of podcasts. I’ve written a statement with my reasons for leaving at theallusionist.org/leaving-radiotopia, and I’d like you to read it, because it’s about stuff that goes way beyond Radiotopia, and responsibilities as a white person in organisations that are not inclusive. I’ll always be grateful to Radiotopia for giving me the opportunity to make this show, and I hope for many excellent things in the network’s future. The Allusionist is going to be independent for the next while, and if you happen to have the inclination and spare cash to support it, head over to patreon.com/allusionist. And if not, no problem - the podcast will always be free.
Content note: this episode contains some sex words and references.
On with the show.
HZ: ‘Horror’ was just a feeling of disgust or dreads. But it came earlier from a Latin word. But if you go back right to its root, it's to bristle. So it's just that sensation of like your hairs standing on end.
PAUL BAE: Oh, that's so you know, it's funny because I've heard of people where their hair stands on end for good things. Someone once told me he knew this was the woman of his dreams, his hair on his arms stood on edge. And I remember joking at the time, that's how I knew who not to date. And I remember him not laughing because he was being very earnest about it. But I guess ‘horror’ would've been the wrong word to use at that time.
HZ: Yeah, I get that when I hear brass bands, not fear but just the hair on my arms standing on end. And choirs.
PAUL BAE: I get that too, in a good way.
My name is Paul Bae. I'm known for several things, including podcasting, TV development and one book. But this is Halloween, so you might know me as the cocreator of the podcast The Black Tapes. Whew. Scary.
HZ: And The Big Loop, which is sometimes scary.
PAUL BAE: And The Big Loop, which is scary sometimes.
HZ: As a former preacher, Paul, did you use words to strike fear into the souls of your congregation?
PAUL BAE: Yes. Yes.
HZ: Give us some tips.
PAUL BAE: Whenever you're telling scary stories or even existentially scary stories, it's always good to use lots of adjectives and adverbs. That is the secret.
HZ: Really?
PAUL BAE: Yes. That is the secret.
HZ: As a subeditor, I'm trying to get people away from that.
PAUL BAE: It's so simple. It's just a blood-curdling scream. A formidable shadow. A daunting staircase. An appalling smell. I don't know why smell came into it.
HZ: Can be scary.
PAUL BAE: That's all it took. Oh, and remind them of hell once in a while, so they'll come back next week for the next instalment of why you should come here and give our weekly monetary sum.
HZ: I put to Paul the etymologies of some non-adverb scary words.
HZ: I learnt that the word ‘nightmare’, around 700 years ago, meant an evil female spirit who would make men or horses feel in their sleep like they were being suffocated.
PAUL BAE: Men and horses?
HZ: Yes, men and horses.
PAUL BAE: This has got to be northern Europe then. Was that the origin of the word?
HZ: I believe so.
PAUL BAE: There’s not a lot of men and horses in Korean etymology.
HZ: I thought it was interesting that the nightmare was a kind of goblin and nothing to do with horses.
PAUL BAE: Not at all?
HZ: No. The ‘mare’ in it was just an Old English word for an incubus or a monster.
PAUL BAE: Oh. Oh. So that's the mare? OK, I gotta remember that. That's like that's a good story to do to file away.
HZ: I also didn't actually know what succubus and incubus meant either. And succubus is a female demon that has sex with men when they sleep. And incubus is a male demon, has sex with women when they sleep. And succubus means like something like to lie underneath. Yes. So, you know, these are female demons and non dominant sexual positions.
PAUL BAE: That sounds familiar only because one teacher made me look at old Dutch paintings and I swear to God that kind of imagery was in some of them. I'm not versed or smart enough to tell you which ones or who it was. But I swear that this sounds very familiar.
HZ: Oh and also apparently having sex with the demon was like having sex with a cavern of ice.
HZ: I have to wonder how they found that out.
Around 700 years ago, the word ‘haunt’ first appeared in written English, at least 200 years before it took on the meaning of a ghost frequenting a place.
HZ: It just meant that way where someone haunts a bar, as in they go to it a lot, but they're not an actual ghost. But it also meant to have sex with. And I could not do enough Googling safely to find out why it had that sense, because it just came up with a lot of websites about people having sex with ghosts. So I cannot find the etymology of this middle English use of 'haunt' in the sexual sense.
PAUL BAE: You've just screwed up your Google ads logarithm by looking up succubus, haunting, "Why sex haunting?"
HZ: The things I do for this show.
PAUL BAE: Exactly.
HZ: Bugbear, boggart, bogeyman, bugaboo: the word ‘bogge’ or ‘bugge’ turns up a few times in scary words; a few hundred years ago as a word on its own it meant...a scary thing. But the origin of that is not known; there are theories that the bogge or bugge was a goat or scarecrow. Not that interchangeable, are they, goats and scarecrows? Maybe they were then...
HZ: When you were little, did your parents introduce the concept of a bogeyman to you? Anything like that?
PAUL BAE: No, there were these stupid - I shouldn't say stupid, I don't know how culturally ingrained they are. But to me, there were silly little superstitions, just to get me to behave. Like a lot of Korean kids are told, don't fidget with your leg, in your chair, don't fidget or you'll end up poor. Huh? Apparently all the change will fall out of your pocket, that's the mythology. I don't know how far back this goes.
HZ: That's quite practical.
PAUL BAE: But again, a lot of my Korean friends grew up with that same thing. This is a very popular one in Korea: don't aim the fan at your face when you go to sleep or you'll wait. You won't wake up. You'll die. It's fan death. Every Korean grew up with that, from their grandmothers or their parents. I remember out of challenging my mom on that, going Hey, my mom used to tell me all the time. Well, the other day I just slept all night with a fan in my face. And here I am. Science, mom. Science!
HZ: How did that go down?
PAUL BAE: She laughed. She goes, " I know. I know. We just did that. We're not sure why we did that."
HZ: Just because you can. I suppose you're just passing down the mass from generation to generation. Yeah.
PAUL BAE: Or just get me get me used to the bullshit of stories out there. They were like, one of them's gonna stop me from getting into trouble. Another one's gonna make me study harder. Another one, just inundate me with a fear of being poor. Fear of not being successful. And you grow a healthy, happy child that way.
HZ: Who wants one of those? You just want one that doesn't trust anyone because of the torrent of lies served by the adults.
PAUL BAE: Exactly. Exactly. My mom just gave me a healthy fear of strangers. That was it. Every time someone knocked on the door is like, ”No, no, don't answer. Don't answer, it's a bad person.” And what she meant was someone trying to collect rent. Anyways. It was it was one of those situations.
HZ: It was the bogeyman that is capitalism.
PAUL BAE: Exactly.
HZ: A bugbear I learnt, which is sort of similar origins, bogeyman and bugbear and bugaboo: a bugbear was a demon in the form of a bear that ate children.
PAUL BAE: That's where it comes from?
HZ: Yet teddy bears are everywhere. What are people trying to say to kids?
HZ: And lemur, as in the animal, is from is from the Roman mytholog 'limures', which were evil spirits of the dead.
PAUL BAE: Cute lemurs are from that?
HZ: Yes. Someone who was cataloguing lemurs in the Museum of King Adolph Fredrick of Sweden decided to call them lemurs because they go around at night with a slow pace. And maybe that reminded him of the spirits of the dead.
PAUL BAE: I don't like it when people who are scared of weird things are given so much authority to be able to name stuff.
HZ: Speed up or you're evil.
PAUL BAE: That's a bad name then. Lemurs are cute.
HZ: It seems unfair. They are cute. They're just slow mammals. Leave them be. They're not vengeful spirits that have not been given proper funeral rites. And then there are a couple of substances that have demonic names like cobalt, the metal cobalt. It's from the German ‘kobold’, which was a household goblin. And because cobalt had the arsenic and sulphur in it and therefore made cobalt miners very ill, they were like, well, they must be a demon. That's why we're ill, because of the demons in the mines.
PAUL BAE: That's okay. I'll accept that one. They've had to put some thought into it. It's not some weird superstition; they saw people getting sick. That one I'll let slide. Not the other ones.
HZ: It's scientific. And then nickel as well was from the word kupfernickel, which meant copper demon. And the miners called nickel that because it looked like copper but didn't have any copper in it. And therefore is demonic. I guess. Can you argue with that? No, science.
PAUL BAE: It have been easier to name stuff that wasn't demonic back then.
HZ: Well now, if we’re talking about demons…
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I'm Chelsey Weber-Smith, I host a podcast called American Hysteria that covers American moral panics, conspiracy theories and fantastical thinking, and we analyse how that affects our psychology and culture.
HZ: Have you noticed any words that you think particularly are likely to stoke fear?
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I have, and I think this is true for the UK and maybe globally, is that word ‘satan’. And I think that that's a kind of a misunderstood word, but you can apply it to so many things that are happening now. I mean, even Donald Trump was asked whether or not there is a satanic cult in our government. And he refused to respond to that. And so this word that has been evoked in the 1980s in this very severe way is really coming back. But it has such obviously ancient origins and it's been used in so many different ways against so many different groups.
HZ: Yeah, and I was surprised that it didn't really have particularly negative origins for a really long time. Or at least not specific origins, like it didn't specifically mean what we take it to mean now, as in the devil, for ages.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: It's interesting because in the Bible, ‘satan’ can mean kind of two different things. There is the character of Satan, but also very often Satan is not a singular person, but rather a descriptor. Like you would call someone a satan. And that word is translated roughly to "one who throws something across one's path" which is great, right? It's so much nicer. It takes away some of the fire and brimstone of it and shows that these things will kind of cross our path and we have to deal with them and try to figure out how to do that in the best way that harms the least amount of people and harms us the least.
HZ: I really think I'm my own satan, by that definition.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I sure throw some stuff across my path.
HZ: Yeah. I mean, literally because I'm untidy, but also in life.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Emotionally.
HZ: So I guess then satan was sort of a genre of beings, rather than one particular being?
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: That's right. That's right. And and again, a lot of times it is this creature, this antichrist type character, but not always. And I think that that's really interesting. And I think that it makes things just a little less scary. And yet we certainly don't have that idea when we conjure satan in our head, especially I think in America, satan is so many things and can be applied to so many different people - because we also have that word satanic. And when something's satanic, it takes on the characteristics of the Satan, but not in the way that its original meaning might denote.
HZ: Yes, because ‘satanic’ suggests malevolence. But the original satan meaning seems more like obstacles.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Obstacles and an almost like "heed this warning. Here are ways to avoid things that are going to take away from your individual spirituality and kind of set you on that path toward destruction" or whatever you want to call it.
HZ: The etymology of ‘satan’ just means an adversary or one who plots against another. Which I suppose has the intent of someone who is trying to cause you damage of some kind.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Yeah. For example, when the colonists came over into America and were met with these indigenous tribes, they needed a way to dehumanise, as we do again and again with any oppressed group in our culture. And one way that they did that was call them agents of satan. And it happened again during slavery, slave revolts; the enslaved people were often referred to as satanic. And then you hear it now with feminists, and anyone sort of pushing against the status quo can be turned into a satanic agent. And it's just a really useful way to create a villain, an adversary from someone that you actually need to oppress to meet your own selfish ends, right? So we turn the victims into evil forces so we can kind of justify any actions we want to take against them.
HZ: Satanic victim-blaming.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: It's the name of my band.
HZ: In the Hebrew Bible, the word ‘satan’ doesn't appear that much, only 10 times. And most of it is just quite literally an adversary: so someone that they were fighting against, like military adversaries, or within legal proceedings. And then there are a very few instances which are angels carrying out tasks of God. Because the God of the Hebrew Bible is often angry. So I guess those satan angels were doing things that would be considered quite negative, but with the command of the big lad.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Yeah. The God of the Old Testament was a scary dude.
HZ: The word ‘devil’ you can trace back to the ancient Greek verb to slander, ‘diabollein’, which literally meant ‘to throw across’ - again, like satan, the slander and the throwing! Demon, meanwhile, derives from a Greek word for a spirit or lesser god, but if you go right back to its Proto-Indo-European root, it meant ‘divider’.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I guess a demon being a divider is not unlike someone who throws something across one's path, right? It's something that's dividing you away from whatever your true purpose is or your true self.
HZ: So if demon was a divider, I wonder if that was dividing your spirit so it was incomplete for divine recognition or something after your death.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I think that's probably right.
HZ: For a bit of Halloween mischief, I object usually to false etymologies, but shall we try and get people to believe that jack-o'-lantern is an eponym? It's named after someone called Jack O. Lantern.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Yeah, we can get people to believe that.
HZ: Just had a very bright smile that looked like fire.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Do you want to hear about jack-o'-lantern?
HZ: I would adore it.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: So the story also involves this guy named Jack, who is sometimes called Drunk Jack. And it's the story of a man who tricks the devil out of stealing his soul. So he's too wicked to be let into heaven. And he goes down to hell. But the devil's so pissed off that he was tricked that he sends him back to where he came from. And the man is out in the bog in the darkness and he asks for some light. So as a little tiny mercy - the devil, interestingly, is the one who shows him mercy - throws him a coal. And the man places it in a turn up. And thus the jack-o'-lantern is invented by drunk Jack.
HZ: Wow. I don't know, if I was drunk, whether I'd have the presence of mind to put a burning coal into something so I didn't burn myself on it anymore. Or that I would hollow out a turnip quickly enough to perform the task.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: I think it speaks to Jack's credit.
HZ: Do you think that that is the way to achieve eternal life? Just being too annoying even to be in Hell?
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Probably. That's what I'm going for.
HZ: But then maybe you just get into purgatory.
CHELSEY WEBER-SMITH: Just throw me a coal, baby. I'm good.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
oneiromancy, noun: the interpretation of dreams in order to foretell the future.
Great, my future involves being chased until I fall down some stairs?
Try using oneiromancy in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman; the music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Thanks to Lauren Passall of Podcast the Newsletter. You heard from Chelsey Weber-Smith. They host the podcast American Hysteria, about conspiracy theories and moral panics, and a new season just began, with episodes about true crime and killer clowns, so check out American Hysteria in the pod places. While you’re there, you can also get Paul Bae’s podcasts The Black Tapes and The Big Loop, and he has a new book out, a memoir of when he used to be a teacher: it’s called You Suck Sir.
Seek out @allusionistshow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram; hang out at patreon.com/allusionist, and to hear or read every episode, find out more information about the topics therein, get links to all the guests, see the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected word, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
PAUL BAE: By the way, your listeners are not really going to know this, But we're skyping on video right now. And over your left shoulder, there's this creepy jacket hanging there; it's not hanging like a jacket. The shoulders are are given form. It's like a headless person with its back to me.
HZ: Oh, it is a headless monk.
PAUL BAE: OK. That's all I need to know.
HZ: For the atmosphere, Paul.
PAUL BAE: Thank you.
