Something Rhymes with Purple - Barmpot

Episode Date: November 23, 2021

*This episode contains language that some listeners might find offensive*  Today we are looking inwards and taking a linguistic journey through the world of mental health; how our attitudes towards it have changed over the years and how language has adapted to reflect this.  Discover the connection between barmy and beer, the effect of the moon on our wellbeing, and why being bananas or nuts has nothing to do with anything that you eat.  A Somethin’ Else production.  To buy SRWP mugs and more head to.... https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple  If you would like to sign up to Apple Subs please follow this link https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/something-rhymes-with-purple/id1456772823 and make sure that you are running the most up-to-date IOS on your computer/device otherwise it won’t work.   If you would like to see Gyles and Susie LIVE and in person on our Something Rhymes With Purple UK Tour then please go to https://www.tiltedco.com/somethingrhymeswithpurple for tickets and more information.  Susie’s Trio: Pecksniffian – to be sanctimonious and self-righteous Pantomorphic – to be capable of producing any shape or state Parvanimity – having a small or ignoble mind Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Annex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello, Purple people. This is a short disclaimer ahead of today's episode to say that we're going to be discussing the language of the mind and mental health today. So if you think this topic might be a little distressing or uncomfortable, then of course, please do sit it out. uncomfortable, then of course, please do sit it out. Hello, and welcome to Something Rhymes with Purple. This is the podcast all about words and language. I'm Susie Dent, and I am with, as always, my brilliant co-host, Giles Brander. Hello, Giles. Good to be with you again, Susie. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'm okay. I just can't believe how time is passing so quickly. I mean, you know, big old trope, isn't it, that one? But it's almost Christmas. Where are we?

Well, it's almost Christmas. That's where we are. We're getting older. And in your case, I hope we're getting wiser. I hope so, too. I definitely need to get wiser. And actually, wisdom and the functions of the mind is a huge subject in language as much as life. and the functions of the mind is a huge subject in language as much as life. And this week, we're going to be looking into the sort of linguistics, I suppose, around mental health, how the language functions and the history of the words and phrases that are used to discuss it. And, you know, it's been a fair old ride, really, the vocabulary of mental health over the centuries. And we will try to discuss it, obviously,ly as possible but the sort of linguistic journey is so I think revealing about our attitudes obviously to mental health and our shifting squeamishness over time. I should just say Giles that Elle and Frank Wallace Aylsworth

and Benjamin Clubb's Cauldron all suggested this really fascinating and complex topic so thank you for that. Well I'm really intrigued by it, and particularly about the language involved, because mental health issues have been a thread in my family's life for as long as I can remember. And the way people talk about it and the words they use have changed markedly during my lifetime. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, I had three older sisters. I still have two of them. They were girls born before the Second World War. I was born after the Second World War. And my youngest sister, and I'm talking to you about this because I've written about it in my childhood memoir, Odd Boy Out. My younger sister, who was called Hester, was a lovely person. She

sadly died when she was only about 60. She had, when she was a little girl, what we would now call mental health issues. But at the time, nobody quite knew what they were or what to do about them. And there we were, this, you know, happy middle-class family. And there was this girl who, as she came towards being a teenager, was unruly. And people didn't know quite why she was unruly. And anyway, the long or the short of it is that over a period of years, she was treated in various ways to all sorts of treatments. And they range from, you know, electric shock treatment, through to talking therapies, through to pills. And I, as a little boy, because I was nearly, you know, several years younger than her,

about eight years younger than her, would go with my parents to visit her in different clinics and sanatoria. And my parents loved Esther, we all did. And the end of her story, maybe you should mention the end of her story now, because it's a happy end to her story. She went through a decade of turmoil, but then somehow came out the other end. Nobody quite knows how or why. Maybe it was time that cured her. And her life ends triumphantly after years of struggle with mental health, with alcohol. She joined AA, and she became a remarkable person and ended up as a drug rehabilitation officer in a prison on Parkhurst. Oh, amazing.

Yeah, and she was fantastic. And she also was, interestingly enough, in the 1960s, kind of pioneer, active person in the lesbian movement. And she was a fun person, a brilliant person, and also a marvelous mother. So her story ends happily. But on the way, she had these very difficult years. And what I want to share with you is that my parents were kind people, but we would drive in the car and my father would say, oh, we're going to the loony bin today to visit Hester.

And we accepted this kind of language that it was the madhouse, the nuthouse, the loony bin. Now we know all that sort of thing is completely unacceptable. But it was the discourse of the time, because there were certain things you didn't talk about, like cancer, known as the big C, or divorce, believe it or not, in the 1950s, it was the D word, people didn't talk about divorce. And certainly, mental health was not discussed at all. And it was, I think, my parents' release, particularly my father's release, to use this kind of casual, jokey, dark humour when talking about it. Maybe we should explore some of those words that I've just mentioned,

lunatic asylum. Where do those two words come from, for a start? Where does lunatic come from? Well, I think just before we go into the specifics, I mean, it's really interesting that actually we have created, in line with what you're saying, so many euphemisms for tiptoeing around that subject. And, you know, we dedicated a whole episode to euphemisms, didn't we? And our shifting squeamishness over time, whether it was religious profanity in the Middle Ages to bodily functions you know, bodily functions these days, but also mental health. I mean, it's quite extraordinary, really. I mean, asylum is a beautiful word. It goes back to the Greek for refuge or sanctuary, which is exactly what we do when we give somebody asylum. We're giving them refuge. But unfortunately, because of the social attitudes towards what were essentially the historical equivalent of the

modern psychiatric hospital the word asylum took on a sort of overtone that as you say was almost the unspeakable really but asylum really came from I suppose the earliest religious institutions which provided asylum in the sense of refuge and one of the oldest institutions was Bethlehem famously which began in the 13th century as part of the Priory of the New Order of the Lady of Bethlehem in the City of London and it's worth saying that before asylums came along people with mental illness were cared for almost entirely by their families but often they ended up destitute and they would beg for food and shelter and there was no provision for them at all so that the idea of public asylums

actually was in some ways it was it was a good one it was to provide that refuge but unfortunately as institutions as often happens with institutions they themselves were sometimes corrupt they were also very poorly kept um i mean obviously we're racing through a big, big chapter in the history of mental health, but the use of physical restraints was commonplace. But at its heart, I suppose, was the idea that they were recognising mental health problems and trying to cure them. And even if that was misguided, and in some cases, you know, downright cruel. The idea was that this was going to be a cure, really. And so this changing attitude to mental health care can almost be charted through the language of these asylums result of the phases of the moon, the changing phases of the moon. So Luna, obviously in Latin, is the moon. So that was the idea that actually your mind would be, and a lot of people still believe this, if you have a full moon, I think there might even

be some evidence to show that actually your moods are quite affected and it makes you perhaps behave a bit irrationally. So those kind of beliefs still prevail, but that was definitely behind the word lunatic. And obviously that's not a word that we use these days. You mentioned the word Bethlehem there, or rather the name of the hospital Bethlehem. Is that related to the word bedlam? Yes. People talk about bedlam. It is related to bedlam. So this famously goes back to many, many descriptions of the asylum as being a place of absolute chaos and of commotion with shouting inmates, and they were called inmates at the time, that were said to be barmy. Barmy goes back to the idea of barm, B-A-R-M, being the head of froth on beer or tea even. And so the idea is that these people were kind of frothing at the mouth. So again, not a particularly nice metaphor there.

But yes, Bedlam almost became London's most iconic symbol for a while. And it definitely entered language through that word Bedlam, which is again, you know, unfortunate because it's portraying that very negative side of mental health. And Bedlam is a variation of the word Bethlehem. It just is a way of pronouncing Bethlehem in a different way. Exactly. And also you'll find the idea of the asylum, and you'll see this in Shakespeare as well, in Hamlet and Macbeth. It's used to explore the question of who was mad, who was sane, who had the power to decide. And, you know, we've talked about this before, Giles, the fool in so much of Shakespeare is actually the soothsayer, is actually the one who dares to tell the truth, albeit through the lens, I suppose, of perceived madness.

So it's fascinating. Madness. Where does madness come from, that word, mad? When I studied in Princeton in the US, I was invited to do a dissertation for my master's degree and I was doing German literature. And I decided that I would study madness throughout German literature. We were allowed to choose what was called a synchronic and a diachronic subject. So synchronic would be of a certain period and diachronic would be throughout the time. And I chose madness. And I think in America, they were way ahead of us really in the way that they viewed these things, because I wrote down the title madness in German literature, and my professor immediately changed it to psychopathology in German literature, because madness itself, I think, was not precise enough. But mad, very, very old term. And it goes back to the idea of always being sort of insane, as he would have described it then. But in its Germanic form, it accounted for all sorts of kind of wild and frenzied behaviour, a little bit like berserk, which we've talked about before. the Viking warriors who would dress in their bearskin coats and perform this wild, uncontrollable mad dance. And berserker meant bearskin because that was the coat that they would put on. So, yeah, so mad is ancient and the idea and the word is actually reflected in lots and lots of siblings throughout language. What about sanity and insanity? Where does sanity come from?

Yeah, well, in some ways, this, I think, is quite nice. It's quite a nice etymology, and that is quite an understanding one, because it goes back to the Latin sanus, meaning healthy. And that, of course, gave us sanitary and sanitation, but it also gave us sanatorium, where you would go to recover your health. So it was all about the health of the mind. So I think almost quite an early recognition that this was something that, you know, that we could address and that didn't, if somebody was unhealthy,

they were unhealthy in their mind as opposed to the body, but both were equally legitimate. And I'm hoping that's where we are moving to today as well. Yes, the words we don't use now, we don't use lunatic anymore, do we? No, we don't. And nor do we use well i mean we might describe

something a little bit silly as bonkers but i don't think we use it so much in the mental health sense but you know up until quite recently tabloid newspapers might actually call somebody bonkers if they genuinely have mental health issues and um i think that was used of frank bruno for example bonkers bruno um so you know it's persisted for quite a long time. Well, Bonkers is actually pretty similar to nuts because the idea is your head. So the idea is that your bonk or your bonce is your head. And if you are bonkers, you act as if you've had a blow to the head. Similarly, the nut, because the head is slightly nut shaped,

your nut is your head. So if you're a nutty, you are slightly touched in the head is slightly nut-shaped. Your nut is your head, so if you're nutty, you are slightly touched in the head, which is another euphemism from the past for being mentally ill. What was so extraordinary, as I remember as a child, visiting these asylums, was how vast some of them were. I mean, I remember going with my parents to see my sister in places where there would be 1,000 patients,

ranging from people like her, a teenage girl with issues that people couldn't really get to grips with, through to people who were suffering from dementia, all living in, often actually the grounds were quite attractive, and in these huge Victorian asylums. And indeed, it did feel like a madhouse because you could walk along a corridor and there would be people wailing or making strange noises in one room and you didn't quite know. Very, very odd. And of course, it all ended with the advent of what was called cared in the community and the closing of these huge places and trying to actually provide people with appropriate care for whatever their needs were.

But it's interesting that we're talking about only 50 years ago. Well, yes, sometimes unmarried mothers were sent there as well, weren't they? Because it was a way of sort of banishing them because they were no longer acceptable within society. I mean, it's just absurd and preposterous and thoroughly tragic what happened, as you say, only in recent history. I think the work that was done after the First World War, where psychiatrists were called upon to treat troops with the results of stress and a trauma of war, I think that also was quite a big milestone when actually psychiatric treatment was recognised and that kind of trauma also, that shell shock as well, were recognised.

So that was another important landmark, I think. Are the words like psychiatry and psychology, they are, I assume, late Victorian words with the advent of psychology and then later psychiatry. Is that where those words come from? Yes, and psyche, actually, we associate with things of the mind, but to the Greeks, it actually meant breath or life or soul, which I think is quite beautiful. Your psyche is your breath, your life, your soul, is it?

Yeah. And psychiatry, too, has quite a beautiful image behind it because it's from that Greek, suka meaning exactly that, the breath, the soul, the life, and a word meaning healing. So it is the healing of the soul or the kind of replenishment of breath, which is great. And then there was the tale of Cupid and Psyche wasn't there as well, which goes back to the second century. So quite a history, Psyche, as a suffix before we get into psychology and psychiatry, etc. Hysteria was one of the conditions I remember being talked about. What's the origin of the word hysteria? Yes. Well, hysteria, quite infamously in etymological circles, goes back to hustera, which was the Greek for the womb, because it was only women who were thought to suffer from hysteria.

And even today, we'll only find hysterical really applied to women. And hysteria or imbalances of the mind were thought to be caused by a wandering of the womb. So your uterus would not stay in the right place if you're a woman suffering from this, but it would wander around your body. And they used to perform all sorts of cures to try and tease it back into place, including sort of putting foul smelling aromas near certain orifices. I mean, really strange, but that persisted for quite a long time. So when you were calling something, oh, that's hysterical, as in that's hysterically funny, you may not know that you're actually looking back to the Greek for a womb.

Well, only 100 years ago in the 1920s, the late Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, his mother had a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with it being of a psychosexual nature. And they didn't, it was hysteria. And people did not know what to do. But one of the things that various people were called in to help her, including Sigmund Freud, but they used x-rays on her, you know, private parts, as it were, to do exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about because they thought that the origins were somehow, as they put it, psychosexual.

And so they, extraordinary, isn't it? That sort of thing so recently was going on. Yeah, and other treatments, which, of course, you know, hugely controversial today. I think we've talked there about euphemisms, you know, round the bend, doolally, etc. I think we've covered those actually in previous episodes, but some did speak very honestly about it. I mean, Winston Churchill famously referred to his black dog, didn't he? And he was echoing centuries really of folk tales of black dogs that would

appear as tormenting spirits, which if you remember, Giles, were also called the blue devils, which were said to beset people who were depressed or who alternatively had the DTs from alcohol withdrawal. And blue devils became the blues in the end. So melancholy pervades so many words in the English language. And melancholy itself goes back to black bile because it was thought to be due to a preponderance of black bile within the body and the belief in medieval medicine earlier that our entire physical well-being and indeed mental well-being

were due to the various proportions of the humours within our body. I mean, this is such a huge subject. We're not going to be able to really touch the surface, are we? Well, we are touching the surface and why not? Because some of these words also have value and use outside the area of mental health for example hysteria frenzy delirium these can be useful words in other contexts can't they there was an atmosphere of hysteria in the room is a legitimate way of describing something isn't it oh yeah you know absolutely it's interesting you mentioned delirium then because you know what i'm

saying is that people would seen as being the outsiders as others somebody who was on the margins um and we could trace all that all the way back to you know ships of fools or fuko's amazing um history of madness and civilization and just phenomenal reading but yeah delirium goes back to the greek for ploughing outside of your furrow. So lyre was the furrow. So if you actually went off track and were ploughing something that nobody else had ploughed before, you were seen as being, again, other. You were just elsewhere. You'd kind of literally gone off track. So that's where that one comes from. What about frenzy? Frenzy, that always just makes me think of the Viking marauders and their berserk dance. Frenzy goes back to Latin and at its heart actually is another Greek word for the mind,

fren. So it's the idea of uncontrolled excitement or wild behaviour. And if you remember a lot of words that you wouldn't associate now with the belief in sort of demons and an unstable mind that results from demons, they're reflected in lots of different words. So giddy, for example, meant possessed by a god. It's fanatic also, if you were a fanaticus, you were possessed by a god and acting in a very sort of, you know, a wild way. So this kind of fear of uncontrolled and uncontrollable behavior has been there you know since ancient times oh this is a crazy subject

car one more word and then we'll have a break crazy what's the origin of crazy crazy well you know when you have um crazy paving um you get the idea there because crazy literally means crack i mean it's a very similar metaphor to crack pot because it means full of cracks. And if you craze paving, you are literally introducing lots and lots of different cracks. You're breaking it into pieces and shattering it. So the idea here is of a shattered mind. Wow. It's fascinating. More of this after the break. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could

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Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Shrink the Box is a Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. This is Something Rhymes with Purple. I'm Giles Brandreth. We're talking about words associated with the mind, mental health, and slang words as well, slang expressions too. Somebody goes bananas. Somebody's written to us about this, in fact. Purple person Frank Wallace Aylsworth. Oh, yes. Why do we compare madness to a fruit? Why are people said to be bananas? Yeah, well, actually, bananas also used to be a slur, meaning homosexual. So it was an insult towards somebody who was gay, essentially. And the idea is that your mind or your sexuality, I think, is bent out of shape. So derogatory from the start, that's you've gone bananas.

But again, you know, it became a very sort of lighthearted, slightly frivolous thing to say. But with a, you know, quite a sort of dark backstory to it. This is why I find language so fascinating, is it does give us cultural and social history. And that's why dictionaries are important, to tell us what words used to mean, even if their meaning has changed now. And even if they're not acceptable now, we need to know the journey. Absolutely. So we don't make the same mistakes again, you know, for one thing. And is nutter anything to do with nuts? Yes, I suppose it is. Is that back to the head thing? That's back to the head. Yes, absolutely.

What about losing your marbles? Ah, losing your marbles. Well, I don't know if you are aware, Giles, of the most amazing dictionary of slang by Jonathan Green, who I know you've heard of. So Jonathan is a sort of slangmeister, really. He has written essentially the OED of slang. It's absolutely majestic and very gritty. But I was looking in there for marbles, as in Lost His Marbles, and he mentions in there, rhyming slang, marbles and conkers, bonkers. So I mean, I think, you know, if you lose your marbles, I think it's just a simple metaphor. And there are lots of them that you've just kind of, you're not there um you know one sandwich short for picnic i mean goodness there are so many versions of that

formula but i i like the idea of marbles and conkers bonkers that it originated that way what about a basket case he's a basket oh yeah that's horrible actually always has been horrible and again not a nice phrase in any shape or form but it was originally u.s military slang and it described a soldier who had lost all four limbs and so was unable to move independently and so would be carried, stretched off or put in a stretcher or similar bed, I suppose, was called a basket. So yeah, really, really sort of sad beginnings. Oh, gosh. It's a completely fascinating world, this. I mean, I've been talking about my family's sort of heritage in this area.

And if people want to read more and written more carefully than perhaps I've been talking rather casually now, do dip into my book called Odd Boy Out. Because I try to tell the story with the arc, the troubled times, the beginning of my sister's story. the, you know, the troubled times at the beginning of my sister's story, and then coming through to find sunshine as she fought the demons, fought the demons, you know, look at me talking, fought the demons. I mean, as though we believe in demons still, but it's the kind of turn of phrase we still use. What's the origin of that? I suppose it is rather like the black dog, you're seeing demons. It's like the black dog. It's, yes, it's like Yes, it's like the sort of the melancholy and the blue devils. And, you know, language is so emotionally charged. And I think it is something where we need to police ourselves better because it's very easy to say I've had such a manic day

or for someone to say, oh, I'm just OCD if they're literally just putting two books together on their desk. Whereas, of course, obsessive compulsive disorder is a genuine distressing condition. I think that we still hold on to some of these words from the past innocently, because I don't think we realise what we are saying. But I think because of the charge, we do need to just be a little bit more respectful, I think, and just a little bit more careful. And aware of different people from different generations talking different ways. I was with an older relative who was talking the other day about manic depression, which when I was a boy was something you talked about. And within my family, there's been quite a bit of manic depression.

But as a wise psychiatrist said to me, there is in every family. I mean, we all have highs and we all have lows. And bipolar disorder is for people where it's extremes, but everybody has elements of it in their lives. And now we would call it bipolar disorder, for people where it's extremes, but everybody has elements of it in their lives. And now we would call it bipolar disorder, not manic depression. But that really reflects your generation and the way language evolves. Absolutely. It's moving terminology. Absolutely. And just in a far more extreme form, the word idiot actually has had a really interesting history too. I'm not sure if you would nowadays, I don't think

you'd equate idiot with mental health, but certainly in the past they did. An idiot was somebody who literally was thought to be mentally imbalanced. But actually in ancient Greece, an idiot was a private citizen. It was simply one who didn't have an official position. You know, essentially the person on the street, a pleb really, as they would call them there, the plebeians. So it ended up with the meaning an uneducated, ill-informed person because they didn't hold public office. But actually, it originally simply meant private, which is why we also have idiom, which is a linked word, because an idiom is simply your private language. Yeah, so that's had quite a strange journey too. And we've kind of come out of that one. So as you say, there's so

many ebbs and flows and also, you know, so many circles, I think, too, in language that we come back to. I bet we come back to this subject. I hope we do, because it's completely fascinating. And if you've got any thoughts about it or words you want us to explore in a future episode, do feel free to get in touch with us, beautiful purple people. You simply get in touch with us by communicating. It's purple, emailing us, purple at somethingelse.com. And something doesn't have a G in it, somethingelse.com, purple at. People have been corresponding. We were talking about these words today at the suggestion of a couple of purple people.

But another purple person who's been in touch is James. And I'm not sure where he's writing from. Maybe it'll say in his letter. He says he loves the show, which is nice. If you love the show, by the way, do spread the word sure where he's writing from. Maybe it'll say in his letter. He says he loves the show, which is nice. If you love the show, by the way, do spread the word. Recommend us and things. Help the Purple family grow. He says, please help me with BAMS and NEDS. B-A-M-S and NEDS. N-E-D-S. When I was growing up in Glasgow in the 90s, NEDS were everywhere. These badly behaved youngsters were given this NEDI label, widely assumed to be

an acronym, non-educated delinquents. I'm doubtful of this. Then BAMs started to appear, except BAMs were exactly the same as NEDs. Eventually BAMs overtook NEDs and Glasgow was full of these BAMy wee hooligans. This resulted in BAMpots terrorising our streets, trip shops and swing parks, a creative twist on the original BAM that spread through the city. What on earth are the origins of these words? Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it? I would say this century has certainly been one

where we have delighted, unfortunately, in labels. So you remember when Chav just exploded onto the scene in 2004 and then quickly followed really other very derogatory labels like Pikey, for example. Ned and Bam's are some of those. There's also Trobo's, which was specifically said to be delinquents in quotes from Trowbridge. I mean, you got really local. And I think Plymouth also had its own. So yes, we don't know where Ned comes from. As you've just heard, the suggested initialism is that it is from non-educated delinquent, but it seems not to come from there. At least we haven't got any

proof of that. But the Scottish use of Ned for a hooligan is in the OED and it dates back to the early 19th century. So it might just be the use of a first name as so often to mean something specific. So quite often names become generic and they're just appropriated for all sorts of things. And I've always talked about Jack, Jack of all trades, lumberjack, etc. Yeah, so really interesting that one. And the other one that you mentioned was Bam, wasn't it? And again, you've got Bam Potts. I wonder if this actually is linked to the Barn Pot pots that I mentioned earlier. BAM pot meaning somebody who was just mad in the sort of general sense and behaved in a slightly crazed way. And so we seem to be sort of almost frothing at the mouth.

So I'm looking up in the OED now, Scottish, it says shortened for me the BAM pot or BAM stick. But it's dated back to 1959. So we don't actually really know for sure that it comes from this idea of a BAM pod, but it's defined as a belligerent or disruptive person. And it's actually first recorded by Iona and Peter Opie in their amazing Law and Language of School Children. Reverting to potty, which we were talking about earlier as somebody who's got problems, they're potty. That is related to the beer again, is it?

The beer pot with the froth on top? Do you know, I've never even thought about this one. Okay, so once again, I'm going to look this up. So, first meaning in 1860 was feeble, indifferent, petty, insignificant. By 1920, it meant, I'm reading the definition now, crazy, mad, out of one's mind, eccentric. And it says the semantic development is unclear. So they're not sure where it comes from. So maybe, Giles, maybe you're right, this idea of a crackpot or a barnpot, maybe those are fed into potty. And you've got dotty as well, which is a slightly more gentle word, I suppose, isn't it?

In terms of being slightly confused. Yeah, so slightly confused. And if you were dotty as a horse in the 19th century, you had a slightly limping or unsteady gait. And we think it comes from that. But why the dot? We're not completely sure. Maybe it's just something that's kind of slightly staccato and not steady and continuous. Fascinating, isn't it? That's what happens to people who herpel. They walk with a limp. They end up a little bit dotty. We've got time for one more.

This is from Canada, from Penny Penrose from Ontario in Canada. What is the origin of bagsy or bag's Eye or Eye Bags as in appropriating something? I remember it when I was a child in the 1950s. So do I. Bagsy, me do this. What a great name. Penelope Penrose. Love that.

Well, Penelope, you actually have almost given the answer pretty much in your question because you say Bag's Eye or Eye Bags. It is all about bagging something. So the idea is that you put it in your bag so it's yours. And the first record is 1914. To bag in school slang is to claim on the ground of being the first to get there. Hence, bag's eye or eye bags. And bag's eye eventually became bagsy.

If you've got queries, just get in touch with us. It's purple at somethingelse.com. Something without a G. Just email us. Susie, every week you bring us a trio of intriguing words. What have you got on the agenda? I've got three Ps for you today. My first one I think you'll like, Jaz, because I know you're a Dickens fan. Peck Sniffian. Oh yes, he's a character called Peck Sniff, wasn't he? Yes, and he was a real hypocrite and he was in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit.

And to be Pecksniffian is to be sanctimonious, in other words. So, as I say, a real hypocrite. So don't be such a Pecksniff or don't be so Pecksniffian if you're being sanctimonious without any justification whatsoever. My next P is pantomorphic. And I think this applies to language as much as things or people. To be pantomorphic is to be capable of producing any shape or state. And I think I just like it because we're all linguistic chameleons, aren't we? We change our language to suit our audience entirely. And I think that sums this

up beautifully. So that's pantomorphic. And my third one, none of these are very positive. I will go back to the positives. Parvenimity. It goes back to the Latin parvas meaning small. Parvenimity, P-A-R-V-A-N-I-M-I-T-Y means having a small or ignoble mind, to be a bit petty minded. Oh my goodness. Say that word again. mind, to be a bit petty-minded. Oh my goodness. Say that word again. Parvenimity. Parvenimity. You do not want to be accused of parvenimity or to be a pecksniffian. No. Oh dear. They are negative words. They are. Well, I've got a positive poem. Oh good. And it's by Spike Milligan because I was thinking that when I was young, Spike Milligan talked openly about some of his mental health issues. And I worked on a book of nonsense verse with Spike Milligan, who was a delightful, brilliant, sometimes difficult

and always rather eccentric human being. And he did struggle at times with mental health issues, overcame them most brilliantly, and was a very entertaining companion and a wonderful entertainer of children. Anyway, in our collection of nonsense verse, we included this poem by him. In the land of the Bumbley Boo, the people are red, white and blue. They never blow noses or ever wear clothes. What a sensible thing to do. In the land of the Bumbley Boo, you can buy lemon pie at the zoo. They give away foxes and little pink boxes

and bottles of dandelion stew. In the land of the Bumbleyboo, you never see a gnu, but thousands of cats wearing trousers and hats made of pumpkins and pelican glue. Oh, the Bumbleyboo, the Bumbleyboo, that's the place for me and you. So hurry, let's run. The train leaves at one. For the land of the Bumbly Boo, the Bumbly Boo, that's the place for me and you. So hurry, let's run.

The train leaves at one for the land of the Bumbly Boo, the wonderful Bumbly Boo, Boo, Boo, the wonderful Bumbly Boo. It's brilliant, isn't it? Just Bumbly Boo. Ah, it's brilliant. He was brilliant. Absolutely. Such a privilege to have met him and known him.

Oh, well, lucky, lucky you I feel lucky, lucky me to know you I have to say Susie Dent, you know so much and you put it over with such conviction and so lightly, anyway I think I think you're brilliant. No and I still have so much to learn which is why I'm often scurrying

to the OED and that's just the brilliant thing about English really but if you loved the show which we really hope you did please do follow us on Apple Podcasts

or Spotify or Stitcher Amazon Music wherever you get your podcasts Oh and do recommend us to friends and get in touch

via purple at somethingelse.com Something Writes with Purple is of course a Something Else production it was produced by Lawrence Bassett and Harriet Wells

with additional production from Steve Ackerman, Jen Mystery, Jay Beale, and he's here today. Yes, he's taken a trip away from the land of the Bumbleyboo. He's with us. It's Gully.