Something Rhymes with Purple - Dexter

Episode Date: January 14, 2020

This week we’re playing the name game! Following on from our recent episode on surnames and nominative determinism, we’re now casting our eye over first names. What do they mean? What are their origins? Do they reflect your personality or does your personality change to suit your name? So whether you’re a Gyles, Dexter, George, Charity, Faith, or a Harper, join us in finding out what’s in a name… As usual we’ll be answering questions you’ve sent in via Twitter and email and Susie will be serving up her trio of words for the week. A Somethin’ Else production Susie’s trio: Ultracrepidarian - somebody who gives opinions on matters way above their knowledge Quidnunc - an inquisitive and gossipy person Kiddlywink - an old Cornish word for a pub or ale house If you’d like to get in touch with a question for Susie and Gyles for a future episode, mail [e-mail]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello, I'm Giles Brandreth, and I'm sitting in the sitting room of my friend... Susie Dent. We're in Oxford, and indeed Susie used to work for the Oxford English Dictionary some years ago. And we are both people who love words. Susie loves them professionally because, of course, she's famous as being the person in Dictionary Corner on Countdown and on 8 Out of 10 Cats play Countdown. And I just love words because I love words. And we get together once a week to talk about them. Let's be frank today.

I say let's be frank because we were being frank the other day and you were telling me about the origin of frank and how frank and frankincense it must have been before christmas all come together remind me what you were telling me well it goes back to the conquering franks so the race who i think themselves were named after their weapons uh i think it might have been a spear and they conquered all of Gaul as it was gave their name to modern day France but also because they were considered or considered themselves to be superior anybody who was kind of blessed by them or was considered to be part of the in crowd were known as Franks in other words they were open and free and you know happy in society. And so to be frank with somebody is to be open

and have no hold barred, really. And frank incense is a superior kind of incense. Oh, it's frank. It's all about superiority. So if you're called Frank, you are Frank. Do you feel Frank? Do you think if you're called Frank, you are a different person than if you were called Fred?

Well, that's really interesting. Maybe we can come to this a little bit later because there's quite a lot of research done on what we have been talking about actually on the show, nominative determinism. And we've had a lot of fun with our listeners on the names of people who aptly fulfil their personality or their occupation. But also it works with first names and that's what we're talking about today, isn't it? First names. First names. Yes. Giles, you must know what your name means. Curiously, I don't know what Giles means. I felt it didn't mean anything. I mean, I know it's an old name, spelled with, in my case, a Y, sometimes spelled with an I. Have you avoided this all your life?

Maybe I have. There may be a reason. I think it's because I once looked up my surname, Brandreth, in the Oxford English Dictionary and discovered that a Brandreth, the definition was a substructure of piles. So I didn't dare look up Giles. Well, mine's not much better. What is yours? You don't get much better for dent. No, I agree, you don't.

So what does Giles mean? Well, it came in after 1066, so Battle of Hastings, came with the Normans and a medieval given name, Giles, with an I at that point, goes back to the Greek originally for a kid or young goat. Oh, I quite like that. Well, you can be a young goat rather than an old goat. I like that, exactly. A young mountain goat darting over the mountains, a kid. Kidding about. Kidding about. That's fine for me, young at heart.

Give us some more of these words, these names. Well, the first thing I should say is that first names are obviously very personal choice selected by a parent. Very different from what's called patronymic names, surnames. And with surnames, there's a sort of huge history behind them and distinct patterns. With first names, it's much more hit and miss, but in quite a sort of gloriously random way. And I would just say I'm not a first names expert. So I've done a bit of research, but I would not say that I'm the sort of best person to judge on this, but let's just have some fun, shall we? Have some fun with first names. Themes. There are so many themes to first names. We must come to your kids because

they've got extraordinary names, I think. But first of all, there's the kind of aspirational thing. So what would you like your child to become? Idea of nominative determinism there. So Clement, we have Clement Attlee, Clement Freud. That means merciful. We have, of course, charity. We have faith. One of our children is called Charity as her middle name. Lovely.

Scytherid is her first name. What does that mean? Charity is her middle name. My wife, who is the author of the dictionary of first names, this is the world authority on this. Your wife? Oh my goodness, we should have her here. Yeah, indeed. She doesn't know I come here. This is a big secret, don't let on. So she was interested in history and she read the Venerable Bede of the church in england and she came across cythrid in there who was a saint the daughter of king anna i think the king of the east angles

s-a-e-t-h-r-y-d one of your predecessors of the oed dr robert birchfield yes a great editor of that dictionary yeah told us because we knew him at the time cythrid was born that probably it should be pronounced cetherid okay like ingrid cetherid yeah time Scythrid was born, that probably it should be pronounced Sethrid. Okay. Like Ingrid, Sethrid. Yeah, well, S-E-T-H-R-I-D. We say Scythrid, her middle name is Charity. I love it.

So the red bit, do you know what that means? Because I know red, R-E-D-E, could mean sort of prepared and ready. So that's... Well, she's ready. She's ready for anything. She's ready for anything. And she's very charitable too.

Good. So there's this sort of aspirational side of things. And those are coming back, actually. Lots of kids called Hope and Faith, beautiful names. Then you have the kind of occupations. Now we know from surnames and loads of occupational names given to people. So Fletcher was an arrow maker, for example. Chandler was a candle maker, et cetera.

And that works with first names as well. So George means earth worker. So probably a farmer. And then you've got Casper, which is Persian for treasurer. So the keeper of the money. You've got Harper, you've got Mason. Forgive me for interrupting. Casper the ghost is why Casper is popular.

I don't think people are thinking of your money changer. No, no, I think they're just thinking it's a lovely name. I really like it. But what were the other two you mentioned? We have Mason, so quite American, and Harper, as in Harper Lee, obviously. And these are jobs, are they? Yeah, so those are occupations, a harpist, a Mason. Oh, Harper is a person who plays the harp.

Yeah, or it could be a maker of harps. Then you've got where you were born in the family. So this, particularly if you go back to Roman emperors and things, you'll have Octavius, the eighth child. Thomas means twin, originally. Gosh. So if you're twins in the family, one might be called Thomas. One might be called Thomas, yes.

Then there are physical characteristics. Again, if you go back to surnames, remember I talked about somebody called Sweat-in-the-Bed and Black-in-the-Mouth? Well, that applies to first names as well. So, Calvin, as in Calvin and Hobbes, brilliant cartoon strip, means bald. Bald. Bald. No hair.

Cameron means crooked nose. Yeah, to have a crooked nose. And then, of course, it went on to become the name of the Scottish clan. So, that explains that. Ciara or Ciara, that's Gaelic for black, maybe black skin or black hair. Alba, white, fair-skinned. Algernon, who would ever call their child Algernon these days?

Well, actually, Algernon, Algy is quite nice, you see. Is his third son? That's what he means, the third son. No, no, he means having a moustache. I see. You thought I might call a child. But actually, Algernon, it's again, the name I might have, because Algernon's one of the characters in Oscar Wilde's famous play,

The Importance of Being Earnest. There is Algernon there. But, you know, Archibald sounds like an old-fashioned name, like Algernon. But Archie is the Sussexes, Harry and Meghan. It's really famous. It's really popular now. They have a child called Archie, and that's a popular name. Yeah.

So these are all physical characteristics, really. Dexter would have been applied to someone right-handed. Ginger, as in Ginger Rogers. Either short for Virginia, I think, or you've got red hair. Grant, from the French, grand, meaning tall, and so on. So these are kind of based on the way people look, although presumably babies weren't born bald. Well, they are.

Sorry. Some babies are born bald. Why are you having these? What did your babies look like? What was it? My tea. With a moustache is what I really wanted to say. Anyway.

You know, isn't it funny? We have to say that all babies are born beautiful, but many babies are born looking like Winston Churchill. You know know they're not all born beautiful but you've got to say they're all beautiful haven't you well they are beautiful to the beholder as in the parent um surnames you have as well winston harrison ross that kind of thing sometimes those are applied to first names as well time of birth as well. I haven't really thought about this one, but I suppose Christmas Day, we've got Noel. We have Nathalie from the French as well, being born. And then you've got Carol, of course.

You've got April. Some people call Tuesday, particularly popular in America, I think. Oh, Tuesday, yes, indeed. There was an actress called Tuesday Weld, wasn't there? There was. And there was a famous actor called Frederick March. In fact, he was Frederick March II. And if Tuesday Weld had married Frederick March,

she'd have been Tuesday March II. Then you've got Place of Birth, famously Brooklyn Beckham, I suppose. But you've got Brittany, you've got Lorraine, Lorraine in France. You've got Sierra as well, which is quite a nice one. And topographical names. I hadn't really thought about this either. But Glenn and Cliff and Rock. It was in Rock Hudson.

So somebody presumably who was quite rugged and strong. How interesting. I knew somebody genuinely who called their child Neasden because that's where they were conceived. Neasden Jones. That That's quite a nice name. Sounds like they've got the slightest problem to me. And so it goes on. And then you've got different languages coming into play as well. So you've got Hebrew, I mentioned with Susanna, you've got loads of Arabic, beautiful Arabic Abdullah, servant of God. Muhammad, I think, means praiseworthy. You've got Germanic ones, which are quite sort of strong and glorious

and kind of often quite warlike as well. You've got Slavic ones, Milena, Vezhna, Dobromir, and probably it's a lot of protection and peace and love behind those names. In the old days, people were named, usually, weren't they, after saints? Or often were named after saints. People in the Bible, for sure. People in the Bible. So that's how many people for generations.

Joshua, Joseph, David. Exactly. They got their names. Then there was a vogue for people being named after flowers, people of a certain generation. My grandmother's generation, people were called things like Gladys. Yes. After the gladiola. Yes. Flowers. Flowers are quite big, actually. Hyacinth.

Rhoda, as in rhododendron. Oh, rhododendron. I never thought about that. I think so. Okay. Hyacinth, as in bouquet. Iris, lily. I had an aunt called Aunty Hope. And Aunty Hope, when she died, her husband, Wilfred, married again. And he married, in fact, Auntie Hope's cousin, and indeed her best friend, who was called Beryl, after a precious stone. Again, there's that period, there were people named after precious stones. And my father was asked to propose the toast at this second wedding, Doziem Nos. And by then, they were grown up people. I mean, they were, I think, in their 60s. So, Hope had died and Beryl was marrying Wilfred. And Beryl was a mature lady, a lady of riper years. And my father proposed this toast and said, let's raise our glasses to the happy couple and to the triumph of experience over hope. Well, I thought it was funny. He thought it was funny.

Everyone else at the wedding reception looked into their glasses, rather appalled. Oh. It was an unfortunate joke. Anyway, so you get flowers, you get stones, you get saints. Jade is another one, isn't it? Originally being named after the kidneys. I think we mentioned that, didn't we? Because it was a medicinal cure if you laid it against your flanks. And are you telling me that these names affect people,

so that if you're called Lily, you expect to be a beautiful girl? Yes. I mean, sometimes I do think it's a little bit cruel. So being called Aphrodite means you've got quite a lot to live up to, not least because Aphrodite gave us Aphrodisiac. Is Aphrodite a female name or a male name? Female. If you're called Romeo, I imagine that creates a problem too. I have a friend who's got a luckily, absolutely beautiful son called Romeo.

But yes, it's true. And all these coming back in, Shakespearean names also coming back in, which I think is great. But yes, social scientists believe that names produce what they call, and you'll know all about this because you are an expert on Oscar Wilde, a Dorian Gray effect. So the idea is that names influence our personality, how we're perceived and even our physical appearance. We ought to remind people the picture of Dorian Gray is a novel by Oscar Wilde

in which the character Dorian Gray is painted. He grows old in the painting, but he himself stays young. Yes, the painting takes on all the sort of physical excess, isn't it? And he lives a life of debauchery and the painting grows more grotesque as the years go by and he remains as beautiful as ever. Yeah.

So there's something called the Dorian Gray effect. And what happens there? Well, the idea is that our physical traits in turn impact how other people perceive us, which again affects how we feel and see ourselves. And so it goes on. But they think that names kind of operate in the same way. So if you, um, yeah, if you, if you were called Kevin, for example, Kevin in America is, is a hero's name. I mean,

it's a really strong name. It's slightly ridiculed over here, isn't it? It's a gerbil over here, isn't it, Kevin? It's a gerbil. My very first crush when I studied in America was on this gorgeous boy who I never managed to talk to, really. I used to work in a portis lodge at Princeton University. And he was an Adonis, and he should have been called Adonis, instead of which he was called Kevin. I was so disappointed when I heard that.

But to everyone else, Kevin was fine and strong and, you know, reflected his personality perfectly. Sadly, he didn't notice me yeah so the thing is if you are called rose for example you might then act in a very feminine way perhaps whereas if you're called i think the study was saying if you're called alex which can be male or female then you might actually in that way sort of be perfectly you know comfortable in your own body and be and happy to sort of mix both masculine and feminine. It sounds bollocks, isn't it? But actually... Think of being called bollocks. Hello, it's bollocks Brandreth. You can call him Bolly

for short. Or Arthropes. Back to Arthropes. Arthropes don't. I've got a son called Bennett, B-E-N-E-T. Okay. And this, of course... Is that blessed, right? It's blessed. It's as in Benedict. It's the same name as Benedict. But he's had a lifetime of people calling him Benet. Hello, Benet. Oh, so it's Ben for short? He doesn't really like that. He prefers to be called Bennett.

Of course, it is a surname with two N's and two T's, but he is Bennett as in being blessed, B-E-N-E-T. He's coped with that. Of our three children, the youngest is called Aphra, A-P-H-R-A. And, of course, Aphra, we named her after the first woman to earn her living as a writer in this country, Mrs. Aphra Benn. Oh, that's lovely. And that links into Bennet and so on. So have you got a game, I think?

Well, I'm quite excited because you mentioned Dorian Gray. Yeah. And if you take the word Dorian, you can rearrange the letters and what do you get? Another everyday English word? Ordain. Oh, I thought you meant another name. Yeah, ordain. It's not bad, is it? No. So my game, this is what I want to challenge people to do, and they can do this during the break or they can just do this for life, is to take a name and rearrange the letters to form an everyday English word. I'll give you, well, we'll do a couple to show them how it works. Rodney. Rodney, that's a good, strong name.

Delboy and Rodney. What's the word? R-O-D-N-E-Y? I should be really good at this, but without pen and paper, I'm actually rubbish. It's like a big countdown game. Yonder. Yonder.

Yonder. Lawrence in the distance, our producer, is calling out yonder, and he's got it right. I'll give you oneonder. Nine. Lawrence in the distance, our producer is calling out Yonder, and he's got it right. I'll give you one more. Andrew. Andrew is Wanda. Yonder and Wanda. I like that.

Isn't that good? Yeah. Ivan. Vane. Vane. Very good. So I'll give people a few more, and they can ponder it while we have the break.

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Giles, I figured out what Gerald is. Oh, doing an anagram with the name Gerald. Unscramble it. What did you give us? Larged. As in she larged it.

Oh, she larged it. Well, that's very good. My version of being glad. Okay. Which is an which is an older word. I gave you Brian, which can become brain. Craig can become cigar. Ernest can become enters. Stephen can become events. Alfred can become flared. But it's quite a fun thing to do. You know, I sometimes have difficulty getting to sleep. I think this is either, as my wife says, it must be a bad conscience. I say it's fear of death. I'm lying there awake thinking I'm going to be dying.

And I think you can't die if you're awake, so I better stay awake. And then I think, no, it's four in the morning. I've got to get to sleep now. So I'm going to try and come up with names that I can turn into words, first names. And having done a lot of boys' names, I'm now moving on to the girls' names. And Mabel has given me Amble. Bertha, I love. Big Bertha has given me Breath.

Carol has given me Coral. Lydia has given me Daily. Edna has given me Dean. Anyway, I've gone right the way through it. The furthest I've got down the alphabet, because I tried to do it alphabetically, I got to Rose giving me Saw. And then I did Esther turned into Threes. That's rather good. And I had a sister called Hester. That also can be made into Threes. And Astrid, Triads. Oh, that's very good.

Yeah. That's very good. There is a word, actually, I was just looking it up, which the writer Mark Forsyth discovered. I think he discovered it. Sometimes I think, you know, there are authors who make things up deliberately just to see how often it catches on.

Very clever, I have to say. But it's a lovely old English word, Mark says, and it's, I think, utcare, U-H-T-C-E-A-R-E. And it's just what you have, Giles. It's that anxiety experience, usually just before dawn, when you wake up too early and you're so worried about things. Everything becomes ridiculously, excessively inflated in your mind. It's all catastrophic.

I'll say that again. Ut care, U-H-T-C-E-A-R-E. That's Mark's word. I do suffer from this because I've got nothing to worry about in the world and yet I'm anxious every morning. Anyway. And also that's Matutalipia,

which was one of my trio from long ago. Grief of the dawn. Yeah. We've been talking about names and the anagrams of names. Some people call their child a Simone because they know that you can make an anagram of of names. Some people call their child Simone because they know that you can make an anagram of that and it becomes monies. So if you want your daughter in the

monies, call her Simone. We didn't even mention that, of course, there are those male-female sort of flips in language. So you have Frances, Frances, and Francesca, etc. So you have a lot of kind of gendered first names, a lot of riffs like that and sometimes of course things are named after names aren't they like hurricanes are named after tempests are named after girls names aren't they hurricane oh that's what you mean yes absolutely we ascribe names to um meteorological phenomena don't we yeah storm i still haven't been a storm and a few years ago i had something called a tessa which was a tax exempt special savings account. A TESA. And I was quite pleased because you could make an anagram of that, which was ACID.

So I had a TESA that was an ACID. That's probably why it was called a TESA. Yeah, maybe. Little backronym there. Have we had letters from people this week? We always get great letters from people. We call them letters. They're actually emails usually, aren't they?

Or they're tweets. And you can communicate with us at purple at something else.com. That's something without the G. Yeah. I have one from Alan Guest, throwing the book at someone. He was wondering if this book is the Bible. But no, it's not the Bible. It was a sort of notional legal tome, if you like, that judges have at their disposal. And so they give them every sentence in the book. That's the idea, which is quite nice. One of you got one there? I've got a couple here relating to when we talked about the word dumb and the pronunciation of the B at the end of the word dumb.

Dylan Planteiga, if I pronounce the name correctly, he comes from Canada. Fantastic. It's quite exciting. We have listeners all over the world. I love it. And he says, hi, Susie and Giles. I'm comes from Canada. It's quite exciting. We have listeners all over the world. And he says, Hi, Susie and Giles. I'm Dylan from Canada. What's the origin of the word dumb? D-U-M-B. I remember as a kid watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and in one of the tunes, they use the line, ho-hum, the tune is dumb. The words don't mean a thing. That was in 1937. Didn't know Snow White was as old as that.

Anyway, how far does dumb go as far as the origins of the word? So dumb, how old a word is it? Well, I would, I'm just looking it up in the OED, Dylan, but I would expect, because it's Germanic, they have dum, a dummkopf, obviously. It was, people know that in German for a stupid person. Stupid head. Yeah, the year 1000. So we're looking at old English, really.

And it would have been definitely pronounced Dumba. And eventually that B would have dropped off. Why did the B drop off? Just because of ease of pronunciation, really. Because when we inherit a word from another language,

we try to stick with that language as much as possible. But in the end, it often does prove impossible. And so we kind of adapt it to the English tongue. On the same lines, Kevin Bradley has been in touch. Hi, Susie and Giles. When you were talking about the silent B on words like thumb and num, et cetera, it made me think, is that a word? And if so, where does it come from for people like me who were born with extra digits? Oh, he's a polydactyl. Oh, a polydactyl.

Polydactyl. I was born with an extra left thumb, which was removed in childhood. I used to work with someone who was born with an extra right thumb and still had it and had to have work gloves specially made. Amazing. Anyway, love the podcast. Best wishes, Kevin Brackley. So he was born a polydactyl.

He now isn't a polydactyl, but now isn't a polydactyl, but his friend remained a polydactyl. That's amazing. And remember that the B and thumb wasn't ever pronounced. It just followed suit. It was a bit of a copycat and also probably was influenced by thimble. Would you describe Anne Boleyn as a polydactyl? Because you know, rumour had it that she had three breasts or at least three nipples. Really? Yeah. Oh, she was triple nippled. Never. That was well known.

Why did I miss this in my history lesson? I'm having a coughing fit. It doesn't feature much in the... It's got to be in horrible histories. I have to check with my friend Gregor. But no, I believe that Anne Boleyn was triple nippled. Wow. That's the rumour that went round.

Difficult to prove, of course. How useful. Well, I suppose so for babies i mean is there a word for being triple nippled i have no idea i'll come back to you on that one but would polydactyl apply no because a dactyl is a digit it's digit yes so you've got that's fingers and toes yeah and it's related to date the dates in our calendar because um we count used to count them on fingers and it's related to the date that we eat because the trees have leaves that look like fingers as well. So, dactyls are everywhere.

And pterodactyl as well, winged finger. We've got time for one more letter this week. Yes, that was really interesting. Jamie Barley. Good day, Susie and Giles. I just want to say how much I love your podcast. It's a staple of my week. That's a generous thing to say.

Thank you. My question for you isn't exactly a question about the English language, but rather the French. How come there are so many French words in the English language, even though the English historically hated the French? Specifically in my mind, some pretty words like protégé, café, déjà vu, faux pas, and some phrases such as je ne sais quoi and avant-garde. Hope you have a good day. Salut, Jamie. Oh, thanks, Jamie, for that excellent question,

because I often talk about 1066 and all that, and I didn't really go into a lot of detail. But essentially, when Harold was defeated and William the Conqueror came in, he could speak no English. So when he, during his coronation, he spoke entirely in French or Latin, and he had to have a translator.

He brought with him his French court and the only language they knew was French. And because French was the language of those in power and of the nobility, thousands and thousands of words came into the English language. Some we resisted, some we, I think probably quite happily took on, but what resulted for a while was what was called Anglo-Norman. So it was a kind of mixture of English and French all sort of mushed together. It was a really interesting time linguistically. Nowadays, of course, so many of the words that we use are French and we have no clue that that's their heritage because they're so happily settled in our land. Probably like heritage. Like heritage, probably. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, So many, obviously that would go back to Latin

ultimately, and most of them do. When we talk about having so many Latin and classical words in our language, most of them came to us via French. Winston Churchill, a great orator, he used to say that he preferred Anglo-Saxon words. He used to say the best words are the old words and the best of the best words are the short old words. Was he thinking of swear words then? No, he was thinking of like his great speeches, blood, toil, tears and sweat. Oh yeah. And mostly the language he used was Anglo-Saxon. Yeah. Those are the words come more from Germany. Yes. And Anglo-Norman words come from French. And eventually there's a great amalgamation.

Well, we just speak to this day a complete mishmash of various languages and that's why we love it. That's also why it's the richest language in the world. Absolutely. Because as the great Ralph Waldo Emerson said, the English language is a mighty river into which so many tributaries have flowed.

French has been traditionally the diplomatic language. language is a mighty river into which so many tributaries have flowed. Yeah. French has been traditionally the diplomatic language. Yeah. Does that date back literally a thousand years then, do you think? Yeah, no, absolutely. And certain of the aristocratic pursuits like falconry, for example, all of those words came from French. Fencing, hunting, all of those came from French. And they still use the French lingo.

Quite often. La langue française. La langue française. hunting all of those came from french and they still use the french lingo quite often la langue française uh la langue française and of course the poor french they tried to protect their own language for centuries by having this special academy they still have it which tries to protect them and keep out words like le weekend le snack bar even le feel good factor but they've had to accept it's a world. It was quite interesting. I did a programme for Radio 4, actually, which is coming out this year on the battle for English and whether English will eventually be superseded by Chinese, by Spanish and by Arabic, et cetera.

And I spoke to a lot of students at an English language school and I said, I asked them that very question, how many of the words that you use in your native language still come from English? And they just reeled them off. Every bit of modern technology has gone, they use the English word for it. So it's incredibly powerful. Oh, English is the language of the world. If I may say so, English is the lingua franca of mankind. Yeah, it is. Will it stay that way though? Fascinating question. It will, as long as we're podcasting. Have you got three new words for us this week?

I have. I've got one with a bit of a story behind it. Ultra-crepidarian. Ultra-crepidarian. Yes. Ultra means extreme. Yes. Crepidarian, I don't know.

Decrepid, is there anything to being decrepit? No, actually. It's a very useful word. Kind of goes with mumpsumus, which was one of my trios a while ago. Mumpsumus is somebody who insists that they're right, despite clear evidence that they're wrong. And ultracrepidarian is somebody who gives opinions on matters way beyond their knowledge.

Oh, it's a story of my life. Thank you. And it comes from a classical story. It's very long, so I will just give you the short version. But it was Pliny the historian recorded that a famous greek painter called apelles put his pictures where the public could see them and then would sneak around the corner to listen to their comments on his paintings and a shoemaker apparently once faltered the painter for a sandal because it didn't have enough loops in it so apelles duly went and corrected that and then the shoemaker

who was so proud of himself for having actually single-handedly changed the painting, that he started to criticise the subject's leg on the printer, at which point Apelis had had enough. And he replied with expletives gone, I imagine, that the shoemaker should not judge beyond his sandals or ultracrepidam beyond the sole because he knew nothing of anything apart from shoes that was the idea so ultracrepidarian goes back to that lovely story i think it's a brilliant word in in street slang nowadays your crepes are your trainers i wonder if it goes back to that same not to the same story but the same um you know sole of your shoe anyway i need to look that up it's good this this tune into this program if you want to learn how the younger generation are now talking. And if you want to sound like an old fart, you can use the word quidnunc, which means... Oh, quidnunc. Funnily enough, that is the sort of word that my father did love. Quidnunc. What does it mean? It's a nosy person, a sticky beak. It comes from the Latin. What now? What now? What now? What's going on? That's what it means.

What now? What now? Quidnunc. A quidnunc. Oh, nosy. You like that one? I like it. What do you call a sneaky beak?

A sticky beak. A sticky beak. You're sticking your nose into other people's business. Yeah. A sticky beak is a quidnunc. That's not one of my trio, by the way. I just threw that one in for good measure. And my third one is kiddly wink.

Oh, as opposed to tiddly wink. Oh, as opposed to tiddly wink. Well, it can be tiddly wink as well. So a kiddly wink and a tiddly wink were once old slang terms for a pub, actually, believe it or not, where you got a bit tiddly. And maybe then had a bit of a shut eye. You winked. Remember, the first meaning of wink was to close your eyes, hence hoodwink. So not quite sure why, but especially in Cornwall, they're known as kiddlywinks in old dialect. So I just like that one. I'm off to the kiddlywink. No one will have a clue what you mean.

Three lovely words. I think you're brilliant, Susie Dent. No, likewise. Well, no, I really do. I'm going to leave people with a few more names that they can have fun trying to unravel. Just sort of tease yourself. These are everyday English words that also can be the names, first names of people, okay? I give you hurt, H-U-R-T. I give you ideal, I-D-E-L. I give you, this is a tricky one, riding.

I give you road. And I'll give you one boys one as well. Sinned. You've got to turn those. Take those words. Did you get all of those? Well, I'm not going to give the answers, but I think so. Aren't you a clever clogs? No, it's possibly because

I'm switched on, also you've got the book in front of me. Yeah, well, you are a clever clogs. That's it for this week. We have a fresh one every Tuesdayuesday don't forget please give us a nice review if you can or recommend us to a friend if you've got a question you'd like us to answer or just want to get in touch email us at purple at something else.com that's something without the g we like to be different purple at something else.com and something rhymes with purple is a something else production

it was produced by lawrence bassett thank you lawrence with additional production stop clicking your baro and with additional production from jemima rathbone steve ackerman and gully the baro clicking was the best bit