Something Rhymes with Purple - Pettifogger

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

In this our 99th episode we’re calling our Purple People to the bar and passing judgement on the words of law! Susie tells us what a large number of judges and a large amount of food have in common, why the Old Bailey has Roman origins and explains why a Juror must swear but never curse. Gyles asks some ad hoc questions, as is his modus operandi, and proves that he’s no ignoramus when it comes to stories of late, great lawyers.  Later, Susie and Gyles are brief about briefs, explain the significance of colourful bags and ribbons, and cause mayhem with some dark humour- but who doesn't love the sound of a "mans laughter"? A Somethin' Else production. Susie's trio: Ninguid- blanketed in snow Widdendream- to be in a state of confusion or mental disturbance Rhinarium- the moist nose of an animal like a dog or a cat If you would like to get in touch with Gyles and Susie with any questions, please email [e-mail]. Our fabulous new range of merchandise is now live at https://kontraband.shop/collections/something-rhymes-with-purple PLUS for this first week we are giving you 10% off all items if you use the code purple2021. So whether you’re buying a treat for yourself or a gift for a Purple loved one then now is the time to do it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up y'all it's your man Mark Strong Strizzy and your girl Jem the Jem of all Jems and we're hosting Olympic FOMO your essential recap podcast of the 2024 Olympic Games in 20 minutes or less every day we'll be going behind the scenes for all the wins

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Something else. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Hello and welcome to Something Rhymes with Purple, the podcast about words, language and, well, just general witterings about people we know and people we see. In the case of my co-presenter, which is Giles Brandreth. Giles, I love your witterings. That wasn't supposed to be an insult. I can take it, whatever it was supposed to be. I'm just pleased to be talking with you. It's lovely to see you. I'm quite looking forward, though, to when all this is over and it's actually meeting in person because I've almost become sort of shy of meeting people. It's quite strange. I'm so accustomed now to just seeing people on a screen. If the doorbell rings, I'm alarmed. I think, accustomed now to just seeing people on a screen. If the doorbell rings, I'm alarmed. I think, oh no, I don't think I can cope with actually meeting

somebody in person. And in the streets now, we see people, of course, but we keep our distance. It's all very, very strange. But anyway. Yeah, it is strange. And do you remember the word that we came up with, or not came up with, but that we remembered, oclophobia, which is the fear of crowds. I think a lot of people are going to be feeling that. And also the introverts amongst us. I think, you know, this is somehow kind of appealed to those instincts, but made them a bit more extreme. So I'm like you, I quite enjoy having meetings on Zoom, I have to say. There's something much more kind of controlled about it. Oh, yes. You can press the button saying leave meeting and you can disappear. And people are more forgiving of interruptions and that kind of thing.

I think it just feels more relaxed somehow. Did you see the, on Twitter or wherever, did you see the court case from someone in America where the person had a filter on and appeared as a cat? Yes. Did you see that? I did. That went viral, didn't it?

That was hilarious. Yes. And the parish council meeting and all sorts of wonderful things. Oh, of course, we loved all that went viral did that was hilarious yes um and the parish council meeting and all sorts of wonderful things we loved all that we love that and zoom will stay i mean in a sense we've all realized we no longer need to traipse over half across the country to go to meetings but nonetheless people do need people i have to tell you i'm looking forward to today very very much indeed because we're going to be talking, I mentioned the courtroom there, we're going to be talking about the law and legal language. And in a sense, this program is something I have needed all my life, because I don't know

if you know this, but my father was a lawyer, both a barrister and a solicitor. And we can talk about the difference between them, I hope in a minute. And my grandfather was both a barrister and a solicitor, and we can talk about the difference between them, I hope, in a minute. And my grandfather was both a barrister and a solicitor. And I have a son who is a barrister and did a QC and now a part-time judge. And I've always avoided the law, but I was brought up on the law and legal stories. So my hero, when I was a little boy, when you were a little girl, who were your heroes and heroines? Audrey Hepburn for me, always. I just wanted to be Audrey. Still do, really. So she was my hero. Who else? I think it was more actually people that I met. I'm not sure I had sort of like pinups of people that I, you know, that I'd never met and wanted to be apart from Audrey. Well, you had Audrey Hepburn and I knew that you'd have somebody glamorous and beautiful

and international and exciting and a perfect choice, Audrey Hepburn. I had someone you may not even have heard of as my hero when I was a little boy, F.E. Smith. Have you heard of F.E. Smith? Okay. No. He was the first Earl of Birkenhead, and he was a lawyer. He became the youngest Lord Chancellor since Judge Jeffries. You've heard of him, the famous hanging judge. F.E. Smith was my father's hero.

And my father told me so many stories about F.E. Smith that he became my hero. And I had pictures of him when I was a little boy. And you might have had pictures of Aubrey Hepburn. I had pictures of F.E. Smith on my walls. The reason he was a hero to my father is that he came from, my father came from near Liverpool in Birkenhead and F.E. Smith was, in fact, became the first Earl of Birkenhead when he became Lord Chancellor. But he was a lawyer brought up in that part of the world. And in those days, lawyers were glamorous figures. Court cases were much more

often reported. And the first anecdotes, you know, I love an anecdote. The first stories I was ever taught were about these exchanges between this man, F.E. Smith, this barrister, and various judges. I'm going to give you, share three with you that are sort of in my head all the time. One where the judge says, I read your case, Mr. Smith, and I am no wiser now than I was when I started. F.E. Smith replies, possibly not, my lord, but far better informed.

He was just very cutting. And there's another one when the judge says, what do you suppose I'm on the bench for, Mr. Smith? And Effie Smith replies, it's not for me, my lord, to attempt to fathom the inscrutable workings of Providence. But the most famous and my favourite, and my father loved this story, and I think it was the first anecdote I was told, and it may explain everything about me. I think I was only six or seven years of age when I first heard this story, and I therefore have loved it

for nearly 70 years. The judge says it's a case where there's an alleged assault taking place, and F.E. Smith is pointing at the man in the dock and is saying, at the time of the alleged offence, the man now standing in the dock, the man now standing in the dock at the time of the alleged offence, he was as drunk as a judge. At which point the judge intervened to say, I think you'll find, Mr. Smith, that the expression is drunk as a lord. F.E. Smith responded, as your lordship pleases. I just thought that was so clever. So I love... He sounds a bit like John Mortimer and, you know, he's Rumpole of the Bailey. I love... John Mortimer, in a sense, Sir John Mortimer, as he became also a QC,

wrote Rumpole of the Bailey, was actually in the 1950s in the same chambers. And we're going to come on to all these words like chambers and court and barrister and solicitor in the same chambers in the 1950s. When there was this extraordinary thing called a dock brief, John Mortimer, who wrote Rumpole of the Bailey as a television series, but he also wrote plays and novels. And his first play was called A Dock Brief. And you can perhaps tell us about that origin of that expression. And A Dock Brief basically was when somebody who didn't have representation, the criminal, you know, didn't have a lawyer to represent him, could choose from the dock who they wanted. And all the ballisters would sit around waiting to be picked. And John Mortimer, when I talked to him about this, he said to me, it's rather like being, you know, in a sort of

high class brothel in Paris, and you'd be picked up. The punter would point at you and say, I'll have that one, please. And they chose the barrister. And because my father became a barrister quite late in life, he looked older than some of the others. And he got more work because they thought, well, he's older, maybe he's wiser. Wiser? Well, that's good. That's good. I like that. So, yes.

But yes, should we go through some of the terms? Please, take me through it. In any order you want. I'm just fascinated by the whole world of law. The one thing I would say is if some of the purple people haven't heard our Busies and Curtles, Cops and Robbers episode from April last year. It is there in the archive. So we talk a bit more specifically about police and criminals in that one. But yeah, shall I start with court itself? Please do. Absolutely.

Court is a really interesting one. So it goes back to the Latin cohors, which of course gave us cohort. And that in turn goes back to the latin meaning a garden a communal garden and the term was applied to a kind of yard a courtyard if you like where people might gather so it might be company of soldiers it might be people gathering for conversation etc and it was from there that it acquired the senses of a kind of sovereigns or a monarch's retinue, if you like. And then it became a judicial assembly. So it was all the idea of people coming together. And because people would go to court in order to pay homage or subservience, possibly to the monarch, the idea of courting favour came about. And it was all inextricably linked to chivalry as well. So that's why we get courtesy,

because we've lost the original pronunciation of courtoisie, we kind of forget that courtesy also has court at its heart. And it was all the idea of being chivalrous and paying homage. Gosh. So when you're in the court, certainly, of course, we're talking here mainly about the British courts, and we can hear from purple people around the world the way they do things differently there. Within the court, give me the shape of the court. The judge sits on they. And in fact, banquette, which in turn gave us a banquet. Banquette actually was also a bench. And you had moneylenders benches, which were called banque again, or in French, a bunk. And that gave us the banks that we go to for finance today, because these were the moneylenders kind of tables or low benches. So they've had quite a history. But there's the bar as well, of course, which has become a kind of figurative word for joining the law, if you like, you're at the bar. But in a

court, a bar, a physical barrier, you marked off the area around the judge's seat where prisoners were brought to be charged, hence you have a prisoner at the bar. And at the ends of court, where lawyers were trained, in England at least, a bar separated the students from those who had already qualified. And so a student was called to the bar to become a fully fledged barrister. And from this, the bar came to mean the whole body of barristers. And of course, barrister has bar in it as well. So it was all to do with the physical barrier. And in fact, you will still find that, of course, in court that separates qualified students from non-qualified students and, of course, the judge from the charged or the accused. So the judge sits on the bench. The bar is where the prisoner stands. But the members of the bar

are the people who are the barristers who represent, who are in a trial. We have two sides in the adversarial system we have in the United Kingdom. And the barristers, and that comes from the bar, they are, as it were, they're told what to do, or rather the work is brought to them by solicitors who do not, in the most part, appear in the court. They can now appear in some courts, but they used to appear in courts at all. What is the origin of the word solicitor? Well, it's interesting, this one, because it wasn't very positive to begin with. So it was a 15th century term for anybody who kind of solicits. And solicit had a broader term to the one that we think of today. If you solicit, you're kind of asking. But it was somebody who urges or prompts or

instigates something. And it was the kind of instigation bit that kind of affected the name for somebody who conducts or negotiates matters on behalf of another. So kind of representative. So your solicitor is somebody who solicits, I suppose, on your behalf, but in that kind of broader sense of solicit, which is kind of, you know, transacting matters on behalf of another person. So that's where that one comes from. And you've got the jury as well, of course. And the jury is really interesting. I was talking to my friend, Greg Jenner, who's a historian yesterday, because I have no idea why there are 12 members of a jury and jury goes back to the Latin jurare, meaning to swear, because each jury member had, and he probably still does have to swear that they will give true answers to

the questions asked of them, et cetera. But why 12? Because it seems really odd when we want to deliver a majority verdict that there's an even number rather than an odd number. And Greg said that it might be apocryphal, but there's a standard answer to this, which goes back to Tudor times, is that it was a nod to the 12 apostles. Yes. And so it's got that kind of religious, possibly religious significance behind it. But that's not proven. And it might well be, as I say, just a kind of a retrofitted answer. Nobody seems to quite know, but there are 12 members of the jury.

And then we have the Old Bailey. Oh, of course. Well, now we think it out of different courts. So we've got the court with the bar and the jury and the solicitors in their little compound. And then we have different courts. There's the High Court, the Magistrates Court for different kinds of things. And there's the Old Bailey. Now, the Old Bailey is actually a place, isn't it? It's just one particular group of courts. Yes. And it's named after the street that it's on, which is part of the wall of the city, the city of London. And it was called the Old Bailey because it was a Mott and Bailey fort originally. So it's topographical, the Old Bailey,

because of where it was situated, or indeed is situated. And Bailey, of course, is the outer wall of the castle. And people think of it as a kind of premier court because a lot of famous cases happen there. But it's only just, it's one of many courts that we have in the British Isles. And it's become the most famous because within the Old Bailey, there are different court rooms, number one court, number two court, etc. And there've been great trials held there, murder trials of every kind. The famous trial of Oscar Wilde took place at the Old Bailey. I've occasionally filmed there. I'm pleased to say I've never appeared there.

So that's the Old Bailey. Now give us some of the people who are in there. For example, the judge presiding. We mentioned he sits on the bench. Judge, what is the origin of the word judge? He's sitting in judgment, I suppose. He came just via French. Yeah.

Yeah, so juge, so it's all the way back to Latin, but came to us via the Normans. In fact, so much of English was kind of flooded with the Anglo-Norman French of the Norman conquerors. And its first real appearance was in law. And legal ease, if you like, is particularly full of French terms. And we can come to this maybe later, but there's been a massive effort in recent years to simplify legal language and legal jargon because it is so wrapped up in history and some of it is, you know, centuries, centuries old. So big attempts to clean it up, if you like, and make it much more accessible to the layperson. But you have the judge and then you have the brief when you mentioned the doc brief earlier. And it's

interesting for a book that I wrote about the kind of professional jargons of different groups of people. I did talk to a few people about the kind of legal profession, especially Rob Rinder, if anybody knows Rob Rinder. Oh, I love Rob. Judge Rinder, who is, yeah, just the loveliest man and frighteningly bright. Of course, he isn't a judge at all. He just calls himself that. He is a barrister, isn't he? He's a barrister.

And he sort of gave me quite a good insight into his profession. And a brief simply goes back to the Latin brevis. And a brief was a short document that could be used in any particular context, but it became particularly attached to official documents and particularly the legal kind. So it's a short summary, a brief. Brief is another example of what is called synecdoche. Sorry, I'm laughing because I mispronounced this earlier. So you're hearing the edited version.

So it's S-Y-N-E-C-D-O-C-H-E. And it's a figure of speech in which one part is made to represent the whole. So, I mean, you'll find it everywhere. So if England lost by six wickets, England means the England cricket team. And in this case, the brief is moved from the kind of briefcase that a barrister might hold to the barrister themselves. So it becomes the kind of symbol or the emblem of that person, if you like, or of the whole. But talking to Rob Rinder, I remember him saying, you're more likely to spot a barrister from the kind of aircrew style push trolleys than a sort of simple briefcase. And they will be full of the files needed for the case.

And they're wrapped in blue ribbon for a defence brief and white for the prosecution. And before the trolley came about, they apparently carried a bag of green cloth in which to carry their briefs. And they are very tired of the joke about carrying your briefs around. Although I discovered there was one slang dictionary from the 18th century that said, those gentlemen, i.e. the briefs, carry their client's deeds in a green bag. And it is said when they have no deeds to carry, frequently fill them with an old pair of breeches to give themselves the appearance of business. But anyway, they were known as the green bags, incidentally, because of that.

So the barristers carry their wig and their gown in a blue bag until they are given a red bag by a queen's council. So I don't even begin to pretend to know exactly what the ins and outs of that are, but it is so steeped in ritual, you know, it's a kind of advance from one office to another. Well, it's very exciting becoming a silk. That's what happens. I mean, I say this only because my son became one a couple of years ago

and we were able to go to the ceremony to see the Lord Chancellor making him a silk. It's a royal, well, you become the Queen's Council. When there's a king, you become the King's Council. And there's a wonderful certificate signed by the Queen that we now have. Our son just gave it to us to have on the wall. So we have it on the wall here at home. And you become a silk because you exchange your robes.

You're able to wear a silk robe as opposed to a sort of cotton or linen one. And that's when you've been appointed Queen's Counsel by Her Majesty the Queen. That's it. That's right, isn't it? And you become called a silk because you're wearing a silk. And the silks, interestingly, in the court, the silks are allowed to sit in the front row

and the other barristers sit in the second row. And they also wear a bum freezer, which is a kind of short, tailless silk jacket that's worn by Queen's Counsel as well. They call them bum freezers. Maybe we'll get on to the kind of jargon later because some of it is quite very dark and quite funny. Oh, dark. We like dark and funny. I have to tell you, my son has not told me any of the dark stuff, but he has told me a few of the funny things. Anyway, go on. So just talking about the

green bags, et cetera, and the briefs, lawyers have not always attracted particularly positive epithets. So a shyster, for example, wants a kind of clever but sort of slightly crooked person. That's pretty much applied to lawyers exclusively these days, if they are looked down upon or if they're particularly incompetent. It's interesting, during Trump's impeachment trial, there was quite a lot of criticism of his defence lawyers. And I saw the word scheisse crop up there in relation to them. And it probably goes back to the German scheisse, meaning shit. So it sort of came into New York City from the large number of German immigrants. That's one kind of theory for them. But it kind of, in fact, first emerged in a notorious New York prison known as the Tombs. And there were a lot of charlatans in the Tombs who

pretended to be lawyers and officers of the court. And we think that shyster was first applied to them and then kind of went on a little bit to become a bit broader in its applications. And there's the pettif fogger as well. That was used in parliament, I think quite recently, a petty fogger. And that's again, a sort of incompetent or inferior legal practitioner, or one who just deals with petty cases and isn't up to anything more. And that's petty. And then a really old word, fogger, meaning an underhand dealer. And it might've come from fugger, which was the name of a family of merchants in Augsburg in the 16th century. So, you know, not particularly,

people didn't think very positively about them, clearly. But petty fogger and shyster, those are just two of the epithets that are thrown at lawyers if they're not much cop. Well, of course, lawyers themselves throw bandy language around and not just the English language. They're constantly coming up with these little Latin tags and phrases. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of legalese that you were talking about earlier that you said they were trying actually to avoid and with good reason. One of the other lawyers that my father was a great hero to my father was a man called Edward Marshall Hall. Have you heard of him? No. No, you've missed out on all these great characters.

These were, I suppose, these are people going back to Edwardian times or certainly the 1920s. This man was called Sir Edward Marshall Hall. He was a KC, a King's Council, and he was known as the Great Defender. And he was reckoned, this barrister, to have saved more people from the hangman's noose than anybody else.

This was in the days when there was the death penalty, of course. And, I mean, thanks to my father, I could tell you endless stories about this man, Marshall Hall, and his great cases, the Camden Town murders, the Green bicycle case, the brides in the bath case. Anyway, he was an interesting character, an unhappy marriage. He was an MP for a while, but he was also very fond of these courtroom quips. And my favourite that I can remember was during a trial, an Irish labourer was on trial and Marshall Hall was defending him. But at one point, the presiding judge turned to Marshall Hall and remarked,

is your client not familiar with the Maxim Res I ipsa loquitur? To which Marshall immediately responded, my lord, on the remote hillside in County Donegal, where my client hails from, they talk of little else. And that is the problem. These Latin terms of phrase, the way some of these lawyers talk, means nothing to the average man or woman in the dock. Ad hoc, modus operandi, pro bono, quid pro quo. All these are phrases that pop up in court. Like subpoena. Subpoena is often used in American movies, isn't it?

He's been subpoenaed. Yes, under penalty. Yeah, it means under penalty. Under penalty. So if you don't come, you will be liable to punishment. And that res ipsa loquita, I've just looked this one up. So in Latin, it means the matter speaks for itself. And it's used in law to mean that just the occurrence alone of an accident is sufficient

to imply negligence. So the very fact that it happened means that there was negligence. It speaks for itself. That's very good. Which reminds me of one of my all-time favourite words, which I'm sure I've mentioned before. But again, this comes from, it's applied in law, although it goes all the way back to followers of Pythagoras, ipse dixitism.

And ipse dixit, again, means like he said it himself, is what it means in Latin. And in law, it means, okay, we're we are resting on the authority of one single speaker so how how can we just take one person's word for it that is you know that's the basis of your argument and ipse dixitism more widely in english it's a bit of a tongue twister but it's brilliant and useful because it means that you basically assert that something is absolutely true. It's undeniable because someone somewhere said it. So you might have heard it down the pub and because you heard it down the pub, it's true. Before we take our break, just run me through

those ones that I rattled off there. Ad hoc means what? For this, ad hoc for this. We use ad hoc to mean kind of impromptu, don't we, all sort of here and there. But it's really kind of when necessary or needed. So the group was constituted ad hoc, for example, and it just means for this or to this. In other words, for this occasion, we'll just get people together. That's that one. Modus operandi, MO, that just means the manner of operation. Very good. Doing something pro bono? For the public good. Pro bono.

So, bono means good and pro means what? For, for good. For, for good. So, it simply means for good. Alibi means elsewhere. Oh. So, if you have an alibi, it means you weren't, you know, you weren't at the murder spot or whatever. I'll give you a quid pro quo. Quid pro quo means this for that. Oh, so,'ll give you a quid pro quo. Quid pro quo means this for that.

Oh, so yeah, literally quid pro quo, this for that. And what about this? John Mortimer specialised in, we mentioned him earlier, the creator of Rumpole, also a barrister when he was one, he specialised in divorces. And he told me lots of fascinating things about when rows most frequently take place apparently in the bathroom shared bathrooms lead to rows and he was fascinated by the number

of murders that occur either in or close to the bathroom but often in in the cases that he was dealing with in the early days before divorce became much simpler and less blame-attached business, people had to be caught in flagrante delicto in order to secure a divorce. And they would set up, even if they hadn't had an affair but they wanted a divorce, to be seen as the guilty party, they would have to be caught, as it were, in flagrante delicto. I mean, what does it mean, flagrante delicto? Well, red-handed is an allusion to the blood that you might still have on your hands if you're caught red-handed. In flagrante delicto, it simply means a kind of flaming crime or a blazing crime. So, in other words, it's kind of happening in full force while someone is caught.

Be upstanding in court. We're going to take a quick break. Blue break? Not going to the bathroom anywhere near you. But we're going to take a quick break. Blue break? Not going to the bathroom anywhere near you. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you.

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Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Day. You might know me as the creator and host of the How to Fail podcast, but I want to tell you about a new podcast I've made. How to Write a Book is for anyone who wants to get their story out there. Fronted by a best-selling author, a super agent, and a powerhouse publisher, this 12-week

masterclass will take you right through from developing an idea to nailing the plot. If you want to get all episodes at once and completely ad-free, subscribe now. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. This is Something Rhymes with Purple. We're talking about the law. The law is an ass, some people say. Is it an ignoramus? Now, you told me once that ignoramus was a word that has some connection with the law, and I can't remember what you told me. That's often the problem. I just don't remember all the wonderful things you tell me. Susie, what does ignoramus mean and why? Yes, it's from a Latin verb.

So it's a kind of declension of a Latin verb and it means we do not know. And it was introduced into the courts of law in England in the 16th century, I think. And when used by a grand jury, it was written across the back of an indictment that was presented to the jury if the members thought the evidence was too weak to warrant prosecution. In other words, so we do not know. And from the sense of ignorance and being unable to decide came that sense of somebody who knew absolutely nothing. So ignorance in the sense

of stupidity. So that's where that came from. And there's a similar one actually that kind of came from legalese again, I suppose, and that's culprit because culprit wasn't originally a word, but it was a kind of running together, a bit of a mistake of two words because of the abbreviated writing of legal records. So in the Latin, it was culpabilis, meaning guilty, that was abbreviated to C-U-L, and the old French, prest, P-R-E-S-T, meaning ready. So when the prisoner had pleaded not guilty, the clerk of the court replied with, culpable, prest d'avérer notre bille, meaning guilty, and I am ready to aver our indictment. Anyway, this reply was noted down as cool, full stop,

and then priest, P-R-I-S-T. And eventually that became mangled to culprit. So it goes all the way back to a kind of Latin tag, if you like, that then was misunderstood. That's what happens when you use Latin, much as I love it. Did you do Latin at school? Obviously you did Latin at school. I had to do Latin in order to get into an American university, weirdly. So I didn't do it at school. I did a crash GCSE, or O-level as it was then, in Latin.

I think I had to do Latin to get into Oxford University in those days. Oh, did you? Yeah, they didn't have that when I was- I mean, I was terrible at Latin. For years, I thought in loco parentis meant my dad's an engine driver. Any more of these interesting words that have a kind of legal start to them? Yeah, thing. What? Thing? Thing. T-H-I-N-G.

Any old thing. Anything can be called a thing. But in Old English, it was really, really important because a thing was a meeting or an assembly. And it could even be a court or a council. And it developed through being something brought before a court, and then an affair or concern to its much more general kind of diluted sense of whatever you want to call a thing. I mean, it's such a placeholder now. It's a real shame. And in Iceland, of course, you've still got the, it's written as Althing, but I think it's pronounced such a placeholder now. It's a real shame. And in Iceland, of course, you've still got the, it's written as Alþing, but I think it's pronounced Alþingki.

Oh, the parliament. And that is their parliament. So Þing is, you know, it survives there in its kind of full, original, powerful sense. And they claim it as the oldest parliament in the world, I think, the Icelandic people. I think it is. The people on the Isle of Man, I think they think they've got the oldest anyway.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay. And then sort of mayhem is quite an interesting one because if you look at murder, if you go back to murder in Old English and for the Anglo-Saxons, it meant secret murder because in those times, and going back to kind of Germanic peoples, only secret murder was regarded as a crime because open killing or homicide was considered to be blood revenge or compensation. And so if somebody killed a member of your family, you were therefore entitled to kill them

and take your revenge. And that wasn't punishable by law as opposed to murder, which was secret and therefore plotted and therefore that was unlawful. And mayhem in criminal law was the infliction of physical injury on a person so that you basically, they couldn't defend themselves. So that was very much linked to murder, mayhem and murder. But what's interesting is that mayhem then also gave us the word maim, M-A-I-M, because if you're maiming somebody, you're inflicting that same physical injury. This is why I absolutely adore this programme, because I learned so much. The English language is so extraordinary, the way one word leads to another by these circuitous roots. It's extraordinary. If you are listening to this programme around the world,

and we're very lucky with Something Rhymes with Purple, it's a global podcast, and we have a lot of listeners outside of the British Isles. And today we've been talking really about the law as it appertains in our country, that has spread, of course, to other parts of the world through maybe one of the better parts of the British Empire, the life that was doing that. But people have different ways of doing things in different parts of the world through the, maybe one of the better parts of the British Empire, the life was doing that. But people have different ways of doing things in different parts of the

world. So if you've got any queries, questions or information about how the law operates and the legal terms, if you are one of the love children of the late, great Perry Mason, do please feel free to get in touch with us. It's purple at something else dot com. That's something without a G. Have we had letters this week? We have, but can I just quickly tell you some of the lingo? I mentioned the dark humour.

Of course. Just some of it, again, that I think Rob Rinder and a few other informants, if you like, told me about. It's very much old school, as you might expect, places like the Old Bailey.

So, you know, this was a few years ago. It might have changed, but the vibe was very much for kind of gentlemen's club. And the phraseology kind of reflects this. So manslaughter, for example, is man's laughter. And then they might say something like, how long are you good for? In other words, how long is the case that you're working on? And you might get the answer, oh, not long. it's just a murderette. Just a little murder. And there's prize giving, which is sentencing in which someone might be weighed off if they're being sentenced. And that's awful actually, because that's supposed to go back to the historical assessing of someone's weight so that you could indicate the length of rope that you needed for

hanging. So if you're weighed off, that's what a judge might say if you're being sentenced. Barristers might refer to themselves as hacks if they're kind of in everyday sort of knockabout crime. They take a drink in the annex, which is their preferred watering hole. And they're just sort of lots of old fashioned phrases like going to the winders when a company is about to be liquidated. lots of old fashioned phrases like going to the winders when a company is about to be liquidated. So it's interesting that often in professions where you do hear really, really difficult stuff or witness it, you know, paramedics are very, very similar in the medical profession, very similar. You do get this kind of dark humour creeping in, but it's very, as we've, as we've said so many times on, on Purple, you know, it's very much a kind of uniting thing. No matter how strange it seems

to somebody outside, it is very much a kind of necessary tribal jargon. But yeah, a bit old school, but interesting nonetheless. Old school is good in my book. We've had some lovely letters this week. Here's one from Julie Swerchek. And she says, Hello, Susie and Giles. Whenever you refer to your listeners as purple people, I think of a bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. There's a half-mile pedestrian bridge stretching across the Ohio River to Newport, Kentucky. It's called the Purple People Bridge.

No. Yes, and she sent us a link to it. You can rent. Wow. Wait for it. You can rent the bridge for events. So perhaps one day when travel is possible, we could all make a

pilgrimage there. I really enjoy your podcast. I'm going to look this up. Isn't it wonderful? And we're coming up, I think next week, we're going to have our 100th episode. Maybe when we get to our 200th episode, we could do it live from the Purple People Bridge across the Ohio River. What do you think? That is amazing. I love that, the Purple People Bridge across the Ohio River. What do you think? That is amazing. I love that, the Purple People Bridge. The Purple People Bridge. And people could come from all over the world. Purple people could come and unite

and we could have a great word in. I would absolutely love that. Thank you, Julie, for telling us that. I've got a letter from Brian Johnson who has been reading a book about sabotage units during World War II. And he says, one of the most prominent characters is called Colin Gubbins. What's the origin, he asks, of using Gubbins for miscellaneous items paraphernalia? And no one quite knows exactly

where it came from, but it was certainly dialect in English where it meant fragments of fish. So it was like little bits of fish or fish pairings that you might get at the end. Well, I don't know whether fishermen would have them or whether you might get them at the end of preparing your fish for a meal. But from there, from the idea of being kind of spare stuff that's not really wanted, it came to mean a fool or a simpleton. Hopefully Colin Gubbins wasn't one of those. And then it was kind of indefinite for any kind of nameless object, I think probably because of its sound, Gubbins. I think in the origin of it meaning a fool, I can tell you a little story concerning the great actor Sir John Gielgud,

who unfortunately for him in the early 1950s, he was arrested for importuning at a public convenience. And he was fined for this and turned up at rehearsals shortly afterwards where Noel Coward reprimanded him and said, oh, you silly bugger. And John Gilgamesh replied, no, not silly bugger, silly gubbins. It didn't get that far. Anyway, let's moving swiftly on. yes chuffed chuffed yes we have an email don't we from paul herrington who has been watching a rick stein program on cornwall and they featured the bird called the chuff which um he said is on the cornish coat of arms i didn't know that did you no so he's wondering where chuffed comes from. And the answer is, again, dialect words.

Chuffed meaning plump or pleased. And that might also well be behind the idea of the kind of plump birds' feathers on a chuff. But just to be kind of really confusing, there is a very different dialect use of chuff with the completely opposite meaning of surly or gruff. So actually to be chuffed could also mean to be a bit disgruntled. But we definitely use it now to say, you know, I'm chuffed to bits. Do you know what? I must throw this in because I've just thought of one other word that has passed from law into us, just thinking about sort of being plumped up, is size. The word size actually

goes back to the assizes, which was a sitting, and that was borrowed from the Norman conquest. So the sitting of a legislative body or a court. And assize also began to embrace the regulations established there, especially weights and measures, quantity and dimension. And because people heard it as a size, they cut the A off and we were left with size because it was weights and measures and things that were being decided at these meetings. Great. Love that. I forgot about that one. Thank you for these letters that people sent us. Alistair Sudgey has sent us a letter saying, good morning, Giles and Susie. Well, obviously they listen in the morning or write in the morning. An avid listener. Thank you very much. This morning I heard myself say, oh dear, that'll put the mockers on it

and then instantly realised that I had no idea of the origin or the meaning of the idiom other than its uncommon usage. Google seems to tell me of its Australian origin and yet the phrase has been in constant use by my family, half Scottish, half Yorkshire, as far back as I can work out. So what is the answer for Alistair Sajia? I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. I think it's Sajie as in budgie. Anyway, put the mockers on this one. Well, yes, Google in this sense,

in this occasion seems to be correct, actually, because the OED also says it was originally Australian. And it says of uncertain origin, perhaps a borrowing from Yiddish, or in which they've got a verb meaning to sort of make sore. Or it could just simply mean to kind of mock somebody and so put a jinx on them, because certainly that's the idea. If you put the mockers on someone, you're kind of thwarting them or bringing them bad luck. So it may be linked to the idea of mocking and mockery, or it may go back to that Yiddish verb meaning to make someone sore. But the answer is we're not completely sure. But the first record in the OED is around the 1920s. Very good. One quick one more. This is from Geraldine.

I'm wondering if there's a word that describes the specific kind of pleasure experienced at the cessation of pain or discomfort. I'm thinking of the ah sound that happens when, for example, you take off an uncomfortable pair of shoes at the end of the day. I've asked several people, but all they can come up with is relief, which doesn't seem adequate. Is there a word to describe that sensation of relief that comes oh when you undo that you know or undo your undo your trousers when you've just eaten a big meal that's the big one isn't it you just undo that speak for yourself no you know if you've got a pair of tight jeans on and you've just had a big blowout and you undo that big blowout how charming yes big blowout purple people know exactly what I'm talking about.

Maybe they do. Unfortunately, though, I can't come up with a good word. There must be a fantastic dialect word out there, but the only thing I could think of was easement. But that's not enough, is it? I think we need purple people's help for this one. And also, if there is anyone who knows exactly what I'm talking about with opening the button on your jeans after a meal, let me know.

For those of us who don't wear elasticated waistbands, girls. Did you see the Indian chef who, before Valentine's Day, had produced marvellous takeaway Indian food that he guaranteed would not produce wind? No. Did you try it? For Valentine's Day, he wanted people to have fart-free Indian food. So he created a Valentine vindaloo that he guaranteed would not generate wind. I'm just thinking of that because of what a romantic date you'd make.

Oh, I've had a right blowout, Charles. I'm just going to undo my buttons now. Oh, dearie me. Well, I think that's enough correspondence. Raise the tone now, Susie Dent, by giving us your trio of words for the week. Well, in Britain, at least in recent weeks, we have had the delight or might be a sort of peril to other people. So for those of us who love snow, we have had the delight of having a covering of the white stuff. And I just love the sound of the word ninguid. the sound of the word ninguid. Ninguid means having much snow, N-I-N-G-U-I-D. And it's as beautiful as nivius, which is another word meaning snowy. So if there's a nivius landscape,

it means covered in snow, which I think is quite beautiful. Okay, here's another one that describes me very often, either during the podcast or just generally, a wooden dream. Dial it word, if you're in a wooden dream, you're not just in a daydream, you're in a kind of state of confusion or mental disturbance. A wooden dream. How do you spell that? So W-I-D-D-E-N-D-R-E-A-N. A wooden dream. And just because I love dogs and at the moment when I'm going out for my lockdown walk, I apologise to dog owners near me because I just descend on their pets and basically have a nuzzle. And this is one for all dog owners and I think cat owners as well. A rhinarium, R-H-I-N-A-R-I-U-M, is the moist nose

of animals like dogs, etc. How interesting. Is that related, the rhine in that, as in a rhinoceros? Yes, rhinoceros means nose horn. And rhinoplasty is a nose job. So rhine means nose. Yes, rhino. Well, that takes me, it's made me realise what poem I should share with you this week, because I got a little book through the post from my friend Mark Graham, who's become a bit of a laureate of the lockdown, writing wonderful short poems and putting them up on Twitter. And he sent me a collection of his poems called

Words from the Wild. And these are poems really basically about wild animals. And you'd love this little book. It's all about people, for people who love animals. And it's also about protecting animals. And as you know, in some parts of the world, rhinoceros horn is taken as an aphrodisiac. Complete awful madness. Anyway, he's written a little poem about this, which I thought I'd share with you. It's called Hands Off Our Horns by Mark Graham. I know my horn's impressive, but it's not a magic cure for poor performance in the sack of that, I'm really sure. I recommend Viagra if suffering from these ails. You're stupid if you buy my horn. Just bite your bloody nails.

Amen to that. Thank you so much for listening to Something Rhymes with Purple. We love having you along and we really appreciate it. And hello also to Jimmy Carr, who told me recently that he loves this jazz, which is great news. So hi, Jimmy, if you're listening. Something Rhymes with Purple is a Something Else production produced by Lawrence Bassett with additional production from Harriet Wells, Steve Ackerman, Ella McLeod, Jay Beale

and the ever absent Gully. But will he be back next week? It's our 100th birthday. He better be. Gully better turn up for that.