Something Rhymes with Purple - The Milky Way

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

3..2..1..Get ready to launch into an episode that is out of this world as Susie and Gyles explore the language of outer space. Via the fast-flighted messenger Mercury to the saturnine tendencies of an overthrown Roman God, we explore how the planets came to be named and the legacy they have left within our everyday vocabularies. There’s just about time to stop off for a chocolate bar or two while Susie takes the opportunity to drop a celebrity name and Gyles discusses their compatibility… based entirely on their star signs… Susie’s Trio: Empleomania - Manic compulsion to hold public office at any cost Glump - To look solemn or glum Nibbling - Nephew/niece. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main We'll see you next time. Amex. Benefits vary by car and other conditions apply. Thank you so much for listening to this. It's Something Rhymes with Purple. It's a podcast all about words and language. And Susie Dent and I, who created this a year or so ago, are very conscious that there are a huge number of podcasts out there

and that you have chosen ours is lovely for us. And we know that actually it imposes some responsibility on us to be informative and, if possible, entertaining so that you don't feel that as you're commuting to work or doing your walk or trying to get to sleep, we are entirely wasting your time. We are honoured by your company. And I'm privileged to know Susie Dent, who knows more about words and language than anybody else in the world. And I love people like you know a great deal. I was a friend of Patrick Moore, eventually Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, the amateur astronomer. eventually Sir Patrick Moore, the astronomer, the amateur astronomer. He was just an enthusiast for the stars. He was one of life's enthusiasts. He also played the xylophone quite brilliantly.

He was a delightful human being. And when I was waxing eloquent, I felt one day with him about the wonders of the English language, telling him how many hundreds of thousands of words there were. And if you encountered all the derivatives and all the technical terms, how many millions of words there were. He said that pales into insignificance. When you look up in the sky, there's so much out there and we haven't even begun to name them all. So I thought, Susie, today we could talk, we could do a bit of stargazing. I'd love to. Do you ever look up at the sky?

Yes. I find them totally bewitching. And it's a fascinating subject. And as I will tell you, so many star-related images are actually embedded in English, which is all the more reason to completely love them. Am I right in thinking, Patrick Moore, the reason he had a bad eye was because he had indeed looked at the sun with a telescope? Is that right? That is the line that he took.

Yes. He was a curious character. You'll never see a photograph of Patrick Moore, who was a very jolly man, smiling. He felt the smile was inappropriate. So he always scowled for the camera. Wore a monocle to cover his problem with his eye that had gone a bit wonky. So he would have known the answers to all this. You know the answers. Where do we begin?

Well, I don't know all of them because I'm as curious a traveller of the stars as anyone, but I'll do my best. Where in the galaxy should we begin? With the planets? Let's start with the planets. So it's Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. So the gas giants are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. So the gas giants are Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and then there's a smaller... Excuse me, what about the planet Zog? Oh, Zog. I forgot about Zog. We always need one with a Z.

Okay. So Mercury, which came first, a mercurial personality, the Greek figure of Mercury, or the planet? How do these planets get their names? Who gave them to them? How do they affect our language? Well, that's a really good question. As I say, I am not an astrologer or an astronomer, so forgive me if I get some of these facts wrong, but a mercurial person would be named after Mercury, the Roman messenger god. So he, of course, was known for his ability to travel really quickly with wings on his feet. Hence, he will get Mercury in thermometers, etc. So Mercurial is somebody who is very quick, sort of quick tempered and shifts and changes moods

quite quickly. So that's Mercury. Then you've also got somebody who's Saturnine, of course, and they tend to be quite gloomy. And they would be named after the king of the Titans who ruled the world before Jupiter. What the sort of gloomy connection would be, I'm not quite sure. But can you have a guess as to Venerial and who that might be named after? Venus, the goddess of love. Because unfortunately, lovemaking with the wrong people at the wrong time in the wrong way can result in venereal disease. Is that correct? Yes, that's right. It's a bit of a sad legacy, isn't it? But of course,

Aphrodite gave us Aphrodisiac as well. So there's goddesses of love. But I always thought that's a bit sad that Venus's legacy is that rather than, you know, anything like Mercurial or Saturnine. Uranus was the ancient Greek king of the gods and the original Roman sky god. So he's like Jove. Yes. Now Jove was... Well, Jove is Jupiter, isn't he? Jove is Jupiter, exactly. So he was king of the Roman gods. It's the largest planet in our solar systems.

It's very confusing. There are Greek gods and Roman gods. Which came first, the Greeks? The Greeks, yes. And then the Romans renamed the Greek gods with different finds. Yes, exactly. So there's a Greek name and a Roman god named for all these gods. Yes, it is quite confusing. I totally agree.

Neptune was the Roman god of the sea. And because of the beautiful cerulean colour of the sea, Neptune seemed a fitting choice for that planet. And Pluto, we've talked about, Roman god of the underworld. And as you say, the underworld is supposed to be dark and cold, just like the planet or dwarf planet now, Pluto. Mars, Roman god of war. Oh, I thought it was a chocolate bar. That's the red planet. I do know that I always love the fact that Mars, the Mars bar is not named after Mars, the planet.

It's named after Mr. Mars, who actually made the original Mars bars. And he made the Milky Way as well. He made the Milky Way. Isn't that extraordinary? Yes. Anyway, so Martian, Martian skills, meaning Mars. Oh, Martian warlike.

Yes, because Mars was the god of war. So, yeah, I think we've gone through most of those. No, well, no. What I was wanting to establish is somebody decided once upon a time, we're going to name the planets. And they chose, these are mostly the Greek or the Latin names here? Both. We tend to use, I think, probably mostly the Roman names for these. And absolutely, we named them after the gods.

And this is about the 15th, 16th century when stargazing became a big thing and people like Galileo were looking up there with their telescopes. Is that when it was happening? Galileo. Yes. I think that's where my love of astronomy began well not love as i say i'm not an astronomer but my love of the stars began was watching bertolt brecht's life of galileo and learning about him and how he was forced to recant and things it's quite quite a story but yes and then after this people born during the ascendancy of a particular planet were thought to be susceptible to its powers. Hence, as we say, all those adjectives to describe people. Oh, I'm with you. Very good.

Okay, so those are the names of the planets. You mentioned the Milky Way. Why is that so called? Well, that goes back to Greek myth and Zeus who brought his son, apparently Heracles, home for Hera to breastfeed while she was sleeping. And Hera didn't like Heracles because the child was half mortal, but also more importantly, it was a result of an affair that Zeus had had. So not hers. And when she awoke, she pushed Heracles away, which caused a few drops of milk to spill into the night sky that's the milky way that's that's the myth and the romans picked it up they named the galaxy via lactia road of milk so they took that and then all sorts throughout all

different languages there's some beautiful names for the milky way so the chinese called it the silver river which has to do with a legend in their stories. It seems like every culture has a beautiful story to account for this idea of the Milky Way. It's intriguing. I suppose it's because of the man, Mr. Mars, who created the Mars Bar, that his company decided to, well, we've had a success with Mars, let's have similar names, and then created the Milky Way. And then there's a chocolate bar called a Galaxy, as I recall. Absolutely, yes.

Milky Way was named because it kind of tastes a bit like milkshake, doesn't it? So I'm sure they were riffing on the space theme, as you say, but it had some kind of rationale to it. And yes, Galaxy. So Galaxy is from the Greek gala, meaning milk, and galaktos is the milky thing in the sky. And then the Romans took that name on and then called it the milky circle or galaxios klikos. So just lots of people kind of picking up on these words throughout the cultures and,

as I say, adapting them themselves. And beyond the planets, are there other words that we've, as it were, stolen from outer space? Well, I think more importantly, it's the belief in the power of the stars. So astrology obviously has ancient traditions, but it's more the idea that the alignment of the stars can produce good or bad results. So if you think about the disaster we've talked before, haven't we, about that going back to disaster in Italian, meaning bad stars, because any ill event, I suppose, or adverse event was thought to be born from the influence of the stars. And we mentioned asterisk, didn't we? I think that was why we said we would do something on the planets because asterisk means little star and an astronaut is a star sailor we have the word dismal that's really

interesting because astrology is at work here too because medieval calendars designated two days in every month they called them the dies mali the evil days when the stars were inauspicious and bad luck was definitely going to follow and that dies mali eventually morphed over the century into our much looser adjective dismal but it was all thought to be under the you know the influence of the stars in the bad days influencer influencer is italian for influence because it was the influence of the stars that were thought to cause epidemics of disease that had no clear earthly cause so yeah the lots of english in fact desire is another one desire is beautiful because it means to wish upon the star almost isn't that beautiful it goes back

to another latin term for star not aster this time but cedus s-i-d-u-s which is just beautiful put those to explain that how you get out of cedus how you get desire s-i-d-u-s because it was decedere eventually or cedarare i think even and eventually it was shortened from the french desire but it also gave us consider because we wouldn't consider doing things unless the stars were properly aligned wow amazing isn't it just normal. Have you had a star named after you? I think you can get asteroids named after you. Oh, can you? Oh, yes, I know that. Because most things I know because I made a little film about them for The One Show.

And I seem to remember we did a film on, I think we wanted to get an asteroid named after Alex Jones. I'm not sure that we succeeded. The other people who'd had asteroids named after them included Isaac Newton, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, but more recently, Stevie Wonder and Freddie Mercury. Freddie Mercury, there you are, named after a planet, which is pretty impressive. Oh, really? Explain this to me. You talk about people's meteoric rise, and I imagine that comes from a meteor which flies at great speed through the sky but it's funny to talk about a meteoric rise because I imagine meteors actually plummet they

do they don't rise they fall they do fall and yes so it's a really strange deliberate linguistic misunderstanding I suppose just because we love to pick things up don't we we love a bit of linguistic inflation and meteorus is mean a greek word meaning lofty. So, you know, it already has that idea of kind of being up in the ascendancy. But as you say, they fall, they don't rise. So it's a completely naff expression. Take 100% the cake of the English language as we have it today. Of that cake, how big a slice is the Latin language and the ancient Greek language of what we are speaking today? OK, well, the first thing to say is it would be foolish to differentiate between Latin and Greek because Greek words came through Latin, then travelled through, they usually ended up in French and then they came to English.

So you've got a long route there. So it would be silly to say this from Greek and this from Latin, because, you know, very often they're kind of on the same path, but probably about 60%, I would say. I mean, it's a vast amount. And the Vikings, for all their influence and for all the sort of pithy, earthy words that they gave us, they didn't give us quite as much as we might imagine. And we are a Germanic language still, even though we talk about those kind of Greek and Latin roots, imagine. And we are a Germanic language still, even though we talk about those kind of Greek and Latin roots, you know, and that of course was Anglo-Saxon and the old English is far and away the sort of biggest part of the rest. Good. So we owe the majority of our language to Latin, Greek, the Romance languages coming up through France and into Britain. Thank you for clearing that up. Waxing and waning. The moon waxes and wanes. People wax eloquent. They wane. Have those words been around a long time?

Yeah. Wax is, okay, this is a nice one, actually. It's a nice segue or segue, as I once said on Countdown, from that question about Latin and Greek, because to wax is actually very much a Germanic word. So in German, to grow is wachsen, W-A-C-H-S-E-N. And that's where we got wax from, because the sound of their W became a W. Do you wax? But I mean, do you wax? Do I wax my legs? Yes. Maybe we're talking about, oh gosh, this is a bit of a shift. Do you? Well, I have waxed my chest in my time. Have you?

Is that for cycling? On your tricycle, you know, if you waxed your chest, you'd go so much more quickly. I haven't done it recently. But a few years ago, somebody said to me, oh, you should wax your chest. And I said, really? Is that necessary? Oh, yes, because you're neither one thing nor another. You haven't got a hairy chest.

Because there were people, you'll find this hard to believe, in the 60s, people liked to have a hairy chest. And you could get that. You could, there was newspapers in the back of the newspapers, certain newspapers, there were advertisements. And you could learn to be Mr. Tarzan, you know, and you could, Mr. Universe, not Mr. Tarzan, forgive me, Mr. Universe. Mr. Universe, not Mr. Tarzan, forgive me, Mr. Universe. And also alongside these were advertisements to make, for those of you who wanted to be a hairy man, you could get a chest wig. A chest wig, a chest firkin.

A chest. A merkin, not even a merkin, a merkin. A chest. A churkin. Yeah, exactly. A chest wig with matching underarm toupees. What do you think of that? Underarm toupees, surely not. I don't know.

That bit I added on. But definitely they were chest wigs. Shall I tell you my, I've got one experience with waxing. Please, share. Okay. I am just so clumsy and maladroit that I thought, okay, well, I'm just not going to shave under my arms anymore. I'm going to go for these little waxing strips. So I did that and it was quite fiddly and it's all a bit sticky, not to be recommended. And

anyway, then I was going for a gym session. And in those days I would join gym classes to sort of get me motivated. And so I put on my Lycra vest and that kind of thing. I put on this really warm black bobbly jumper over the top because it was in winter. Anyway, I arrived, did lots of kind of, you know, things with weights and kettlebells and that kind of thing. And when I got home, both my kids said, oh, my God, Mum, look under your arms. And the black bobble jumper had deposited half a ton of black wool onto the sticky bits under my arms.

So if there's a female equivalent of Tarzan, that was me. I was so mortified. And I obviously, I then went around explaining it to everybody. I recognised in a gym class and made it way worse. Susie Dent, the girl with the hairiest arms in Christendom. Fantastic. It was a lot of bubbles. Well, on that thought, I think we need

a break. Some of us to lie down. The rest of us to think, is the second half going to be as interesting as this? It can't be. Do stay with us. Imagine a world, a world just like our own, but importantly, not our own. Is it the alternate dimension or are we? And does it have podcasts? The Last Post. Hi, I'm Alice Fraser, bringing you daily news from a parallel universe. It's a sweet, sweet dose of satirical news coverage, some of which will sound pretty familiar. He defended him, saying he broke the lockdown rules on a father's instinct.

And I just think if Boris had shielded his a** as much as he's shielding Cummings, he might actually be in a position to give parenting tips. And some of it is just pretty weird. Air and space is becoming much clearer, Alice. And it's quite shocking because there is no air and space. It's empty space. So join me every single day alongside great comedians from around the world, including Andy Zaltzman,

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You know that feeling when you're like, why isn't there more of this? This show is so good. That was how I felt when I started to get really hooked on Black Butler that I think is just incredible. Oh, we, yeah, it's coming back. It's coming back. He's like, I'm going to tell him, and I got it.

I got excited. After like a 10-year hiatus. And this is The Anime Effect, the show that allows celebrities to nerd out over their favorite anime, manga, or pop culture. The Akatsuki theme song, you know what it is. I listen to that one all day. That thing go crazy.

That thing kill me. Be in the gym going, and they're like, what is he listening to? Oh, it's not even in the gym. I be on the field. I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President.

Find out which live-action anime adaptations David Dostmalchian is praying he'll get to star in. Or how Jamal Williams uses the mindset of Naruto for his NFL career. Listen to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts. This is Something Rhymes with Purple. I'm Giles Brandreth.

I'm Pisces. Occasionally, as Pisces is a newt. What are you? What's your star sign, Susie Dent? I'm Scorpio. Sexy old Scorpio? Yeah, well, star sign, Susie Dent? I'm Scorpio. Sexy old Scorpio? Yeah, well, I was supposed to be

vindictive old Scorpio. No, sexy old Scorpio. They're dangerous. What is your birthday? November. So I'm in November. So when is Pisces? Pisces, a fish.

What's your temperament supposed to be like? Fish-like? Do you know? In my view, it's a load of nonsense. I don't even look at it anymore. I used to, I suppose, when I was a child.

Fishy, maybe. Swimming in two directions, the Pisces fish. We are something like the 21st of February to the 21st of March, that sort of time. Yeah. But as a lovely astrologer, Julia Parker, once said to me, the stars incline, they do not foretell. They just give a helpful education of the kind of personality you might have. And given we know

that tides can be affected by the moon. Well, of course, menstrual cycles, the tides. Exactly. Our brains could in some way be affected by the pull of the planets. Are there interesting names for the star signs? I mean, do you have a list there with their origins? I don't. Well, I'll tell you about Zodiac for the start, because that goes back to the Greek for animal, which also gave us zoo, because zoo, of course, goes back to zoological gardens and zoology and all of that. And it's a Zodiac because most of the signs of the Zodiac are represented by animals.

And most of them, I think think are probably self-explanatory so gemini not animals this time gemini said to represent the twins castor and pollux this northern constellation so castor and pollux gave their names to the two brightest stars and so that means twin like i don't quite know what sort of temperament you're supposed to have maybe confused um then there's pisces as as you say, there's Scorpion, obviously. Aries is the bull. The ram. Oh, the ram. That's right. Yeah. I think my mom is an Aries, actually. No, my mom is a Taurus. That's a bull, isn't it? Yeah, my sister is an Aries. And so on. So I don't have a list of them,

but they mostly are named after constellations. So there's a constellation called the ram, which is said to called the Ram, which is said to represent the ram whose golden fleece was sought by Jason and the Argonauts, believe it or not. So that would have been an ascendance to anyone born under Aries. And then you've got Aquarius, which is a sign of water, a water sign, aqua, and so on and so forth. What is Michelle? What sign is your wife? She's Pisces too.

My daughter Aphra is Cancer. That's sometime in the summer. Why is Michelle? What sign is your wife? She's Pisces too. My daughter Afra is cancer. That's sometime in the summer. Why is the cancer a crab? Where does that word cancer come from? Because the swollen veins around a cancerous tumour were thought, I guess, to ancient Greek medics to resemble the limbs of a crab. Canker was the usual form before we got cancer. So canker and cancer are linked. So yes, and cancer, of course, as we know, means crab. It's a sign of the crab. And of course, Leo means the lion.

Absolutely. And you do occasionally, you meet a Leo, and they do look a bit leonine, don't they? It does actually happen, but maybe that's just chance. It's like when there are 30 people in the room, two of them will have the same birthday. And when there are 70 people in the room, I think four of them will have the same birthday. It's just are 70 people in the room, I think four of them will have the same birthday.

It's just a matter of odds. No, really? Yeah. Oh, wow. Okay. Virgo is a nice one. The Virgin, the large constellation said to represent a maiden or a goddess associated with the harvest. So there's lovely stories behind all of them. And, you know, I think maybe we don't quite have the same beliefs that

shakespeare had with the star cross lovers in fact there's a lovely see if i can find it there's a lovely quote which a lot of purple listeners will recognize which is from king lear when edmund gloucester's bastard son call him that just because obviously that's key to the plot he mocks this kind of blind subservience i suppose to influences beyond our control and the beliefs of the time that the stars governed everything and he said we make guilty of our disasters the sun the moon and the stars as if we were villains by necessity fools by heavenly compulsion um blaming the gods blaming the heavens for our own frailties oh yeah absolutely even satan satan was known as lucifer and lucifer is another name for phosphorus and phosphorus was from the greek for light bringing and it was given to the morning star venus which appears in

the sky before sunrise and the chemical element phosphorus was so known because it burns burns so brightly so that's another one with stars and you'll find in the sherlock holmes stories conan dodd occasionally talks about a lucifer which was a match a match absolutely a phosphorescent match yep you lit your pipe with a lucifer. Yeah. Twists and turns. This is brilliant stuff. Have you met any spacemen? Space people? Oh, my goodness. I had one of the best nights of my life a couple of years ago going to see Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut. I don't know if you've ever seen any of his YouTube videos as to how astronauts shave in space or brush their teeth or, you know. But he also has taken the most incredible photographs from the space station. And I've seen him twice, but I got to meet him because he's,

this is my turn to name drop, which I don't tend to do very often because I don't know nearly as many people as you, Giles, but he's a good friend of Rick Wakeman. And Rick very sweetly arranged for me and some friends to meet Chris Hadfield before he went on stage in Manchester and he's an incredible person so yes I just I had goosebumps listening to him and seeing his photographs incredible do you remember the first three people to land on the moon I have a little acronym that helps you ABC the A is Neil Armstrong of course the first person to step on the moon he was was with Buzz Aldrin, the sea.

I don't think he stepped onto the moon, but he was up there with them. Was he a Chris? Michael Collins. Ah. I remember once being at a, doing an afternoon speech and I was next to this man who was a bit tipsy. And I was about to speak and I said to him, you know, I couldn't really make much sense of him. And he was going to speak too. And I was a bit alarmed.

So I said, well, you know, I'm here because I'm saying whatever I'm saying. I said, what's your claim to fame? He said, I suppose, walking on the moon. Isn't that amazing? He was the fourth or fifth man to walk on the moon. How incredible. And he'd got into trouble because when he came back from the moon, when he was up there, he took some stamps up to the moon. And with a kind of John Bull printing set, he franked the stamps, the moon, the moon, the moon, the moon, the moon, the moon, and brought them down to Earth. And the people at NASA did not approve of this. I mean, this sounds like an apocryphal story, but he told it to me.

And they didn't approve of this. So he had to leave. He wasn't allowed to keep his stamps. He was furious about this because he said, everybody else, you know, we brought the stuff back from the moon. Everybody in the world's got a bit of moon. They've given a bit to the Queen of England. You know, there's a bit of moon at the Buckingham Palace. They've given it to the Pope. We don't get to keep anything. He said, I was just taking up a few stamps and pranking them. Anyway, isn't that extraordinary? That is extraordinary. Bits of the moon and they can't. Yeah. So if you are a space person, if you've been to the moon or if you've been to outer space and you also listen to Something Rhymes with Purple, do get in touch.

It's purple at somethingelse.com. People have been in touch. First of all, somebody has been in touch called Sarah, didn't give her a surname, to say, how can you talk about Dr. Doolittle? Give credit, which we did the other day. I think it was last week we were talking about Dr. Doolittle? Give credit, which we did the other day. I think it was last week we were talking about Dr. Doolittle. Give credit to Leslie Brickus, who did indeed write the movie version. And forget the person who wrote the original story, Hugh Lofting.

So thank you for that. It was Hugh Lofting. Who have we heard from this week? Marjorie Critch-Hyam has contacted us to say, I used the word haywire when describing what went wrong with my photos on a Word document. What is the origin of haywire? And thank you, Marjorie. She says, congratulations on our success at the podcast awards.

Thank you for that. Haywire. Shall I go for it, Giles? Go for it, woman. Okay. Well, this simply goes back to the use of hay baling wire in the us in makeshift repairs essentially so if you put hay wire around something you may have done a botched job but you you know it'll be a bit kind of cheap and cheerful and if it goes haywire it means that yeah it's not

stuck very well but i tell you what this made me think, and I don't know if Marjorie will be interested in this, but if you know, well, you are full of them, Giles, corny jokes of the best kind. Thank you. Sorry. They're good corn, good corny jokes. Any idea where that comes from? No.

A joke being corny, I'd love to know. Okay. It goes back to seed companies that sent seed catalogues of their selections to farmers, just as you might get a seed catalogue these days. But they planted some jokes and cartoons through the catalogues to raise interest in what they were offering. And these jokes became known as corn catalogue jokes. And they were always a bit kind of silly and full of puns, etc. You know, because I think corny can be good or bad. And yeah, that's where it comes from, corn catalogue jokes.

That is amazing. I'm writing that down. It's actually so interesting. Hold on. It's fun, isn't it? Yeah. What is the origin of the word joke, by the way? Joke is from the Latin joccus.

So you'll get jocular and all sorts of things from that. What does it mean? So it meant pretty much the same thing. Well, the joke or kind of, yeah, jolly, jolliness. I think for them, it was also not just a jest, but wordplay as well, a jockeys. Speaking of corny jokes, why did the loaf of bread go to the doctor?

It was feeling crummy. And why did the banana go to the doctor? Hang on. Something wrong with its skin? It wasn't peeling well. Why did the computer go to the doctor? It needed... No, go for it. It had a virus. Could I not get that one? Okay, let's get back to run of the mill. Oh no, it's not run of the mill,

it's the word run of the mill. Yeah. This is a message. Hi Susie, hi Giles. English has such a wealth extraordinary words, and there are even some interesting ones for the concept of ordinary, such as run-of-the-mill or bog standard. Could you please elaborate on the origin of these terms? Best wishes from Germany. This is from Heike, H-E-I-K-E. Or Heike, if she's German. Oh, is it Heike? Heike. Is that how you say it, Heike? Yes, Heike. Good question. Run-of-the-mill is simply the material that's produced by a mill before it's sorted. So most of the material would be inspected for quality, but the run of the mill is there before it. And in fact, banal also goes back to a banal mill and is pretty much the same idea of stuff that hasn't really thoroughly been sifted through and you haven't picked out the good bits from the bad.

thoroughly been sifted through and you haven't picked out the good bits from the bad. So that's run of the mill. BOG standard, lots of theories around this one, Giles, but most dictionaries will tell you it's probably a riff on BOX standard, in other words, basic or unmodified. And it's said to have been applied to motorcycles that were brand new, unmodified, straight out of the box. So we think that BO became bog perhaps because, you know, you don't associate bog things with anything particularly nice. The bog in British English means the loo. Maybe because it was just thought of as being sort of slightly unpleasant. Box standard became bog standard and kind of, you know,

boring and dull and not that great. Well, if people have got queries and they want to share them with us, you know where to get in touch with us. It's purple at something else dot com and something without the G. Dan has been in touch from Newcastle under Lyme. Hi, Susie and Giles. Question came up in conversation with my youngest son, Jack, an 11-year-old who's about to leave primary school. I was having my usual joke with him about his school report being terrible, which he always sees straight through, but I try anyway. I told him that his teacher had referred to him as a right bounder. He gave me a puzzled look and asked if that meant he had no boundaries.

I said I didn't know where the word came from, but I had always taken it to refer to someone who bounded around being a bit naughty. Do you know the history of the word? Love the show, keep up the good work. Well, thank you for that. How fascinating, you bounder, you cad. One thinks of people like Terry Thomas or playing boundaries. You rotter. You rotter, you bounder, you cad. What is the origin of the expression bounder?

Well, just before we get to bounder, cad actually was a shortened form of caddy, and that was used for a junior officer or army cadet, and then applied to a chancellor looking to make some sort of quick money by running errands for things. So quite often you'll find that these are first used at public schools. I think CAD was first used at Eton as a kind of contemptuous term. So that's CAD, but Bounder, in fact, Jack, who wrote the letter? It was Dan, wasn't it? Jack, Dan's son, is closer to the truth, actually, than Dan, because it was someone seeking to step over the boundary of their lower class status, apparently,

by adopting the manners of the aristocracy. And then it became a kind of byword for somebody who didn't quite cut it as a gentleman, if you like, and so their manners were a bit vulgar. And then it progressed into someone who was just a little bit immoral oh very good are you good at your boundaries are you good at boundaries i've decided i need to step over as many as i can now i think i've played it too safe through life i'm gonna go can i say i think you have to be honest i'm very i'm glad that you're becoming a bit unboundary. That's what we want. Where does this take me? We'll have to have a chat about what I do to manifest this.

It takes you to all sorts of exciting places. We were talking the other day, weren't we, about going together to somewhere near Lake Geneva. Lake Annecy. Lake Annecy. We're going to be there together. We have this fantasy, settling down. Well, you might have a fantasy. I'm not. I thought we were being unboundary. I thought that was going to be there together. We have this fantasy settling down. Well, you might have a fantasy. I'm not. Anyway, sorry. I thought we were being unboundaried.

I thought that was going to be a lie. Yeah, well, I'm not sure you and I near Lake Annecy is being unboundaried. It is in my imagination. It is in my imagination. I'm a married man. Okay, so it's tricky. Taking you to Lake, I'm sorry, that's unboundaried by my standards. Okay.

You expect that of people, do you? Just because I was a Conservative MP doesn't mean to say that I'm a naughty Tory chasing you around the banks of... You are a bounder. Okay, no, I definitely need to drop my boundaries, but maybe not in that respect. I think, take Michelle and then you can tell me just how lovely it is. I will tell you. I will see you on the other side of the lake knocking back your Gordons. We know you. Now, tell me what your three words of the week are, Susie.

Oh, my trio. Okay. So you have to remember that most of these just pop into my head quite randomly, but sometimes they're sparked by contemporary events. And this is one that I tweeted quite recently just because various actions of various people reminded me of this. And it's a great word. It's empleomania, E-M-P-L-E-O, which is the Spanish here for employ, and then mania. And it's the manic compulsion to hold public office at any cost. Empleomania. Empleomania.

empleomania um so there's another one here which empleomania might make you feel that you you're just a bit glumpy to glump is to look sullen or glum i mean it's it's not it's kind of you know you can see what it says on the tin but i just quite like the idea of a glump and finally this isn't in the dictionary yet i I get so many tweets about this and questions. I just thought I would do it because I think it needs to go in the dictionary now. Nibbling. Know what a nibbling is? A nibbling? Oh, I do know. It's a nephew or a niece. Absolutely. Like a sibling. And it's not in the dictionary. Not in the dictionary yet, no. Even though it's been around for quite a long time and it's an obvious linguistic gap isn't it it is yeah your siblings are your brothers and sisters your nibblings are your nephews and nieces speaking of linguistic gaps can i throw out a challenge to our purple

listeners please we need a word for that kind of pavement dance that you do when particularly now when we're trying to avoid people and socially distance when you just you go one way they way, they go the same way. You go a different way and they go the same way. It's a pavement dance, but there's got to be a better word for it. Probably a blend, I think. So anyone who can come up with a word, I will be very grateful and also incredibly impressed. The pavement dance. Would you please send the words for that to us? You write to purple at somethingelse.com. You can tweet us as well, get hold of us any which way you like. I love that. It would be wonderful to introduce a new word to the language.

Through it. Through the podcast. Yeah. I've had a poem sent in to read, which is rather nice. Oh, nice. Well, we were talking about hypochondria the other day. We were. And this is the tragic tale of Albert Ignatius.

No author is given. so if you are the author, lay claim to this in a future episode. This is the story of Albert Ignatius. This is the story of Albert Ignatius, a boy obsessed by fear of the contagious. He washed his lettuce and dusted his beets, rinsed his carrots and powdered his feets. He inhaled through a mask and listened through a tube and for intimate functions used lots of lube. He dipped the dog and sprayed the cat. He poured disinfectant all over the mat, washed his hands before every meal. He wouldn't eat pork and he wouldn't eat veal and generally caused misery all over his home. eat pork and he wouldn't eat veal and generally caused misery all over his home so they saved up and bought him a dome and stuck him out on the family lawn where he sat disconsolate from dusk

till dawn and mothers warned their children's dear if you make a fuss you'll end up here a warning there to young hypochondriacs. And we know that Jack, age 11, is listening. So if you're a bit of a hypo, that's about you. I'm sure he's not.

No. Jack sounds like a sensible guy. He got his etymology right. He did. He's a brilliant guy. Well, and you're not a bad girl. That's it for this week. Thanks.

More from us next week. I don't know what we're going to be talking about then. No, we will choose something well speak before we go isn't it funny the way nobody can say the word uranus without laughing and smirking aren't we funny aren't human beings ridiculous absolutely we see uranus we just see the word and the sort of silly smirk goes over people's faces and people when they said, just do something silly, it's ridiculous. It is. But that is life.

And that's comedy. And that's why we love it. I have to say, my daughter is one of those that also smirks. Thank you for listening to us. Please do get in touch, as Giles says. Email us. We do genuinely read absolutely everything. And it makes our day hearing from you.

Purple at something else.com something rhymes with purple is a something else production produced by lawrence bassett with additional production from steve ackerman harriet wells grace laker and this is amazing this person is the character who actually twiddles the knobs and makes all this happen and we can see him on the screen he's got a huge beard and he's now got a huge sign in front of him. And on it, he's written, Uranus, oh golly. No.