Alisha Dempsey

It’s no secret that I’m a lover of words and etymology. Words have the power to convey things that actions can’t, as long as you know how to use them. 

The thing I’m obsessed with at the minute is idioms – Merriam Webster defines an ‘idiom’ as ‘an expression in the usage of a language that has a meaning that cannot be understood from the combined meanings of its elements’. Think of the sayings you’ve heard your parents or Nan say that have an absurd meaning when taken literally (‘it’s up in the air’ when you’ve not decided something, ‘it’s raining cats and dogs’ when it’s pouring outside). These phrases often have historical roots on topics that were relevant at the time. 

Take for example the phrase I’ve heard a lot in the office this week is:

‘It rings a bell’, meaning ‘that sounds familiar’.

My first thought always goes to Ivan Pavlov, a Russian experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs.

The long and short of his discoveries is that he had successfully trained a dog to recognise his mealtime by ringing a bell whenever the dog was served food. It eventually got to the point that when the bell was rang, the dog would approach and begin salivating before food had even been presented to it. It made the mental association between the sound of the bell ringing and the arrival of food. 

Then, of course, you have the general relation to bells themselves, and how they have been used over the course of history as a means of alerting or reminding people of things such as events and times – such as school bells, church bells, wedding bells, jingle bells, even the bells inside large clocktowers. ‘It rings a bell’ in the sense of ‘that reminds me’. 

I enjoy ‘it rings a bell’ because, as much as we can speculate, there is no definitive answer as to its origins. I do wonder if that’s what is able to separate an idiom from regular etymology – a definition of roots.

In most common etymology, you can analyse a word or phrase to see where it started, whether it’s another language or colloquialism. Some examples include:

• ‘RSVP’ – used very commonly in English when planning events, is actually an initialism for the original French phrase ‘Répondez S’il Vous Plaît’ (‘Please Respond’). 
• ‘Breakfast’ – broken into two words, ‘break’ and ‘fast’, the first meal in a morning and also the break in your fast from your last meal the day before. 
• ‘Quarantine’ – from the Latin ‘quaranta’, meaning ‘forty’, because in the 1300s the Venetians made plague-stricken ships wait in its ports for 40 days to ensure there were no remaining cases of the deadly disease left onboard. 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve Googled ‘________ etymology’ because I’ve recognised a word (or component of) that played a key role elsewhere – perhaps my favourite so far has been ‘Astronaut’, using ‘astro’ from ‘astrology’ (the study of stars), and ‘naut’ from ‘nautical’ (sailing and navigating the seas). When combined, the two Greek-root words that have existed for centuries come together to give us ‘Astronaut’ or quite literally ‘Star Sailor’, a term that has only existed from 1929 onwards, and has only been widely-used since the Space Race in the 1960s. 

English really is just a bunch of other languages sharing the same trench coat.