THE GHOSTS IN OUR MOUTH: The Beautiful Madness of the Things We Say

We are playing a very strange game with language, and honestly? We are losing!  

Every time you open your mouth, you let a parade of absolute ghosts tumble out across your teeth. You may perceive yourself as a modern, super-rational human being expressing sophisticated thoughts in a digitalized world.   

Spoiler alert: You are not :)))  

The words you utter are ruins. Crumbling, gorgeous, wildly absurd ruins.  

But ruins of what exactly?  

Of centuries-old human panic, of bad fashion and spectacular delusion, right into the present moment.   

What baffles me even more is that we have been speaking this haunted language for so very long without realizing it.   

ACT I: THE THREAD OUT OF THE MONSTER’S MOUTH  

Close your eyes for a second. You are in ancient Crete, Greece. In the middle of stone corridors, in pitch black darkness, while the whole place smells of copper and something rotting.   

You look around only to find a half-man, half-bull creature breathing. You have been sent to kill it.  

If you are Theseus, killing the monster isn’t your biggest problem. Getting back out is.  

Enter Ariadne, the clever princess. She hands Theseus “clew”, a ball of tightly wound yarn.

Theseus anchors the string, lets the ball unfold his palm, slays the beast, and rolls the yarn back up to escape the dark maze. For thousands of years, this is what "clew” meant to English speakers.  

But in the 19^th century, something changed. Obsession with murder mysteries and detectives following fragile trails skyrocketed. Writers needed a word for these tiny pieces of evidence, like a muddy footprint, or maybe a dropped letter, or anything that guides you out of the maze of a crime.  

And what better place to look for it than Ariadne’s ball of yarn? They borrowed the term and warped the spelling.  

So now, when a detective follows a clue, all he is doing is holding onto a piece of string in the dark, hoping it leads to light. The word never changed. Only the maze did!  

ACT II: THE ABSOLUTE AUDACITY OF YOUR PUNCTUATION

Look down at your computer's keyboard. Right next to the letter P, sitting quietly are two little symbols: [].  

We call them brackets!  

We use them for citations, for code, for editorial asides, and they look so boring and lifeless. It feels as if they were designed by somebody who has never felt a single emotion.  

But that is not the case. In fact, they were inspired by King Henry VIII’s codpiece, who is believed to have been a very animated personality.   

Medieval French knights wore groin armor called a “braguette”. Henry VIII, a man who never did anything by half measures, got himself an enormous, shiny, metallic codpiece made, supposedly to frighten his enemies. It bulged outward from the royal groin like a massive metal shelf.   

A few decades later, Renaissance architects were staring up at cathedral walls, trying to figure out what to call the support of the protruding balconies. One architect was reminded of the royal groin armour and realized that the stone support looked exactly like Henry VIII’s groin, and the word “bragget” stuck.   

Then Cpt. John Smith wrote it down wrong in a nautical dictionary.  

Brilliant sailor, catastrophic speller!  

When early printers saw [] enclosing text, they noticed the shape and borrowed the name.  

What finer companions to our prose and our code than Henry VIII’s royal codpieces?  

ACT III: A GOAT WON. A GOAT ALWAYS WON. 

Imagine sitting in a massive, open-air stone amphitheater in the Athenian Acropolis. It is the spring festival of Dionysus, the God of wine, madness, and ecstasy. The place is packed with thousands of people sitting shoulder-to-shoulder, weeping openly.   

Before the era of sophisticated marble theaters, these performances were wild, ritualistic village competitions. To achieve the half-man, half-beast companions of the God of wine, the actors wrapped themselves in smelly, unwashed goatskins. To add to that, the stakes were entirely agricultural, too. The winner did not get a golden trophy or a cash payout, but rather a farmyard goat.   

The Greeks looked at this bizarre combo of high-stakes grief and livestock. So, they combined “tragos” (meaning goat) and “oide” (meaning song). This gave birth to “tragoidia”, which literally meant “the goat song”. Gradually, over the course of time, tragoidia became “tragedy”.  

So the next time something breaks your heart, in a film, in the news, or in your own life, and you reach out for that word, know it was built by men in animal costumes competing for livestock.    

YOU ARE THE HAUNTING!  

A clue is a yarn ball, brackets are groin armor, and a tragedy is a goat’s legacy.  

Every word we speak has outlived empires, survived terrible spellers like our Cpt. John Smith, and travelled further than any of us ever might. We did not simply inherit a language. We inherited a living thing, and it has been waiting, very patiently, for us to say something worth remembering.   

Darwin gave us survival of the fittest. Turns out that applies to words too, and somehow the ones that survived were the ones with the most embarrassing origin stories. Natural selection has a lot to answer for.