I was intrigued to discover recently that there is a word for that thing that boxers do at a weigh-in, before the fight, where they face-off toe-to-toe and glare at each other, sometimes with verbal sparing too: it’s gasconade, meaning extravagant boasting, or bravado. The word originates from mid 17th century French meaning to talk like a Gascon, or brag, for which, apparently, residents of Gascony were known. In The Three Musketeers, I recall, d’Artagnan was a Gascon and the Musketeers were initially dubious of his swordsmanship, supposing it to be merely braggadocio.

It is gasconade for me too, to venture a blog on matters of etymology, for I confess at the outset that I have no formal training or experience in the field. I am an amateur, but fascinated with the way words acquire their meanings and how meanings shift over time. Sometimes, shifts of meaning occur because of mistaken assumptions that people make about unfamiliar words. For instance, heyday didn’t used to be any sort of day. To Shakespeare it meant simply ‘high spirits’, or an expression of elation, as where Hamlet (III.iv) tells his mother, ‘You cannot call it love; for at your age/ The heyday in the blood is tame.’ He means she’s lost her zip and is past it. By the 18th century, however, English speakers, perhaps interpreting the second syllable ‘day’ as a period of time, began using heyday to refer to that period when one’s achievement or popularity has reached its zenith.

Muhammad Ali was a fine exponent of the gasconade, with his famous claim, ‘I am the greatest.’ After his death, I saw an interview with Sir Michael Parkinson in which he pointed out that Ali’s sensitivity and bluster was a compensation for his lifelong struggle with dyslexia. Parkinson had come to know Ali well, having interviewed him three or four times.

dys‑ in English is a prefix for words of Greek origin which means ‘difficult’, or ‘bad’. Thus dyslexia was intended to mean ‘difficult reading’, but the Greek lexis means ‘speech’. When it was coined in the 19th century, the Greek legein, ‘to speak’, was apparently confused with the Latin legere, ‘to read’. Nobody’s perfect I guess. Today we use dysphasia to mean ‘difficult speech’, from the Greek phatos, ‘spoken’, a form of the verb phanai ‘to speak’. At least the dys‑ is consistent. Dystopia is the opposite of utopia, dysphoria of euphoria, dyspepsia is indigestion, and so on.

The prefix dis‑ in English is harder to nail down. There are many words in which it serves a negating function: disavow, disarray, disassemble, disconcert, disorder, are the opposites of their counterparts without the prefix. But it’s more than simple negation, dis‑ carries the sense of ‘undoing’ – there’s a process involved – disorganised is different from unorganised. Dis‑ can also carry the sense of ‘apart’ or ‘away’, as in: dispel, distant, distinct, disparate, disposition, distinguish.

But what of words like disgruntled, or dishevelled, in which dis‑ performs neither function? People are never hevelled or gruntled.

In the case of dishevelled, two years of schoolboy French led me to think that perhaps it originally described the appearance of a French knight knocked off his horse. While this is wide of the mark, according to the OED¹ the origin is French, from Old French deschevele, past participle of descheveler (based on chevel ‘hair’, from Latin capillus). The original sense was ‘having the hair uncovered’, hence ‘disordered, untidy’.

And in disgruntled, apparently dis‑ serves as an intensifier, that is, it means ‘very gruntled’ rather than ‘not gruntled’, dialect gruntle meaning ‘utter little grunts’.

Words are full of surprises. What words have discombobulated you?