These Words Have Absolutely Wild Superhero Origin Stories

Really drives home how differently people did metaphors in the Middle Ages.

Sep 03, 2023

Most words have a pretty interesting backstory when you look into them, but a lot of them grew up in a fairly recognizable way — going to word school, getting a word job, maybe settling down with another word and having little word children. But some words did things the hard way. Some words ran away from home to join the word merchant navy or, like, fly a word hot air balloon around the world. Before I completely lose track of this metaphor, here are five words that ended up somewhere very different from where they started.

Theseus is 100% the type of dude whose number you’d want in your rolodex if you had a pest control problem in your labyrinth, but that doesn’t make him boyfriend material, unless you think “being abandoned on an island” is a good idea for a first date. And in fact, although Theseus did manage the admittedly tricky part of separating the fearsome minotaur from its head, the “clue” that led him there was very much Ariadne’s idea. As the 17th century English poet John Gay has it in Trivia: or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London:

Thus hardy Theseus, with intrepid Feet,
Travers'd the dang'rous Labyrinth of Crete;
But still the wandring Passes forc'd his Stay,
Till Ariadne's Clue unwinds the Way

“Clue” here is a variant spelling of clew, from the Old English cliewen, which means “a ball or cluster,” but especially “a ball of thread or yarn.” By the 1600s, “clue” was being used figuratively — as a metaphorical thread that could lead one in the right direction — and eventually the connection to yarn and labyrinths and minotaurs disappeared entirely. So next time you use the word, give a thought to Ariadne, who had a hall-of-fame-level bad first date and spent the next few months sitting alone on an island justifiably fuming about the fact that she never gets any goddamn credit for anything.

We have the 2005 British political satire The Thick of It to thank for the marvelous “Omnishambles” — a perfectly British version of the brash American FUBAR — but the love affair between the Brits and “shambles” goes back to at least the ’50s, when “shambolic” entered into the language for people who preferred their shambles with a salty adjectival flavor.

But the Behind The Music of “shambles” is an incredible rags-to-riches story that starts in Ancient Rome, where “shamble” was just a humble little footstool. The origin of our “shambles” was the Latin scamellum, a diminutive of scamnum, meaning bench. The “stool” meaning survived a shift to Old High German and then to Old English, where it gained a more specific use as a little table at a market stall. Eventually, a shambles referred to the collection of benches that might constitute a meat market, and, by extension, a slaughterhouse. By the 20th century, the imagery associated with a loud and messy slaughterhouse gave shambles the opportunity to become a “chaotic scene,” and then it was just a matter of biding its time until Peter Capaldi came along to bring into being the Omni-Shambles that will one day consume the world.

“What better way to while away a summer afternoon than by lying on one’s back in a field and gazing up at those great big rocks in the sky we call clouds?” is a sentence that hits the ears pretty weird, but you might have some luck with it if you ever find yourself in the South of England in the 14th century. Cloud metaphors just went really hard back then.

Turns out the similarity between the words “Cloud” and “Clod” is no accident — both share a root in the Old English clud, meaning a “mass of rock,” which is what our puffy little Care Bear pillows looked like to those incorrigible Medieval scamps. Great big hulking heaven slabs. Boulders in the firmament. Air rubble. Wild stuff.

In order from least to most surprising, “Catastrophe” comes from the Greek κατα + στρεφειν, meaning “a sudden turn”; “Disaster” comes from the Italian dis + astro (as in “astrological”), meaning “ill-starred”; and “Fiasco” comes from the Italian fiasco, which is cognate with our “flask” and means … “bottle.”

How we got from the bottle to the fiasco is a little bit of a mystery, though everyone’s fairly certain it has to do with theater kids. Although “Fiasco” is often used generally for a major cockup, it was originally reserved for an omnishambolic event in a dramatic performance. The Italians used to call this “making a bottle” (far fiasco) and, while there are quite a few colorful theories as to what on Earth they could have meant by such a thing, the best I can find involves the idea that one might put forward a bottle of wine as a wager in a game and then (disastrously) lose it to a better player. “Is Giuseppe bringing the booze this time, or is he planning to far fiasco with it playing scopone?”

(I had to look up Italian card games to give that little vignette some color. Scopone is a game a lot like casino and it comes from the Latin scopa, meaning “Broom.” Don’t ask. 🤷)

Next time some beefcake kicks sand in your face at the beach and points at his big biceps, take him down a peg or two with this fun etymological factoid! (It won’t make it sting any less when he steps on your reading glasses and walks off with your girl, but it’s good to share knowledge when you have it.)

Muscle means “little mouse.”

The reason for this is surprisingly cute and direct: Across an impressively wide variety of Indo-European languages, everyone apparently agrees that flexing your bicep looks like a nice little mouse scuttling around (I just tried this and will say that for some of us the mouse is still a baby). Classical Latin uses mus to mean both “Mouse” and “Muscle,” and the same is true for the ancient Greek μυς (mus). Muscles are also mice in Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, Old High German, and Old Icelandic.

A 1561 English translation of Hieronymus Brunschwig’s extremely popular “A Most Excellent and Perfecte Homish Apothecarye or Homely Physick Booke: For All the Grefes and Diseases of the Bodye” (which sounds like a very useful book!) recommends the following (slightly dubious) treatment for a toothache:

Take a garlike head … and loke on what cheke or syde the toothake is: On that arme, binde the garlike, vpon the wrest of the arme so that it do not touche the mousse of the hande.

In fact, everyone in Europe was so historically comfortable with the idea that muscles look like little scurrying creatures that a now-obsolete Middle English word for “Muscular” was “Lacertous,” with roots in the Latin word lacertus, meaning “Lizard.” Which … I don’t know, now that I’m picturing all these lizardy, mouse-filled beefcakes walking around on the beach and kicking sand in everyone’s faces, I’m starting to think the whole thing is pretty weird.