Word origins

I got a ukulele for Christmas. I think a ukulele is a very nice thing to get for Christmas. And I fully intend to master it this year.

As I unwrapped it, I had visions of myself performing George Formby's classic, "When I'm Cleaning Windows", by New Year's Eve. George Formby is the UK's most famous ukulele player. Here he is in action:

Well, I've had to lower my expectations slightly. It's not as easy as George makes it look!

I also got a book for Christmas. So when I'm (not) trying to work, I'm either strumming my ukulele tunelessly — while dreaming of being a virtuoso — or I'm reading my book and laughing out loud.

The book is The Etymologicon by Mark Forsyth. In it, the author explains the origins of words in a chatty, informal stye, each word linking ingeniously to the next. The idea for the book began as The Inky Fool blog, which Forsyth started writing in 2009.

"It's the silliness of the English language that drives me and makes me laugh," Forsyth explains with enthusiasm. "You look up a word like ‘kiosk' and you find it means ‘Turkish palace', and you think: What? How? Really? It feels to me like wandering around a network of streets that you know and nobody else does."

And at the back of the book there is a list of references, among them The Online Etymology Dictionary, where I looked up ukulele:

1896, from Hawaiian 'ukulele, lit. "leaping flea," from 'uku "louse, flea" + lele "to fly, jump, leap". So called from the rapid motion of the fingers in playing it. It developed from a Portuguese instrument introduced to the islands c.1879.

I wonder what the Hawaiian for "scratching flea" is — because I don't think I'll ever get my fingers to leap rapidly!