Words, like people, have stories to tell. Languages, like nations, have their histories. They have their peculiarities and quirks that can be traced back to some circumstance in their journey from our ancestors to us. The English language is replete with these curiosities. Inconsistent spelling and pronunciation are just two weird things about English that make learning it frustrating for non-native speakers.

This is not surprising, as English is one of the most evolved languages, encountering many twists and turns along the way to the present. “English is several tongues in a trenchcoat pretending to be one language,” goes the joke. But this did not prevent English from becoming the global language, indispensable in business, commerce, science, and technology. This list examines the historical turning points English went through that made it the way it is

Related: 10 Foreign Languages That Could Go Extinct in a Few Decades

10 The Coming of the Anglo-Saxons

When the Romans left Britain in the 5th century, the island was defenseless from invasion by Germanic tribes from the continent. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, collectively called the Anglo-Saxons, arrived from northern Germany and Denmark. The Germanic dialect they brought with them was the foundation of Old English. As the invaders pushed back the native Britons (Welsh “Brython”) and settled the land, the Celtic language (“Brythonic”) they spoke was gradually supplanted and now survives only in place names like Devon, Leeds, York, and Avon.

The 100 most common words in modern English are Anglo-Saxon in origin. Compare the German vater, mutter, bruder, and sohn to the English equivalents father, mother, brother, and son. About a quarter of our modern words are Anglo-Saxon—everyday words like be, sleep, night, sing, food, strong, house, water, and earth. Modern English is Germanic at its core despite the borrowing of other foreign words or phrases.

Many wonderful sagas and poems were written in Old English, the most famous being the epic Beowulf. Old English must seem a strange language to us, as can be seen in its opening lines:

Hwæt! Wé Gárdena in géardagum
þéodcyninga þrym gefrúnon
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas.

The Anglo-Saxons originally used a runic alphabet suitable for carving inscriptions onto stones. However, the coming of Christian missionaries who introduced the Latin alphabet replaced the cumbersome method, making possible the writing of long epics like Beowulf.^[1]

9 England Converts to Christianity

In 595, Pope Gregory I decided to convert the pagan Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and sent a mission of 40 monks led by the Benedictine prior (later a saint) Augustine to Britain. They successfully evangelized the inhabitants, and Augustine established Canterbury as his primary seat. Aside from the Gospel, the missionaries brought with them the liturgy and language of the Church—Latin.

The Anglo-Saxons were familiar with a few Latin words that had been used throughout the Roman occupation, mostly dealing with the military, government, commerce, and travel. The Latin for a military camp, castrum, gave us the suffix -chester for place names (Manchester, Lancaster). These simple, easy-to-remember words related to practical matters (cook, kitchen, mill).

Christianity introduced bigger words and new ideas, mainly religious (e.g., pope, archbishop, shrine, mass, offer, martyr) and, in later centuries, was extended to the spheres of law (legal, prosecute, custody) and medicine (lunatic, ulcer). It marked the beginning of English borrowing words freely from other languages, which enriched its vocabulary.^[2]

8 The Viking Invasions

In the 9th century, the Vikings began raiding the coasts of the British Isles, probably to look for new land for Scandinavia’s growing population. Through the next century, many resettled in Britain, the Danes alone coming over with 35,000, about the same number as the inhabitants of London at the time.

As the Anglo-Saxons were pushed back, it seemed that they and their language would go the way of the Celts. But England found a savior in King Alfred of Wessex, the only English monarch to be called “the Great.” He defeated the Danes at the Battle of Edington in 878. By treaty with the Danish king Guthrum, the Danes were allowed to settle in the northeast area from London to Bedford, called Danelaw. We can locate the places where they put down roots by their names, those which bear suffixes like -by (village, as in Thornby, Whitby), -thorpe (outlying farmstead, as in Copmansthorpe), and -kirk (church, as in Ormskirk).

The more peaceful intercourse between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings resulted in the intermingling of their languages. Everyday speech shows the stamp of Old Norse, words like husband, sister, ugly, happy, berserk, anger, cake, and take. We owe the Vikings our pronouns he, him, her, they, them, and their. Finally, the days of the week bear the names of the Norse gods Ty, Wodan, Thor, and Freya.

Meanwhile, Alfred, a lover of learning, sought to educate his own people by translating Latin texts into Old English. He said, “Geðenc hwelc witu us ða becomon for ðisse worulde, ða ða we hit nohwæðer ne selfe ne lufodon ne eac oðrum monnum ne lefdon” (“‘Remember what punishments befell us in this world when we ourselves did not cherish learning nor transmit it to other men.”). As we can see, Alfred’s English, the West Saxon dialect, was thoroughly Germanic. Of the 10,000 words preserved in Old English, only 600-700 were foreign. Many monks must have thought that translating great Latin works into this obscure tongue was pretty pointless.

But Alfred had his way, and the result was to make the West Saxon dialect the standard “King’s English” until the 11th century. Without Alfred, English might not have survived the Viking onslaught.^[3]

7 The Norman Conquest

In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, invaded England to wrest away the crown promised to him by King Edward the Confessor from Harold Godwinson. William defeated King Harold’s forces at the Battle of Hastings and took over the throne. The occupying Normans wrought great transformations in Anglo-Saxon society, especially in language, which transitioned from Old English to Middle English.

The French-Norman aristocracy made England their home, and along with their manners and customs, they made French the language of the court and the elite. They considered Old English a vulgar tongue fit only for the lower classes and peasantry. The poor cooked what they called a cow, but when it reached their French-speaking master’s table, it became “beef” (beouf). Similarly, the sheep became “mutton” (mouton), the calf became “veal” (veau), and the poor pig became “pork” (porc).

English lost up to 85% of its Anglo-Saxon words during the Norman period as French gained ascendancy. French words permeated politics (government, cabinet, Parliament, minister), war (military, army, commander), and law (court, jury, bailiff, tribunal). Thirty percent of our vocabulary today comes from French. A contemporary writer lamented: “Children in school, contrary to the usage and custom of other nations, are compelled to drop their own language and to construe their lessons and other tasks in French.”

King John’s loss of the ancestral land of Normandy in 1204 cut off the Anglo-Norman nobles from their connections to France. Gradually, they thought of themselves more as English than French. As England became conscious of unity, France increasingly became a foreign nation, whose king, Edward I said in 1295, had “his detestable purpose, which God forbid, to wipe out the English tongue.”

Many Normans learned English to communicate effectively with their subjects, while many commoners became more familiar with French. French, however, remained the official language of England for 300 years.^[4]

6 The Black Death

In June 1348, a sailor arriving in Weymouth from Gascony in France brought with him virulent bacteria carried by infected fleas, Yersinia pestis, that would ravage England and kill perhaps a third of the population, between 25 and 50 million. The Black Death was the greatest horror medieval Europe endured, and it profoundly changed society, including the English language.

The bubonic plague did not discriminate between rich and poor, noble or peasant. It cut down people regardless of age or sex. The French-speaking aristocracy and ruling elite were close to being wiped out. This turned society upside down—with an acute labor shortage and huge tracts of land left unattended, the surviving peasants realized they now had bargaining power and dared to demand more for their labor. The commoners now had a voice in society, and the language they spoke, English, began to be important. With the death of so many French speakers, English began to assert itself. The Black Death saved English from oblivion.

What kind of English did they speak? They would have pronounced words very much the same as they were written. Thus, steak rhymed with bleak, tears with bears (not beers), there were no silent k’s or g’s, the l before f,v,k,m is sounded (calf, halve, folke, palmer), the -gh as in thought is pronounced like -ch in German (ich) and the final -e a schwa (ə).

Changes in pronunciation were nevertheless already happening, and by the Renaissance, the long vowels had already acquired their modern sounds in what had been termed the “Great Vowel Shift.”^[5]

5 The Statute of Pleading

Geoffrey Chaucer, the Father of English Poetry, probably spoke French, as he belonged to the upper class. However, English was reemerging as a national language, and the government found it necessary to address the new situation. For one, commoners complained that they could not understand what was going on whenever they were involved in court cases, as legal proceedings were held in French.

In 1362, the Statute of Pleading in English Act was passed, allowing courtroom business to be conducted in English. The Parliament that enacted it was opened with a speech by the Chief Justice in English, the first time since the Conquest the native tongue was used. Now officially recognized, the slow but steady shift to the use of English in government and bureaucracy began.

By the time Chaucer wrote his Canterbury Tales (1387–1400) in Middle English, that language was replacing French as the medium of instruction in schools. To see how English had changed from the time of Beowulf, here is how The Canterbury Tales begins:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

Authors began to write for audiences who knew no French or Latin. Aristocrats dropped their disdain for English, and even those who knew French came to favor English literary works. Furthermore, the growing hostility between England and France that culminated in the Hundred Years War led nobles to speak in English as a badge of their identity. Henry IV (1367–1416) was perhaps the first king for whom Middle English was the language of choice.^[6]

4 Caxton’s Printing Press

In the 1450s, Johann Gutenberg of Mainz, Germany, caught up with Chinese technology and introduced printing by moveable type into Europe. An information revolution followed as thousands of printed works flooded the continent. The wealthy English merchant William Caxton saw the potential of the book business with the growing demand for English literature.

He translated Recueil des histoires de Troye (A Collection of the Histories of Troy) from French into English and published it in Bruges, Belgium, in 1475. It was the first book to be printed in English, followed by The Game and Playe of the Chesse, also translated from French.

Caxton returned to England in 1476 and set up his own printing press at Westminster. At the time, there were wide variations in the English being spoken, so Englishmen could not even understand their fellows. Caxton himself tells this story: “And one of (the merchants) named Sheffelde, a mercer, came into a house and asked for food; and especially he asked for eggs. And the good wife answered that she could speak no French. And the merchant was angry, for he also could speak no French, but wanted to have eggs, and she understood him not. And then, at last, another said that he would have ‘eyren.’ Then, the good wife understood him well.” Lo, what should a man in these days now writes, “eggs” or “eyren”?

To solve this problem, Caxton used the power of his printing press to propagate a standard English, and this variety of Middle English, spoken in London and surrounding districts, was called the “King’s English.” Caxton took the first step in making English a truly national language, ready to one day conquer the world.^[7]

3 The English Renaissance

England could not fail to be affected by the great revival of learning and culture sweeping continental Europe called the Renaissance. From the late 15th to the 17th centuries, during the reigns of the Tudors and Stuarts, English was transformed from a simple vernacular into a rich and complex literary language that continued to absorb new words and phrases, evolving more precise grammar and syntax.

It was a period that saw great writers and poets, the greatest of which, undoubtedly, was William Shakespeare. The Bard from Avon introduced over 1,700 new words into our vocabulary that are still being used today: alligator, bedroom, eyeball, fashionable, gossip, hurry, lonely, manager, traditional, and worthless, to name a few. Shakespeare also originated many familiar phrases. When we say, “Love is blind,” “Good riddance,” or “Wear your heart on your sleeve,” we are quoting Shakespeare.

Another work that has enriched the English language is the King James Bible (KJV) of 1611, the crowning point of the long struggle to wrest the Scriptures away from the Catholic Church and translate it from Latin into English so that the common people might read it. Its majestic prose is quoted, often unknowingly, even in our secular age.

When we “put words into someone’s mouth,” see the “handwriting on the wall,” dread the “signs of the times,” rally “from strength to strength,” or find a “fly in the ointment,” we are, deliberately or not, referencing the KJV. Contemporary idioms have 257 such phrases popularized by the KJV, most of which are copied from the earlier English translation of William Tyndale. It also introduced 40 or so new words, like backsliding, scapegoat, longsuffering, and peacemaker.

Some 10-12,000 loanwords entered the vocabulary, mostly from Greek and Latin, but also from other European languages, further diluting English’s Teutonic character. Spelling was also being standardized (e.g., dette/debt, doute/doubt, indite/indict, quire/choir, faute/fault), and the Great Vowel Shift was making words more recognizable to the modern ear (e.g., shape/sheep, may/me, meen/mine, maat/mate, oot/out, hus/house).^[8]

2 Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary

The first English dictionary, “A Table Alphabeticall” by Robert Cawdrey, appeared in 1604 and listed 2,543 “hard words” derived from Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French. Obviously, it was not very useful, and other dictionaries followed throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.

In 1755, Samuel Johnson published his two-volume Dictionary of the English Language, which he conceived as “a dictionary by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed, and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity may be preserved, its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened.” Though the ever-changing character of the language thwarted Johnson’s attempt to “fix” it, the dictionary nevertheless standardized spellings and usage for future authors.

Johnson provided the template for good and effective lexicography. The Dictionary comprehensively defined 42,773 entries and had quotations to illustrate their usage. He didn’t hesitate to include “vulgar” words like bum, fart, piss, and turd. There were even curiosities like belly-god (“one who makes a god of his belly”) and amatorculist (“a little insignificant lover”), as well as insults, including fopdoodle (“a fool; an insignificant wretch”), bedpresser (“a heavy, lazy fellow”), and pricklouse (“a word of contempt for a tailor”).

Until the publication of the Oxford English Dictionary in 1884, Johnson’s dictionary was the go-to reference for writers and speakers, and its impact on the English language still resonates today.^[9]

1 Expansion of the British Empire

The age of discovery and exploration, beginning in the 15th century, opened up new lands for European colonization. England, a growing maritime power, did not lag far behind Spain and Portugal in exploiting the opportunities. By the 18th century and on to the 19th, the British held sway over much of North America, Africa, India, and Australia. At its peak, Britain was the mother country to a quarter of the planet, ruling a quarter of its population. To all these places they colonized, they introduced the English language.

Britain did not only export her language. Contact with far-flung cultures added more new words to the vocabulary. Early on, Arabic gave us algebra, zero, zenith, giraffe, gazelle, sultan, caravan, mosque, to name a few. Chimpanzee, goober, gumbo, impala, jumbo, mamba, zebra, and zombie are African in origin. From the Chinese comes tea, that beloved British drink, and from Sanskrit, we have avatar, karma, and yoga. The list goes on.

When the thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Britain and went their own way, their English evolved in peculiar ways that made it distinct from British English. It borrowed words from Native Americans (e.g., skunk, bayou, hickory, squash, raccoon, tepee) and Spanish (bronco, avocado, canyon, siesta, plaza), often describing things not found in Britain. When the United States became a world power, she exported her brand of English throughout the world via schools, business, pop culture, Hollywood, and now, the Internet. It is not the King’s English the world speaks and spells, but American English.

From the simple tongue of obscure tribes in the forests of northern Germany to the global lingua franca, English had gone through one great adventure.^[10]

Language is incredibly diverse in our world. There are around 7,000 spoken languages in the world right now and a few dozen of them are known by just a single person. As many as 90% are spoken by less than 100,000 people. Dozens of other languages are officially extinct with no one left to speak them at all. 

We’re so used to language in our modern world that people will go out and create fictional languages for our own entertainment, like Dothraki or Klingon. There are actually more people in the world right now who can speak Klingon than Navajo, which you may recognize as a real language with a long history. 

With such incredible diversity and complexity it’s a very deep process to get to the bottom of where it all started. But it did have to start somewhere. Once upon a time, someone (or several someones) was the first ever to give voice to a thought, to label something in an identifiable way in an attempt to communicate what a thing or a feeling or an idea was. 

Without the benefit of time travel it’s hard to get a lot of definitive answers on this subject. There is actually quite a bit of disagreement in the study of linguistics over a number of facets dealing with the origin and evolution of language so we’ll try to cover what we can while keeping it balanced.

It seems plausible that language, like life, has a common ancestor, meaning it evolved from a single place, not in several. Some believe that southern Africa is that place. Research has shown that the largest number of phonemes, the smallest sort of perceptually distinct sounds in speech, are found in Africa while the fewest are in South America.  

Human vs Animal Communication

Many animals are able to communicate but human language has transcended animals on several levels. We are the only species that can express whole thoughts in sentences, rather than simple ideas like warnings or cries of distress. Human language is compositional and can be combined in nearly infinite ways to express infinite ideas.

The important thing to start with when answering a question like this is to point out we don’t have an actual answer. No one does. Asking when language began is a lot like asking who invented fire or the wheel. It’s impossible to know. It will also always be impossible to know. This isn’t one of those things waiting for an archaeologist to dig it up some day, that just can’t happen. So speculation, however educated and backed by research, is the best we’ll ever have. 

Also, consider that the only person who could document when language began was the person who invented language, and they probably hadn’t mastered book writing on that same day or anything. In fact, writing and speaking were distinct creations and while humans began to evolve as far back as 300,000 years ago, writing only showed up about 5,000 years ago. This is distinct from cave paintings and symbols which, while about to convey meaning and appeared as late as 40,000 years ago, were not a distinct written language yet. 

It seems 300,000 years is about the earliest, which can range all the way up to 200,000 years, and aligns with the Laryngeal Descent Theory, that our voice box evolved to be where it is, allowing a vocal tract capable of producing speech. 

It’s worth noting, however, that research has proven even some modern apes are anatomically capable of producing human words.  Because of this, some argue speech, or the ability to produce it, dates back to a common ancestor as much as 27 million years ago. This clashes distinctly with additional research that bumps speech up to only 70,000 years ago. In this theory, humans only communicated in click sounds before changes in geography and diet led to alterations in the physical language structures in the throat and brain and the evolution of more complex speech about 50,000 years ago. 

Just because we don’t know exactly who started speaking and writing and exactly when doesn’t mean we don’t know anything, though. At the very least, we have some educated guesses.

How Did it Start?

Language wasn’t invented the way Scotch tape or dynamite was invented. There was no eureka moment when someone just started speaking. Because of how complex language is, it’s generally believed that the process of language evolved just as humans evolved from less advanced beings to more advanced ones. 

Our cousins, like the Neanderthals, may have started developing language alongside or before homo sapiens. But they didn’t make it this far in history so it’s hard to know for certain, while a lack of symbols or art in their fossil remains indicates they may not have had language.

Noam Chomsky argued that humans are essentially hard-wired for language. From birth, our brain is designed to learn and make use of it. We’ll get more into his theories later. For what it’s worth, an Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetichus I concluded essentially the same thing about 2600 years ago. 

Origin Theories

There are a variety of theories about what kick-started language in the first place. A number of them, and we’ll dive into a few that have subtle differences, basically suggest language started as noise. We started making noises and ascribed those noises to things that had importance.

One of these theories, called the Mama Theory, explains it well enough in simple terms. Babies start making the “mmm” and “mama” sounds on their own. Those sounds, repeated by enough people over enough time can become accepted and adapted to the word “Mama” and eventually “mother,” for instance. 

Many of the theories, like the Bow Wow Theory, suggest we mimic sounds we hear in nature, fall apart under any serious scrutiny as very few words in any language can be accounted for in this way. 

There are a handful of similar and fairly rudimentary theories about the origin of language that all have silly names like Ding-Dong, La-La and Pooh-Pooh, all of which fail to adequately account for most of the elements of language. 

Differing Theories

More complex theories of language development rely on the cooperative nature of humans. We are inclined, as a species, to want to collaborate and understand one another. This led to a theory that language may have developed from gestures and pantomime. Babies and apes still engage in this sort of behavior, of pointing to things and trying to express thoughts.

As an example of how these gestures and motions develop language, in this case, sign language, which would then evolve to spoken language, there are cases of entirely deaf communities spontaneously creating their own sign languages to communicate. 

In this theory, language isn’t an innate thing, instead the cooperative social interaction is the foundation of language, which doesn’t even require speech or writing. All of that comes after and then is passed down culturally. 

What some of these theories do try to get to the root of is the difference between signs and symbols which are essential parts of language. A sign has a clear meaning that can be easily discerned. A stop sign is very clear meant to convey the idea “stop.” In the modern world, a smiley emoji is a clear sign meant to indicate happiness. 

A symbol is a more abstract concept and can change with context. Words are basic symbols which we all understand. “Hot” is a word that can change in context. It might refer to temperature, it might refer to attractiveness, it could mean something is popular, or that it’s stolen. 

The simplistic theories of language try to explain how signs and symbols evolve into language but miss the mark in many cases. Like the Pooh-Pooh Theory which suggests language began from interjections, like when you cry “ow!” after getting hurt. It’s hard to get this sort of theory to explain words like “daffodil” or “unguent,” however. 

Ritual and Speech Evolution

Ritual and speech coevolution is another more complex theory of how language evolved in humans. It is believed that the earliest forms of man found benefit in gathering to engage in rituals and group behaviors that would benefit them as a whole. Like animals, in particular other ape species, communication would have first been in the realm of gestures. 

It was the continued grouping of early humans, engaging in various rituals and ascribing meaning to their gestures and symbols that could have helped language begin to develop across a group and make it a shared thing that was understood by many and could therefore be taught to others outside that initial group.  

One way in which speech was able to potentially evolve for us, as opposed to apes who have a limited range of vocalization and meanings, deals with trust. An ape, or any animal, typically only has a limited number of vocalizations to indicate stress, fear, hunger, surprise and so on. These sounds can’t typically be faked. Humans, however, can engage in deception and have reason to doubt one another. But trust in a group allows early humans to relax any potential fears and trust that they are agreeing on a shared meaning for a wider range of things.

Tools and Language

One of the more novel theories on language development relates also to the development of tools. In a gross simplification of this theory, the idea is that humans developed the ability to make tools and also needed a way to communicate to each other about what they were doing so language was born out of necessity. In so many words, someone invented an ax and wanted to tell his friends what it was for and how he did it. Again, that’s a gross simplification, but it’s the heart of the theory.

In more complex readings of the theory, there is some breakdown of the idea that tool-making was part of the evolution and growth of the human brain, and manual praxis is linked to language development, Neuroscience agrees that language parts of the brain are also used, in part, for non-language functions that include tool use. So there is some potential link between the growth and development of one along with the other. 

Chomsky and Universal Grammar

We mentioned Noam Chomsky earlier. In 1957, he proposed that all humans are born with an innate understanding of how language works. This was very much opposed to reigning theories of language development and acquisition of the day. He believed, regardless of the language being learned, we are able to learn because our brains are genetically coded for it. We are born to understand communication in whatever form it takes.

This concept had been, more or less, accepted by most linguists for half a century. His basic arguments of universal grammar are convincing. Most languages break down into parts like nouns, verbs and adjectives. They are recursive, meaning we can embed one language structure inside another endlessly, like adding adjectives to describe a noun in a sentence. They are also easily learned by children. These things occur across cultures. 

More recent research casts doubt on Chomsky’s theories. Linguistics and cognitive scientists have studied how children learn language and their findings contradict Chomsky’s theories. Children use techniques that are not unique to language, like classifying what they encounter into different categories, which help them build an understanding of language.

What conclusion can you draw in the end with the debate between linguists? That the origins of language are really hard to figure out.

In the past, we have examined the origins of some popular and peculiar idioms, but for every true story, there’s also a false one, that sometimes becomes more popular than the truth. So today, we put our debunking hats on and set out to correct a few myths about language and communication, be they false acronyms, fake word origins, and even a few misconceptions about nonverbal communication.

10. Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden

An acronym is a type of abbreviation that takes the initial letters of a series of words and pronounces them as one single word, as in, for example, NASA or NATO. And here’s a fun fact for you: if the letters in the new word are pronounced individually instead of a single word, as in FBI or KFC, for example, that would be an initialism, not an acronym.

But back to our main point, there is a belief that the word “golf” is also an acronym, which stands for “gentlemen only, ladies forbidden.” It sounds plausible, since, traditionally, women were discouraged from taking part in the sport, but not only is it false, it is based on an old joke that got repeated so often that people started taking it as fact.

As a general rule, English acronyms are a relatively recent practice that has only been around for a century-and-a-half or so. Therefore, if the word is older than that, chances are that it’s not an acronym, and the word “golf” has been around for 600 years, at least. The earliest written mention we have of it comes from an act of King James II from 1457, where he actually banned it because he felt it discouraged people from practicing archery.

As to the word’s actual origins, those are a bit murkier. Some say it is derived from a Scottish word, others from a Dutch word. We just know that it’s not an acronym.

9. The Rednecks of Blair Mountain

Another word with an uncertain origin is “redneck,” used in a derogatory way synonymous with “yokel” or “hillbilly.” On one hand, the word “redneck” has a great origin story that connects it to the Battle of Blair Mountain, a notorious and violent event that, to this day, still represents the largest labor uprising in United States history. On the other hand, the story isn’t entirely accurate.

In August 1921, around 10,000 miners from West Virginia clashed with lawmen and strikebreakers who were there to prevent their attempts to unionize. This was part of a larger series of labor conflicts that occurred during the late 19th-early 20th century known as the Coal Wars. 

The striking miners wore red bandannas around their necks and became known as the “Red Neck Army,” and the men themselves were, eventually, referred to simply as rednecks. It is quite a compelling tale, and all of it is true except for the part about it being the origin of the word “redneck” which goes back farther than the Battle of Blair Mountain.

As we said at the start, we’re unsure where the word “redneck” comes from, but we do know that the Oxford English Dictionary contains usages of it dated to decades before the labor uprising, even going as far back as the late-19th century. 

8. Putting the “Crap” in “Crapper”

While we’re on the subject of fake word origins that have stuck around simply because people like the story behind them, let’s talk about the words “crap” and “crapper,” both supposedly named after the inventor of the flush toilet, Thomas Crapper.

This is a two-pronged myth. The first false notion is that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet. He didn’t. It’s true that he was a real plumber who later opened his own company and that he held several patents related to plumbing, but none of them were quite as grandiose as the flush toilet system. Sir John Harrington was the first to describe the flush toilet all the way back in 1596, but he never actually built it. Then, Alexander Cummings was the first to receive a patent for it in 1775. Both of them were active centuries before Thomas Crapper, who operated his company during the late 19th century.

As for the word “crap,” that one is even older, and it could come from medieval Latin, Old French, or even Dutch, as they all had similar-sounding words. The connection between “crap” and Thomas Crapper was made in 1969 by author Wallace Reyburn, who wrote the satirical book Flushed with Pride, so it seems like this is another case of people taking a joke and accepting it as fact.

7. The Spanish “Lisp”

This is a myth that most people will come across if they study Spanish long enough. There is a notion that there once was a Spanish king, usually named Ferdinand, who spoke with a lisp. Wanting to suck up to the king, his courtiers began imitating him and, before you know it, the entire country started speaking like him, and that’s how the so-called Spanish lisp appeared.

Once again, we have a myth that must be debunked on two fronts. The first is the very existence of the Spanish lisp. A lisp is a speech impediment and to imply that an entire nation can share a collective verbal disorder is nonsensical. There are some differences between how certain European Spanish and Latin American Spanish words are pronounced, but these are simple variations in language like you would also find between British and American English.

Then there’s the story of the lisping king. No such Spanish monarch has ever been positively identified. The closest we have comes courtesy of 14th-century historian Pedro López de Ayala, who wrote of King Peter the Cruel of Castile and Leon that he spoke “with a slight lisp.” There is, however, no mention that anyone ever mimicked him, let alone the entire kingdom.

6. Start Spreading the NEWS

We move on to another fake acronym, the word “news,” which, bizarrely enough, has not one, but two false explanations. Some say that it stands for “north, east, west, and south” because it brings you information from all over the world. Others say that it actually stands for “notable events, weather, and sports”.

Neither one is true, in fact. “News” doesn’t stand for anything. It is simply meant to be the plural of the word “new” and it dates back all the way to the 14th century. The plural form was used in order to refer to “new things,” inspired by the French word nouvelles and the German neues.

5. The 420 California Code

Many groups of people have private languages, codes, and other ways of communicating with each other in secret. It can be anything from a complicated cipher to a simple reference that only a select few would understand. Nowadays, everyone and their grandma knows that “420” is a weed term referring to smoking pot. It has become so pervasive in pop culture that April 20 is even the unofficial holiday that celebrates all things cannabis.

But there was a time when the term was much more mysterious. It was meant to be a secret, after all. The most credible origin of the story traces it to a group of high school stoners called “Waldos” who attended San Rafael High in California in 1971. “420 Louis,” as the code was originally, signified their plan to meet up at 4:20 pm in front of the school’s Louis Pasteur statue to relax with a quick doobie or whatever the kids were calling it in those days. Eventually, the term was shortened simply to “420” and it became widely used by their extended circle of friends. This happened to include a few members of the Grateful Dead, who further disseminated the usage of the term among their legions of fans known as deadheads. 

It wasn’t until almost two decades later, in 1990, that High Times magazine told the story of “420” to the world at large…except that they got it wrong because they claimed that “420” referred to the California police code for smoking pot…and that’s not true. Or, alternatively, the state penal code for smoking pot. Which, again, is not true. That particular penal code, which does exist, refers to unlawfully obstructing a person from entering public land. It wasn’t until 1997 that some of those former Waldos contacted High Times to get the story straight but, by then, the myth had firmly planted roots.

4. Freezing Monkey Balls

We’ve already examined a few incorrect origins of words, but what about an idiom? If, for example, you were to find yourself shivering in subzero temperatures, you might exclaim that it’s “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.” It’s a great expression and it even has a great origin story. During the Age of Sail, brass monkeys were indented metal trays used on ships to stack cannonballs in a pyramid shape. However, when it got really cold, the brass would contract more than the iron cannonballs, and the latter would come tumbling down all over the deck.

Unfortunately, although it is a compelling story, it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For starters, ships didn’t store their cannonballs on deck, exposed to the elements, where they would rust. They had special lockers for them. Even if they did, they certainly would not have stacked them in a precarious pyramid shape that would have likely crumbled while passing even over a gentle wave. And even if they did all of that, for whatever reason, physics would still spoil the party because the difference between the coefficient of expansion of brass and iron is negligible, not enough to cause the monkey’s balls to tumble.

3. Save Our Syntax

When it comes to nonverbal communication, Morse Code is, without a doubt, one of the most well-known systems. We’ve all heard of it, and even though most of us probably don’t know how to use it, we are still aware of one key phrase: dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot – SOS.

It has been the international distress signal for over a hundred years. Sure, nowadays we have faster and easier ways of signaling for help, but SOS still remains ingrained in the public consciousness. But what does it stand for? “Save our souls” is the most common answer, although “save our ship” is a popular runner-up. But the truth is that SOS doesn’t stand for anything and that was kind of the point. It was a simple, elegant, unmistakable, and recognizable code sequence. It was purposely chosen so that it could be transmitted without pause and repeated every few seconds without the possibility of it being misinterpreted as a different message. 

2. Rechristened at Ellis Island

In 1892, the United States opened its first federal immigration station at Ellis Island in New York Harbor, where over 12 million immigrants were processed over the following six decades. Unfortunately, those immigrants lost something very important to them during their passage through Ellis Island – their names. Immigration officials often changed their names to something that sounded more American – Schmidt became Smith, Noblinski became Noble, Weber became Weaver, and so on. Other times they did it because they couldn’t communicate with the immigrants who didn’t speak English or even simply because they couldn’t spell the foreign names. And just like that, with the stroke of a pen, they erased a person’s whole identity. It is a widely-believed story that has been referenced multiple times in media, most famous of all in The Godfather Part II. But is it true?

Out of millions of people, it’s certainly possible that a few might have been altered due to some error, but it was certainly not common practice and government records are there to prove that people came out of Ellis Island with the same names they went in. Many immigrants elected to change their names afterward, in order to fit in more easily. 

Contrary to popular belief, Ellis Island employed interpreters for all the major languages to communicate with the immigrants who didn’t speak English. And even if they weren’t around, it still didn’t matter. Officials didn’t need to speak with the immigrants to find out who they were – they had the ship’s manifest log, with everyone’s name already written out. The inspection at Ellis Island was mainly concerned with making sure that the immigrants had their papers in order and that they passed a physical exam. 

1. Flippin’ the Bird in Medieval Times

We end our list with a myth about the origins of the most famous and widely-recognized gesture in the world – the middle finger. It is said that it was first used as a taunt by English soldiers after fighting the French at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. If you are up on your medieval warfare, then you would know that, at the time, the English longbow was quite a powerful and menacing weapon, feared throughout the whole of Europe. The French were heavily favored to win that battle and, according to the myth, they intended to cut off the middle fingers of all the captured English soldiers, so they would no longer be able to draw a longbow.

History buffs will be aware that the English gave the French a thorough spanking at the Battle of Agincourt. Not only that, but adding insult to injury, they all waved their middle fingers as the French army retreated to show that they still had their digits firmly attached to their hands. 

There are two problems with that story. The first one is practical – nobody would pay to ransom archers who couldn’t fire a longbow. As harsh as it may sound, archers weren’t very high up in the military hierarchy, and archers who couldn’t fight anymore were almost useless. If the French truly intended to cut off their fingers, they would have known that the English wouldn’t want them back.

The second problem is historical. There is plenty of evidence that the middle finger has been around as a rude gesture for a lot longer than Medieval England. Roman historian Tacitus wrote that German tribesmen taunted Roman soldiers with the middle finger. And even before them, Diogenes the philosopher used the same gesture on Demosthenes the orator, way back in 4th century BC Athens. So it seems that people have been insulting each other with the middle finger for thousands of years.