Anyone looking for positive omens to cling to as we release the brakes on the month-long roller-coaster ride that is the World Cup might take heart from this fact: in the last two tournaments, the country in which Pep Guardiola has managed the league champions has gone on to win it. Spain (Barcelona) in 2010, Germany (Bayern Munich) in 2014. Much as it pains me to say it, Pep managed Manchester City to the title this year. So that bodes well for England.
There are various question marks over this particular piece of soothsaying, the most pertinent of which is this: does anything ever ‘bode badly’? Or do we just say it ‘doesn’t bode well’? I was asked this question the other day in an email from a friend, who is under the misguided impression that I know this sort of stuff. Seems a shame to shatter his illusions so, obviously, the answer is that we don’t say ‘bodes badly’ because we use the more poetic ‘bodes ill’.
Bode originates in the Old English ‘bodian’, meaning to foretell, from ‘boda’ (a messenger), and not to be confused with Bodean’s, which means pork and beans and is a harbinger of ill winds. Back in the early days it was more common to say ‘bodes good’ rather than ‘bodes well’, and even more common to say ‘bodes ill’, because things usually did. Hence the word ‘foreboding’ (which derives from bode) went from meaning ‘a sense of something about to happen’ in the 14th century to ‘a sense of something bad about to happen’ by the 16th. The benefit of experience. Plague, war, torture, witchcraft… there wasn’t a lot to smile about, even if you did have the teeth.
But bode kept its options open and, after all these years, despite attempts by ‘augur’ and ‘portend’ to muscle in on the action, it remains the best word we have for ‘indicate how things are likely to turn out’. One word to say all that! It’s an admirable piece of wordsmithery.
An augur (not to be confused with an auger, which is a hand tool for drilling big holes in things) was a Roman religious official whose job it was to gauge the mood of the gods by the behaviour of birds and other natural signs. If a chicken laid two eggs on a Wednesday, for example, he might advise you to carry a spare toga. All sensible stuff.
Portend is also of Roman origin, from the Latin ‘portendere’, meaning ‘to stretch forward’. It came into English usage in the 15th century, when the gift of foresight could get you married to the king or burned as a witch. You had to gauge your audience.
The fact that we still regularly use such words as ‘bode’, ‘augur’ and ‘portend’ shows that, despite our devotion to silicon, there’s still a hot streak of hocus pocus running through modern society. Whether it’s a tenuous repeat pattern from history, a faith healer in the dressing room or an octopus picking its nose, the World Cup seems to bring out the augurs like no other event on Earth. This morning, for example, I saw a thrush dive-bombing the cat, so I rushed out and put a tenner on England to lose all their group games.
Sorry if that’s depressing but you can’t ignore the signs.
