Every so often, LinkedIn prompts my connections to congratulate me on a work anniversary, which is nice (thanks Kenny). The funny thing is, though, it happens several times a year and never on the same date. What are they up to? So I take it with a pinch of salt. If they sent me a gold watch or offered to pay for a year-long sabatical so I could go and study the sand grains on the beaches of the Seychelles, now that would be welcome. Instead, it’s just reminders that life hasn’t moved on.
Speaking of reminders, here’s a quick one to all my fellow self-employed folk that today is deadline day for paying your tax – an act that should fill us with joy and gratitude that we live in a caring society in which we all contribute and the fortunate support the unfortunate in a harmonious symbiosis that strengthens us as a species and empowers us to wander through life cloaked in a worthy glow. Yet it always stings a bit, doesn’t it?
Anyway, the desperate scramble to find the necessary funds somehow threw up the word quid and I paused in my fiscal panic to mull over this strange little word and wonder where it might have come from. And as I researched it, it struck me that these people who specialise in the origin of words could be making the whole thing up. Think about it – Susie Dent could be pulling the greatest game show bluff since, well, Call My Bluff.
Fortunately for you, you get nothing but the truth in this column (I’ve decided to call it a column. I don’t like blog and article seems a bit grandiose. Plus, if I call it a column, someone from The Times might get the hint. I mean, come on, it must be time they put Clarkson out to grass. He’s already bought the farm).
Anyway, we use the Latin phrase ‘quid pro quo’ to mean ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’, so it seems fair to assume that the word ‘quid’ arose from that exchange – the ‘something’ given for ‘something’ taken. You can imagine sly merchants during the Restoration, abbreviating their Latinisms to monosyllables in order to get the deal done quicker.
However (and this is the bit Susie Dent won’t tell you), it could be a shortening of the word ‘squid’, which had come into use a few years earlier for the 10-armed marine mollusc. Squid is thought to have been derived from the way sailors said the word ‘squirt’ – something squid are prone to doing ink-wise – although it may have been from the sound they make when slid down a shoot onto a fishmonger’s table.
Why a squid should have anything to do with a sovereign pound is less obvious but then many of our names for money are shrouded in mystery. Bob for a shilling? Nicker for a quid? Monkey? Pony? Spondulix? Your guess is as good as Susie’s. There’s a joke about someone paying back a debt of six pounds with a poorly cephalopod and saying, “Here’s the sick squid I owe you,” and while that’s hilariously funny, it could just be rooted in reality. Most jokes are.
Back in the late 80s, my friend Toby used to refer to money as ‘wicker’, because Alan Wicker did the ads for American Express. That’s how easily slang evolves. ‘Wicker’ caught on for a while. Ask Susie Dent and her ilk and they’d probably tell you it’s a variation of ‘nicker’, but we know better, don’t we? I bet she enjoys paying her tax.
I like to imagine the Chancellor sitting under an enormous tree, opening parcels of cash and beaming as each payment lands in her treasure chest. “Just what I always wanted!” she’d coo, as she planned which deep hole to pour it into. And I would smile benevolently and feel the joy of giving.
Happy February, everyone!
