The word henchman has come down in the world since the Middle Ages when it meant a trusted, loyal follower, writes Dr Diarmaid Ó Muirithe.
It now carries a slightly sinister sense, an unsavoury underling in skulduggery and shady dealing. The compound is interesting in that it has survived almost intact from the Old English hengstmann, a groom, from a Germanic origin, hengst, stallion. Stallions, then as now, were prized animals and very difficult to handle; they were entrusted only to the care of loyal, expert handlers. In Middle English a hengstmann had become a henxman or a henchman, and the word had changed its meaning to a nobleman's ceremonial attendant, a post of honour.
That word skulduggery is a bit of a mystery. It seems to have its origins in Scotland in the early 18th century, when it was spelled sculduddery, and meant both fornication and verbal and written obscenity. Its origins are obscure. The Americans spelled it skulduggery (just one l, note) in the nineteenth century and gave it the meaning "misappropriation of funds". It is in constant use, need I say, and not only in the US.
Cemetery puzzles Mary Corcoran of Carlow. Did it come into being as a euphemism for churchyard or graveyard in modern times, she wonders. No, it became a euphemism in the days of the Roman persecution of the Christians, in fact.
It comes from the Greek koimeteron, sleeping quarters - specifically, slaves' quarters. Latin adopted the word in the form coemeterium, for the sleeping quarters of a garrison. Then the early Christian writers got hold of the word and used it specifically to denote the catacombs, and later any consecrated burial ground - the resting place or sleeping place of the Christian dead. Hence Italian cimitero.
This early use of the euphemism sleeping for dead ignored the original sense, slave quarters, and prompted the American lexicographer John Ciardi to fume: "If any preacher presumes to stand over my corpse (whenever) and say I am not dead but only asleep, I instruct my friends to explain to the man that I am damned well as dead as I am ever going to be, and gone (to quote, of course, myself) into the dormitory tombs where old boys sleep."
The great John Donne's no-nonsense attitude would have pleased Mr Ciardi. Up he rose from his sick bed on the Sunday before his death and delivered his own funeral sermon in St Paul's, dressed in his winding sheet and funereal headgear. That fairly shook his audience, I'd say.