Mike Voyager

Mike Voyager writes about the strange, violent and frequently filthy histories hiding inside ordinary English words.

He is not a linguist. He is the person at the dinner table who ruins the conversation by pointing out that "deadline" was a real line, drawn around a real prison camp, that real men were shot for crossing.

What started as a habit of looking things up became a mild obsession when he discovered how much of what everyone knows about word origins is simply made up. The wooden shoes thrown into the machinery to give us "sabotage". The Aztec word for avocado that supposedly meant something anatomical — the story runs the other way round. These tales get repeated in books, in classrooms and in pub quizzes, and almost nobody checks.

So he checks. Every entry gets traced back as far as the evidence actually goes, and where the trail runs cold he says so, because "nobody really knows" is a more honest ending than a good story someone invented in 1935.

The real histories are better anyway. They involve plague, nuclear tests, Viking kings, medieval slaughterhouses and a great many jokes about genitals.

Follow below for new books on words, phrases and the things people are confidently wrong about.