If you were the medieval musician John Dunstable (ca 1390–1453), and if you went through an angst-y period where you wrote a Middle Ages version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” what would that sound like? Thanks to this week’s new(ish)-to-me word, now we know!
The word is bardcore, which describes a musical genre in which people get out their ouds and tabors and crumhorns and cover the Hits of Today. Like this:
There are many things I like about this. First, the name is clever: bardcore is a blend of bard (“poet”) and the -core of hardcore. (Another term is tavernwave, which suggests something like New wave music.) There are a surprising number of bardcore covers on YouTube—Nirvana, Lady Gaga, White Stripes, Backstreet Boys, Shakira, even Dolly Parton (“Jolene,” as covered by the hilariously named Hildegard von Blingin’). The performances are serious, played by people who know what they’re doing with medieval instruments.
Another thing I like is how people really embrace the aesthetic, so to speak, with visuals in the style of olde manuscripts or the Bayeau Tapestry*:
Similarly, for a cover of Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” one of the commenters helpfully provided bardcore-d lyrics that start off like this:
Come as thou art, As thou wast
As I wish thee to be
As a friend, companion
As a known enemy
I will note that while the novelty of both the word and the music tickles me, a little bit of bardcore goes a long way with me.
So let us turn to origins. Speaking of olde tymes, as we were, and diseases, as we weren’t, where does the name scurvy come from? As a reminder, scurvy is an unpleasant affliction in which your teeth fall out, you bleed from the skin, you experience “general debility,” and you eventually die. All due to a lack of Vitamin C, something not recognized in medieval times.
Ok, but why scurvy? It was originally scurf-y, an adjective, where scurf referred generally to scaly or scabby skin. The affliction was therefore originally a scurfy/scurvy disease.
It’s a little unclear at what point scurvy came to mean the disease we use it for today. The OED thinks that maybe the general term scurvy came to be used to render the similar-sounding word scorbut that we got from French in the 1500s, and that refers specifically to the illness. Per this theory, the meaning of scurvy narrowed from the original “scabby” to refer just to good old scurvy. (We still use the word scorbutic for “pertaining to scurvy.”) A slight oddity is that there seem to be virtually no other words in English that use this root.
Another sense of scurvy is “sorry, worthless, contemptible,” which we all know from Talk Like a Pirate Day (“ye scurvy dogs”). This sense is about as old as references to the disease, so it probably alludes to the appearance of someone beset by scabby skin, and probably makes an association between outward appearance and, you know, likability. (See also: mangy and lousy.)
As with bardcore, for me, a little bit of scurvy goes a long way. So that’s it for this week.
* Update (2020-Jul-19): I found King Harold’s font, which you, too, can use to decorate your (virtual) medieval tapestries.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.