Beryl Bainbridge's new novel about Dr Johnson, Mrs Thrale and their circle prompted Mrs Georgina Williams of Howth to inquire about the history of the term bluestocking, which means - I don't have to tell you - a woman of intellectual tastes, or, as the irascible Doctor might have added, one pretending to them.
The term dates from the middle of the 18th century when some English women, tired of cards and embroidery parties, followed the lead of the literary salons of Paris and held evening "conversations", as they called them, to which they invited illustrious guest speakers such as David Garrick, Horace Walpole, Dr Johnson, Lord Lyttleton and Benjamin Stillingfleet, a distinguished botanist.
Stillingfleet, who was as poor as he was distinguished, turned down the invitation to speak to the assembled ladies of London, telling them with candour that he could not afford the fancy evening clothes that were de rigueur, black silk stocking included. Fanny Burnley later wrote in her diary that he was told not to worry; to come as he normally dressed. He arrived attired in well-worn clothes, which included a pair of blue worsted stockings. He was a popular speaker and the girls loved him; "Blue Stockings" they called him behind his back.
Soon the women began to call their "conversations" Bluestocking, or its French equivalent, Bas Bleu. The term soon became one of disparagement. In his Table Talk the critic William Hazlitt put his opinion of the bluestockings rather bluntly: "I have an utter aversion to blue stockings. I do not care a fig for any woman that knows even what an author means." Ah well. There is no hint of derision in the word's usage nowadays.
A book being read by my 11year-old grandaughter states that the word argosy, figuratively anything containing great stores of wealth, comes from Argo, the ship of Greek myth in which Jason travelled in his search for the Golden Fleece. This is nonsense; the word has a different etymology.
In late medieval times Ragusa in Dalmatia (now Dubrovnik) was one of the richest ports in the world. Its huge fleet traded with places as far apart as India and America. Ragusea was the word the Italians gave a Ragusan ship; the English borrowing from Italian was ragusye, which gave Shakespeare's "argosies with portly sail".
John Donne, in a sermon, was the first to use the word figuratively in literature: "If St Paul, so great an argosie, held no more than Christum Crucifixum, what can thy Pinnance hold?"