​​Hidden between stellate (“star-shaped”) and stelleroid (“a starfish”) in the dictionary is the word Stellenbosch.

 

A verb meaning to demote to an ineffective or menial position, Stellenbosch is clearly a surprisingly useful word given its relative unfamiliarity—and what’s more, it has a superb etymological story lurking behind it.

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Stellenbosch is a town in South Africa, where during the Boer War a British remount camp for the training, care and rehabilitation of war horses was located. In the days before motorized military transport, looking after the horses at the remount camp was an important task—but, admittedly, it was far from front line duty.

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Any officer whose front-line conduct or tactical decisions had proved unsatisfactory, might ultimately find themselves “Stellenbosched”—that is, moved aside, out of harms way, to a significant but much less impactful position at the Stellenbosch camp. They had not been demoted as such (and so could scarcely complain about their reassignment), but were nevertheless cashiered far from the military front line. 

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It was this brilliant geographical etymology that inspired Around the World in 80 Days—a fascinating collection of all those words in the dictionary we owe to our maps and atlases. Beginning and ending in London, the Around the World route takes in the likes of the tiny Swedish mining town whose name lurks behind four chemical elements, the tiny Czech mining town whose name lurks behind more than 100 world currencies, the mountain in Jordan whose name is a metaphor for the unreachable, and the Australian island whose name inspired an old word for the unforgivable. 

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Entailing six continents, 70 countries, and 80 fascinating etymologies, Around the World is a circumnavigation of the English language like nothing you’ll have read before. ​