An English boxing commentator told his television audience that Lennox Lewis was torpedoed by a lucky punch. No doubt he had the invention of the British engineer Robert Whitehead in mind when he used the verb. Long before Whitehead developed his weapon, Robert Fulton, an American, invented a mine which he called a torpedo, designed to blow up when it came in contact with a ship. Fulton said that he gave it its name because it reminded him of that rather nasty fish, the electric ray, sometimes called crampfish. His mine was first used in the Civil War.
Fulton was a bit of a classicist, and he knew that the ancient Romans had given the name torpedo to that fish which gave a numbing electric shock to anybody unlucky enough to touch it; its origin was the verb torpere, to be numb. Hence, by the way, the English words torpid and torpor.
In the 16th century torpedo became the common English word for the electric ray. Richard Harvey, in a tract called Plaine Preceuall the Peacemaker of England, wrote in 1589 about the "the fish Torpedo, which being touched sends her venom along line and angle rod, till it cease on the finger, and so mar a fisher forever." A bit over the top, I fancy; the fisher would be numbed all right, just as Mr Lewis was. John Kelly from Artane asked about the word.
"Where does the word sleuth, a detective, come from?", asks a man of that profession who wants to be anonymous. It is from the Middle English sleuth, which meant the track of a person or an animal, and it, in turn, came from the Old Norse sloth.
After about 1450 sleuth was seldom used on its own, but was used in compounds such as sleuth-hound, a bloodhound. In Bellenden's translation of the Latin History and Chronicles of Scotland, the populace was warned that "he that denys entres to the sleuth-hound sal be haldin participant with the crime and theft committit."
With the rise of American crime fiction in the late-1880s, the sleuth-hound became a detective; not long afterwards the second part of the compound was dropped.
Greave, a grove, is a word I had thought obsolete. Mary Kehoe, formerly of Wexford, sent me the word from Luton where she now lives. Her mother had the word. "She fled into that covert greave", wrote Spenser. Chaucer has "a gerland of the greves." This lovely old word is from Old English graefa, a bush.