The news report said that drugs and a number of weapons including grenades were seized during a police raid on an alleged safe house in the Sydney suburb of Glenfield. And that got me thinking about this word ‘grenade’. We know what it means (we’ve been watching war movies since we were kids) but where did it come from? Why are small, hand-thrown, explosive devices called ‘grenades’? It seems to come from a word (or a group of related words) found in French, Spanish and Portuguese meaning ‘pomegranate’. And when you think about it, these small, hand-held explosives are (very roughly) the size and shape of a pomegranate fruit. Personally, I’m not fond of pomegranates (all those seeds!)  – but even worse are those nasty little grenades found in a Sydney house (all that shrapnel!) Which brings us to the nasty little word ‘shrapnel’ – the flying bits of splintered sharp metal that make grenades so deadly. It turns out that ‘shrapnel’ is an eponym – it bears the name of its inventor, British army officer Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842). He joins a long list of other notables who have embedded their names in our language: sandwich (from John Montagu, 4th Earl of Sandwich); diesel (from Rudolf Diesel who invented – guess what!); boycott (from Irish landowner Charles Boycott); biro (from Laszlo Biro who inspired the ballpoint pen); guillotine (invented as a painless method of execution by Dr Joseph Guillotin); and a host of others. And we now know that Henry Shrapnel belongs on that list.

Dale, who says he loves his bangers and mash, asks why on earth anyone ever thought it was a good idea to call sausages ‘bangers’? This usage goes back to the trenches of the first world war. The quality of sausages supplied to the troops was very poor – a minimal amount of meat, lots of cereal, and lots of water. And it was the water that was the problem. This frequently caused the sausages to explode as they sizzled in the frying pan. Hence they (quite literally) became ‘bangers’.