This is the allusionist in which I, Helen Zoltzman, take you down to language town.

Coming up in today's show, your brain on language to warm up is the word history, the

etymology of banal.

Ban has its roots in the old Germanic banan which meant to proclaim or forbid, so it

had the sense of the law a decree, including decrees in medieval times and beyond, pertaining

to the use of unpayment for shared facilities such as ovens and wells and mills.

With this sense of community, ban evolved in French to refer to compulsory service,

so the word took on the idea of something applying to all, and then to being commonplace.

That's what the French adjective banal had come to mean by the time English and after

at around 1840, and since banal has only become more negative, commonplace has degraded

to being hackneyed or triped.

Triped, by the way, is from the Latin treatise worn down, conveying the notion that something

has become dull and over familiar from repeat use.

Possibly it's unwise of me to put these words in your mind before we embark upon today's

linguistic jaunt, jaunt being from a 16th century term for tiring out a horse.

Etymology is not on my side today, on with the show.

So what we're trying to understand is the processes that are going on in your head right

now as you try and understand what I'm saying.

Jenny Rodd is a cognitive psychologist at University College London, and I think she can

look right through my skull to see these processes at work.

If I could do that, that would make my job a whole heap easier, and fortunately we can't

look directly into your brain so we have to come up with cunning and devious experiments

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