Every day, you learn something new

For me, Caran d’Ache is a maker of pencils with a name you’re never sure how to pronounce. Well, I learn that the pencil is actually named after a French cartoonist, whose main claim to fame is one single drawing – well, two actually – along the lines of the H.M. Bateman ‘The man who …’ cartoons.

There it is, on the left. The first picture is entitled 'let's not discuss the Dreyfus Affair' and the second is 'they discussed it'.

But there’s more. While Caran d’Ache the pencil is named after Caran d’Ache the artist, Caran d’Ache the artist is named after … a pencil. For karandash (карандаш) is the Russian for pencil, and while the artist, whose real name was Emmanuel Poiré, was of French extraction, he was born in Russia. Now how about that?

One thing leads to another, and I recalled something I was taught at school, that the Russian word for (railway) station is vokzal (вокзал), and this came about because a visiting Tsar was mightily impressed by these new-fangled trains at Vauxhall, in South London.

This, of course, is a myth. Vokzal was in use long before this supposed visit, and it didn’t mean railway station – well it couldn’t, could it? In fact, it meant ‘pleasure garden’. I wonder if that had anything to do with the fact that an Englishman established a Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens in Moscow in 1783 – named, of course, after the ones in South London.

You learn something new every day