Hi, everyone. And welcome back to one of your favorite segments【詞源考古研究所】, in English, we call it It Means What?

Woo~

That's a new one. Hi, 安瀾

Hi, Lulu, hi, everyone.

So in this segment, we are going to get to the bottom of some of the everyday words and expressions, and share with you some interesting origin stories. So what's the word for today, 安瀾?

Today's word is Berserk.

That's a peculiar word.

Well it means, for example, to go berserk, you start acting in a violent or wild way .

Like go crazy.

You go crazy.

Go crazily violent.

Yeah.

But berserk is not one of those, I wouldn't say like “every day” every day, but you do hear it.

You do hear it a lot.

You also see it in like games or anime.

Yeah. So to go berserk means to be really, really angry or really, really violent. Or you could say just to be really angry, so for example, my boss went berserk.

Why are you looking at me when you say that?

Sorry.

But more on the usage of this later. Let's get to the bottom of it. B-E-R-S-E-R-K berserk. This is not a Greek word anymore.

No. This comes from old Norse.

Norse means northern European, right? 就是北歐

So this was the language of the Vikings.

維京人.

Yeah. And it's berserker, which means bear-shirt.

Bear-shirt.

Yeah, i.e. a bear as in Teddy bear, and shirt as in, well, shirt that you wear.

I'm assuming it's not a shirt with bear print on it. It's more like a shirt made of bear fur, bear skin.

It could mean lots of different things.

Okay. But this actually, you said berserker so with ‘er’ at the end. There's obviously because earlier on, we said it's a state of being really, really violent and wild. But add ‘er’ it refers to a type of person. This is a type of warrior, if I remember correctly.

It's a type of warrior, a berserker, according to the stories, was a Viking warrior, who went absolutely crazy.

Okay. Yeah, 我看到過一個(gè)翻譯叫做‘狂戰(zhàn)士’，就是瘋狂的狂, 就在有些游戲或者動(dòng)漫里面會(huì)有這樣子的一個(gè)berserker.

So what they would do is they would sometimes fight dressed as bears, or some people think that they actually fought naked depends on who you speak to.

Yeah, just don't think it's a really good idea to fight while you're naked, especially when you're using sort of metal weapon really.

Well. That's the thing. They would do things like foam at the mouth, bite the shield, they went completely completely crazy .

Did they have rabies?

No, what they did have were drugs.

Oh, the berserk as they were crazy because they were on drugs.

Pretty much. So some people say that they were eating mushrooms or drinking loads of alcohol.

Mushrooms like magic mushrooms.

Yes.

For those of you who have heard about mushrooms, some of them are poisonous like every year in Yunnan because Yunnan has a lot of mushrooms. A lot of people would end up in hospital if they were not careful.

And these berserk as they would take these poisonous mushrooms, the ones that will give them hallucinations, they would take them on purpose, I guess？

Yeah, to basically drive them into hysteria. No one really quite knows what happened. Some people think they did it themselves that they can have just made themselves go into this state and then start fighting.

Vikings were pretty fierce warriors to start with, imagine Vikings on drugs.

Exactly. So they would go absolutely crazy and there's loads of stories about how they were used as shock troops so that they would just basically be at the front and they will just start killing and attacking everything.

Yeah, because the drugs make them essentially their devils.

Yeah.

They were completely fearless. And to be completely honest even in modern warfare, this is not unheard of, there were even governments that would purposely drug their troops, their soldiers so that they don't get anxiety, so they stay up and ready to fight and there were quite a few scandals around that.

Yeah. So with these particular berserkers, we're not 100% sure what they were doing. One thing that was very common in the ancient world was dressing up as bears.

Dressing up as bears or wearing bear skin?

Wearing bear skins.

So you think about the guards outside of Buckingham Palace. They’re also wearing bear skins.

白金漢宮外面的大帽子像火柴頭一樣的. That’s bear skin, that's actual bear skin.

Yeah. There's always been that symbolism between bears which back then were very common in Europe and fighting and being very very brave.

Wouldn't that slow you down though it really looks really heavy.

Well, that's why some people were saying they were wearing bear skins. Other people were saying they were naked.

Okay the two extremes, anyhow, back to berserkers. And can you just imagine the horror that their enemies whoever is fighting against them would feel when you see hordes of berserkers charging towards you, wearing bear skins or naked, foaming in the mouth, frothing in the mouth and looking like rabid animals.

Yeah. And you say about fighting naked, that was not that unheard of. So for example, when the Romans invaded Britain, the ancient Britons would also fight naked.

Why didn't they use shields?

They did use shields, but they didn't wear anything else. And they would actually spend a long time trying to make their hair look scary. They would probably cover themselves in blue paint.

Okay, I can see... So the nakedness, I guess, in that sense is more like they want to show that they're wild, the wilderness of all.

Exactly.

But nowadays we just use apart from use berserk or berserker in games, cartoons and stories to mean these ancient Viking Warriors, in everyday life, we just say someone goes berserk, which means they go crazy and violent.

Yeah. It means they go completely crazy. They're out of control.

For example, after hearing that he lied to me, I went berserk, I just went crazily angry.

You just lose control completely.

By the way 安瀾, have you ever... I mean you're very mild tempered. Have you ever gone berserk?

Once or twice, I've really lost my temper, but whether or not I would want to take off all of my clothes and start like attacking people, probably not.

Stay away from drugs.

Yeah.

I mean going berserk I think I experienced that from time to time.

Okay. When was the last time you experienced that?

I think you know... I went berserk when we were having a fight.

Possibly.

But then again, just so you know guys I wasn't running around naked or wearing bear skins or on drugs.

And neither was I.

I went berserk all by myself.

All right. So Do you ever go berserk? What kind of things would make you go berserk potentially? Leave us a comment in the comment section and I can't wait for us to get into another one of these episodes where we explore another word.

You can also put in request the words and phrases you want us to talk about in the segment, and thank you, 安瀾for being on the show.

So until next time,

we'll see you next time.

Bye

Bye.