In “Great Expectations”, the main character, Pip, has an older sister who’s not the nicest person. At one point she calls Pip “young Rantipole.” This wasn’t a very kind description, because a “rantipole” is a person who’s “wild, disorderly, reckless, or badly behaved.”
The word “rantipole” has been around since the mid-1600s, and nobody is quite sure where it came from. The best guess anybody seems to have is that it’s a compound word made from “rant” and “poll.” English borrowed “rant” from Dutch around 1600; in both Dutch and English it means to talk foolishly or rave. “Poll” might also come from Dutch, but several centuries earlier. It originally meant the top of your head, and as time went on it was generalized to mean about anything that referred to the head of a person or even an animal. Quotations from the 1300s are in Middle English and not all that easy (for me) to decipher, but 1603 Shakespeare used it in Hamlet: “His beard as white as snowe: All flaxen was his pole.”
“Poll” is still in use that way, occasionally. even though it’s considered obsolete. In 1989 Thomas Tryon included it in his book “Night of the Moonbow”: “His chunky features, furrowed brow, and poll of kinky black hair.”
“Poll,” since it means “head”, turned out to be pretty useful for formulating compound words that describe somebody, especially if your intention is not to compliment them. A “clodpoll” was a dope or blockhead, and Shakespeare used this one as well: “This Letter being so excellently ignorant..he will finde it comes from a Clodde-pole.” (Twelfth Night). A “doddypoll” is the same thing; a stupid person. Shakespeare avoided this construction, but it appears in “Against Ierome Osorius Byshopp of Siluane” by Haddon and Foxe (1581): “No man..besides this Doctour Dottipoll.”
Closely allied with “doddypoll” is “noddypoll”, which was yet another way to call someone a simpleton in the 1500s. “There is none that your name woll abbrogate Then nodypollys and gramatolys of smalle intellygens” is how John Skelton put it in “The Poetical Works” in 1529.
Possibly related to all of these “poll” compound words might be “frampold”, which is from the same era, and is also now obsolete. “Frampold” means being bad-tempered. Shakespeare used this one in his 1616 “Merry Wives of Windsor”: “She leads a very frampold life with him.” On the other hand, “frampold” might instead be derived from the older words “fromward” and “froward.” “Froward” means perverse, the sort of person who, if you ask them to turn left, will deliberately turn right. “Fromward” means about to leave — that is, you’ve turned in a different direction and you’re about to be “from” where you are at the moment. It’s an odd word, but just the sort of thing people might like to say a couple of thousand years ago when they used Old English, which is where “fromward”…er…came from. Maybe at the time people could tell that “fromward” was already fromward.
It makes more sense if you think of “fromward” as the opposite of “toward” (and you notice that “toward” might have originally been a compound word too). Like “fromward,” “toward” comes from Old English. The words were opposites in another way as well — in some English dialects “toward” meant left and “fromward” meant right. John Morton’s 1855 “Cyclopedia of Agriculture, Practical and Scientific” made this very clear: “land is ploughed ‘framwards’ when the horses are turning to the right.” Possibly only a rantipole farmer would plow his fields any other way.
