A short history of English words 5 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 934.

It's this magical sense that leads to glamour . In the 18th century in Scotland, people took up the word grammar , meaning ‘an enchantment' or ‘a spell', but they changed the pronunciation. Devils and wizards were said to cast the glamour over the eyes of onlookers. From here it was a short step to the meaning of an alluring charm surrounding someone or something. And in the 20th century, we see the word arriving at its present-day sense of ‘charm' and ‘attractiveness'. In the 1930s, people talked about glamour boys — a phrase given popular appeal when it was used to describe the handsome young airmen of the wartime RAF. Eventually the adjective came to be used chiefly for women, especially after the movies popularised the phrase glamour girls , and the pin-up photograph became widespread.

The word took an unexpected direction in the 1950s, when it began to be used as a euphemism for nude or topless modelling. If you were offered glamour photographs , you wouldn't expect to see much clothing. Girls, such as those gracing page 3 in The Sun newspaper, were described as glamour models , and the agencies and events promoting them were said to be on the glamour circuit . The term is still widely used in this way.

The unexpected link between grammar and glamour illustrates a general point about the history of words. Often, a source word develops meanings that are so different from each other that we don't suspect they have a common origin. Who would ever guess that there's a common origin for salary , sausage, sauce and salad ? And who would ever have predicted that grammar would one day give birth to such a flamboyant and publicity-seeking child as glamour ? Grammar hasn't yet achieved such a vivid popular presence — but I live in hope.

. Valentine — first name into word (14th century)

On 14 February each year, in many countries, people send valentines as love tokens — usually a card, flowers or a small gift. Often it's a chance for one person to express secret admiration for another. People sometimes spend ages deciding what to send and whether they ought to send it. But they probably don't spend a moment reflecting on the linguistic character of what it is they're sending.

Valentine is an example of a first name being used as a common noun. The practice is surprisingly common, though many of the uses are specialised or slang. Certain kinds of apples, pears, daisies, magpies and fish have all at some time or other been called Margaret . Certain kinds of flags (Blue Peter ) and card tricks (in whist or bridge) have been called Peter — as have cash registers, prison cells and penises.

Sometimes the name becomes part of a generally used idiom. People talk about a Jack of all trades , simple Simon , a proper Charlie , taking the Mickey and every Tom, Dick or Harry . In Australian English, Sheila is used colloquially for a young woman and John for a policeman (from French gendarme — ‘johndarm'). John can be a lavatory in American English. Literature provides examples too, such as a Sherlock for a detective or a Lolita for a sexually precocious young girl. And the Bible has given us an Adam for a gardener, a Samson for a strong man and a Solomon for a wise man. Named disasters can travel too: ‘We don't want to see another (hurricane) Katrina.'

In many of these cases, we have no idea who the source person was. Charlie may well have been Charlie Chaplin, but who was the original Jack or Sheila? Nobody knows. And Valentine presents a puzzle too. The feast day of 14 February commemorates two early Christian martyrs from Italy, both named Valentine. But neither of them seems to have had any obvious link with romantic love. The amorous associations first come to the fore in Geoffrey Chaucer's poem ‘The Parliament of Fowls', written in the early 1380s, telling the story of Nature convening an assembly where the birds choose their mates.

Humans evidently rather liked the idea, because quite soon we find a variety of activities associated with the day. A common practice was a valentine lottery: names would be written on folded pieces of paper and placed in a pot, and the pairings which were drawn out would motivate a special relationship for the coming year. As a result, the papers themselves came to be called valentines , and this led to the practice of sending paper valentines and then valentine cards. In the 19th century it became big business, with manufacturers producing highly ornate creations, adorned with lace and ribbons. Children would go from house to house on the day, asking for small gifts. The practice was called valentining .

But we can never predict the course of language change, and eventually senses of valentine developed where the romantic associations of the word were left far behind. In the 16th century, a sealed letter from the Crown to landholders demanding the arrest of lawbreakers came to be called a valentine . And in the Second World War the name was given to a 16-ton heavy infantry tank. Why? Its production was apparently given the go-ahead on 14 February 1938.

. Egg — a dialect choice (14th century)

One of the most famous words in the history of English language studies is eggs . It's all because of William Caxton, who introduced printing to England in 1476.

Caxton was faced with a real problem. For hundreds of years, English had been written down by scribes from different parts of the country with different kinds of training. There was a huge variation in the way words were spelled. A word like might appears in manuscripts in over thirty different spellings — micht , mycht , myght , mihte and so on. Caxton had to make a choice. Which one was most likely to be most widely understood?

It wasn't just spelling that posed a problem. People from different parts of the country used different words for the same thing — dialect variations. And this is where eggs comes in. In the prologue to one of the books Caxton printed, he tells a story he had heard about a shipful of sailors who were becalmed in the Thames estuary, and who decided to make a shore visit while they waited for the wind to pick up. One of them went into a café (as we'd call it today) and asked for some ‘eggs', but the lady who ran the establishment didn't understand what he wanted, and replied that she couldn't speak French. This made the sailor angry, because he couldn't speak French either! He just wanted ‘eggs'. Then someone else told the lady that what the sailor actually wanted was ‘eyren'. She understood that, so the sailor got his eggs.

This story sums up Caxton's confusion. ‘Lo!', he says, ‘what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?' And he goes on: ‘It's hard to please every man because of diversity and change in language.' He would have to choose one or other of these words, if he were printing a text about eggs, and which one should he go for? He was a businessman, not a linguist, and he was — understandably — confused.

Why were there two words? Eggs was a word used chiefly in the north of England at the time. It was an Old Norse word, presumably brought to England by the Viking invaders a few hundred years earlier, though it doesn't appear in writing until the 14th century. Eyren was used in the south of England — a development of the word that the Anglo-Saxons had used. Eventually, as we now know, eyren died out and eggs became the word in everyday use.

We don't know whether the café owner was serious, or whether she was having a joke at the expense of the hungry sailor. But the tale does illustrate well the way people were beginning to feel the need for a kind of English that would be understood throughout the country. In the egg story we see one of the origins of present-day standard English.

. Royal — word triplets (14th century)

Monarchs couldn't have been regal or royal in Anglo-Saxon times. They could only have been king-like or queen-like . But during the 14th century, as part of the huge influx of vocabulary into English from French and Latin, regal and royal arrived, and along with kingly /queenly made up a cluster of words that have, rather sweetly, been called triplets .

Why did English speakers welcome these new words? All three basically mean ‘king/queen-like', after all. Why have three words when one might do? The answer reveals something of the character of the language, for this triplet is not alone. We see the same sort of development taking place repeatedly, such as with Germanic ask , French question and Latin interrogate ; Germanic fire , French flame and Latin conflagration ; and Germanic holy , French sacred and Latin consecrated . As the examples build up, we can begin to see a pattern. The Germanic words are short and feel down-to-earth; the Latin words are long and scholarly; and the French words have a different set of associations.

It's sometimes said that we know a word by the company it keeps. From the very beginning, regal and royal went in different directions. Regal went conceptual, used with such ‘authority' words as throne , government and power , as well as ‘appearance' words such as demeanour , figure and look . Royal went personal, used with ‘ancestry' words such as blood , birth and family , as well as ‘position' words such as princess , majesty and highness . Learnèd Latin offered an alternative mode of expression to courtly French, and both were more stately, refined and cultured than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.

These trends are still apparent today. Regal has had relatively little development over the centuries. It still typically adds connotations of superiority or distinction. Anything regal , by implication, is ‘fit for royalty' — hence its application to such things as cars (Buick Regal ), whisky (Chivas Regal ), buildings (Regal Cinema ) and the visit from an especially magisterial great-aunt.

By contrast, royal has accumulated a huge range of uses. It's used in relation to the activities and words of royal people (royal charter , visit , assent , command , warrant and not forgetting the royal we — ‘We are not amused') as well as social groups (Royal Navy , Borough , Society ) and a host of person-related activities such as transport (Royal Scot ), colours (royal blue ) and cards (royal flush ).

The words don't substitute for each other. The Royal Mail could not become the Regal Mail or the Queenly Mail . Nor is it possible, except in jest, to talk about the Regal Shakespeare Company or the Kingly Albert Hall . Kingly and queenly seem to be dying out, in fact, with only a few hundred thousand hits on Google, whereas regal has 20 million and royal 200 million.

But we can never predict the future, when it comes to vocabulary. Who would ever have thought, in the Middle Ages, that royal would one day be used as a colloquial intensifier, similar to bloody ? But it happened in the 19th century, and the usage is still with us. I recently heard someone say He's a royal pain in the neck . And the defeat of a local football enemy was summed up in the regal words: They got a right royal hammering .

. Money — a productive idiom (14th century)

Vocabulary isn't just a matter of single words. It includes thousands of idioms — strings of words which have taken on a special meaning. We talk about doing something at the drop of a hat (‘immediately'), getting cold feet (‘becoming afraid') and having a heart of gold (‘a generous nature'). Some words are very frequently used in idioms. Money is one of them — a popular idiomatic source since the word arrived from French in the 14th century.

You can give someone a run for their money , see the colour of their money , get your money's worth , have money to burn and spend money like water . Maybe you won't do something for love nor money , perhaps because you're not made of money . Or maybe you will, because it's money for old rope , money for jam . If you've got some, then money is no object and it might burn a hole in your pocket . You can put your money where your mouth is . Money talks , after all. And if you're feeling proverbial, you can observe that money is the root of all evil , doesn't grow on trees and makes the world go round . Even nonstandard grammar can survive in standard English as an idiom. You pays your money and you takes your choice .

It's not just the general word that attracts idioms. The individual coins and banknotes do too, reflecting the currency of the culture. So in American English people feel like a million dollars , make a fast buck , bet their bottom dollar and put their two cents worth into a conversation. Some, such as pass the buck , have become part of colloquial standard English everywhere. In other cases, the idiom is translated: in British English, we're more likely to see feel like a million quid and put in their two pence worth .

If there's a change in the currency system, or in the value of money, it quickly affects the language (§86). Penny and pence have been really popular over the centuries, but many of these idiomatic expressions reflect an age when things cost a penny. In old publications we'll find such expressions as penny dreadful, penny bun, penny bank, penny arcade, penny whistle and penny novelette . Some live on. Many people still say that cheap things are ten a penny , observe that something expensive is a pretty penny and offer others a penny for your thoughts . And, even in an age of new technology, people still say the penny dropped , from the 1930s, when people put a penny in a slot machine. Older people still use the euphemism about going to spend a penny , though the days when a public lavatory had a penny slot are long gone. Today it costs at least 20p, and more in some places. Maybe one day British English will get a new idiom: I have to spend a pound .

^{7. The 19th-century Yorkshire Penny Bank building in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. The idea behind the name was that savings could be deposited as small as a penny — a practice that the larger banks did not condone.}

. Music — a spelling in evolution (14th century)

How many possible ways are there to spell music ? Today, just one. But over the history of English we see this word spelled in over forty ways. The word arrived from French in the 14th century, and early spellings reflected its origins. We find the French q in such forms as musiqe, musyque and musique . An English k makes its appearance in musyk, musik and musike . A few writers opted for c , producing musice and music .

The uncertainty led to some strange combinations. In the 15th century we find musycque, mewsycke, musick, musicke and others. And in the 16th century some writers, evidently totally at a loss, decided to cover themselves by using all three consonants: musickque . The vowels too were variable, especially when people pronounced the word in different ways. We find moosick , mwsick , maisick, masic, meesic and misic .

When Dr Johnson published his Dictionary , in 1755, most of these variations had disappeared, but the modern spelling had not yet arrived. Johnson had strong views about spelling, and was of the opinion that ‘The English never use c at the end of a word'. So in his dictionary we find musick , as well as comick, critick, physick, publickly and many others. But this is one of those occasions where Dr Johnson's authority wasn't enough. In the USA, Noah Webster and other dictionary writers began dropping the final k as part of the changes being introduced into American English. The change evidently had universal appeal, for within a few decades the final k had been dropped from these words in British English too.

There is still a great deal of variation in the spelling of English words. Some of it is due to the differences between British and American English, such as colour and color or litre and liter . Some is due to different printing traditions, such as judgment and judgement or organise and organize . There is still a great deal of variation over whether to insert a hyphen or not in such words as washing machine and flower pot . And the situation remains fluid, with American spellings increasingly influencing British ones. Words such as encyclopaedia , paediatrics and archaeology are often now seen as encyclopedia , pediatrics and archeology on both sides of the Atlantic, and around the Pacific too. And probably we ain't seen nothin' yet. The internet is likely to eliminate some of the irregular spellings that have crept into English over the centuries.

When rhubarb came into English in the 14th century, it had no h : it had such spellings as rubarb and rewbarb . The h was added much later by writers who wanted to show the classical origins of the word. Today, people are voting with their fingers. Type rubarb into Google and you will get 80,000 hits (in 2011). And in fifty years' time? Maybe rhubarb by then will seem as archaic as Ye Olde Tea Shoppe does now.

. Taffeta — an early trade word (14th century)

On 14 July 1724 a fleet of cargo ships arrived in England after the long journey from the East Indies, carrying goods on behalf of the United Company of Merchants. The cargo lists showed 1846 addaties , 1279 alliballies and 1997 baftaes , and the rest of the cargo included various numbers of carridarries, chillaes, cushtaes, doofooties, emerties, ginghams, lacowries, nillaes, romals and taffeties .

How many of these words do you know? Most people recognise ginghams , and might be able to identify some of the others if they really know the history of fabrics. But for most of us, the terms have no reality other than to provide ammunition for word-guessing games such as Fictionary or Call My Bluff . In fact they are all types of cotton, linen or silk, with names reflecting local Indian usage, or sometimes the town of origin (as with cushtaes , from Kushtia in Bangladesh). A few names refer to types of product, such as romals , which were silk or cotton squares or handkerchiefs.

We tend to underestimate the importance of words like these in the history of English vocabulary because they are so specialised. Few of them ever get into general dictionaries. But, for a language like English, in a country like Britain, tens of thousands of words have entered the language as a result of global trade. Many of them, such as calico, chintz and khaki , retain a distinctive spelling reflecting their exotic origins.

Taffeta is first recorded in 1373. It appears in the list above as taffetie — one of many recorded spellings of the word before it settled down in its modern form. Its meaning has varied over the centuries, referring to various kinds of fabric, but its primary application has been to silk of a rich and lustrous quality. This led to taffeta being extended to non-fabric situations. Anything ornate or florid might be described in this way. Shakespeare has one of his characters, Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost (V.ii.406), say how he will never woo a lady in artificial ‘silken terms'. He calls them ‘taffeta phrases'.

Taffeta is ultimately from Persian, a language we don't normally think of as a source for English vocabulary; but over the years, either directly or indirectly, it has supplied English with a surprising number of words (§48). You are entering an originally Persian linguistic world if you ever find yourself sitting on a divan in a caravan , wearing a scarlet or lilac shawl , eating couscous , having been checkmated by a rook in chess and watching ‘The Day of the Jackal '. The shawl would have to be taffeta, of course.

. Information(s) — (un)countable nouns (14th century)

It's one of the commonest errors heard when people are learning English as a foreign language. They say such things as ‘I want to buy some furnitures', ‘I'd like some advices' and ‘Do you have any informations about that?' Or they use the singular form, and talk about a furniture , an advice , an information .

Teachers know why such things happen. It's often interference from the student's mother tongue. In French, for example, information is used as a plural when it means ‘news', so French learners assume the same thing happens in English. Teachers sort it out by getting learners to say a piece of information , and suchlike. And they draw attention to the important distinction between nouns that are countable in English (such as eggs , chairs and elephants ) and those that aren't — uncountable nouns such as information .

However, we mustn't fall into the trap of thinking that words like these can never vary. In fact, when information arrived in English from French in the 14th century, it was also used as a countable noun, with the meaning of ‘a charge' or ‘accusation'. Someone might make informations about you. And in law, this countable usage remains today in various technical senses.

It was used as a countable noun in everyday English too, in the sense of ‘a piece of advice' or ‘a piece of news'. Chaucer talks about wise informations and teachings . Coverdale's Bible has informations and documents of wisdom . And usages such as reliable informations and latest informations can be found in print written by native speakers right up to the present day. At the same time as all this was going on, of course, information was developing its uncountable use, which is the most common use today in this information age .

The message is plain. Words can be countable or uncountable depending on the sense we have in mind when we use them. Before the 20th century, tea and coffee were uncountable, apart from in specialist settings where types of tea or coffee were being identified. But in recent times we have seen the development from ‘Would you like tea/coffee?' to ‘Would you like a cup of tea/coffee?' to ‘Would you like a tea/coffee?' and such usages as ‘Two teas/coffees, please'. We also say ‘I like tea/coffee' and ‘Would you like some tea/coffee'. These words have two uses today.

Many words switch in this way. We eat cake and a cake. We play piano and a piano . We hear noise and a noise . We turn on a light to let some light in. The process works the other way round too. Countable nouns can become uncountable. I can imagine a children's story about a family of moths discussing what they're going to have for lunch today. ‘I'm eating coat', says one. ‘I tried some coat yesterday, and it wasn't very nice', says another, ‘I prefer hat, personally'. Well, why not?

. Gaggle — a collective noun (15th century)

I think it went something like this. A group of monks, wondering how to pass the time on a cold, dark winter's evening in the 15th century, invent a word game. ‘Let's think up words for groups of things', says one. ‘What do we call a group of cows?' ‘A herd.' ‘A group of bees?' ‘A swarm.' ‘A group of geese?' ‘A flock.' Words like herd and swarm had been in the language since Anglo-Saxon times. There weren't many of them, and the few that were available had been used for all kinds of things. People talked about a herd of cranes, wrens, deer, swans, gnats and more. The game must have palled after a while.

Then someone had a bright idea. ‘Let's think up better words. What would be a really clever way of talking about geese?' ‘A cackle of geese, maybe?' ‘Not bad, but that better suits hens. What about gaggle ? It goes better with goose because of the g 's? What do you all think?' ‘Agreed? Write it down, Brother John.'

And Brother John did. Or maybe it was Dame Juliana. She was the prioress of Sopwell nunnery, near St Albans in Hertfordshire, and her name appears in a collection of material on hunting, heraldry and folklore that was printed in 1486, called The Book of St Albans . It's one of the first English printed books, and it contains a list of some 200 collective nouns. Several are traditional expressions, such as herd . But many seem to be inventions. This is where we find a muster of peacocks, an unkindness of ravens, a watch of nightingales, a charm of goldfinches and dozens more. But the list goes well beyond animals. We find a diligence of messengers, a superfluity of nuns, a doctrine of doctors, a sentence of judges, a prudence of vicars and a non-patience of wives . And people tried out fresh combinations. ‘A gaggle of geese?' ‘What about a gaggle of women?' ‘Write that down, Brother John.' He did. A gaggle of women is recorded in a book written around 1470. An early sexist joke.

Why do I think this is the sort of thing that happened? Because this is a game people still happily play today, and human nature hasn't changed that much in 500 years. A great deal of entertainment can be derived from thinking up the funniest way of describing a group of ‘X' — where X can be anything from dog handlers to dentists. What's the best collective noun for politicians, or undertakers, or linguists? Competitions have produced some fine examples. I made my own collection a few years ago, and found many that deserve prizes. Here's a top ten:

An absence of waiters

A rash of dermatologists

A shoulder of agony aunts

A clutch of car mechanics

A vat of chancellors

A bout of estimates

A lot of auctioneers

A mass of priests

A whored of prostitutes

A depression of weather forecasters

An exces's of apostrophes

And still they come. In recent times I've encountered a crash of software, an annoyance of mobile phones and a bond of British secret agents .

. Doable — a mixing of languages (15th century)

How many English words do you know? People tend to seriously underestimate the size of their personal vocabulary. They think that it's only a few thousand words. But if you were to take a dictionary and work your way through, ticking the words you know, you'd be pleasantly surprised. The total would be at least 50,000.

This figure seems less surprising when we reflect on how easy it is to make up new words. A single word can generate a whole family. Happy, happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily, unhappiness, happy-go-lucky, happy-hour, happy-dust, happy-hearted, happy-clappy, trigger-happy, slap-happy … The prefixes (such as un- ) and the suffixes (such as -ly and -ness ) are especially important in building up our vocabulary. There are just over a hundred of them in everyday English, and at least one will be found in nearly half the words in the language. Most of them came in from Latin and French during the Middle Ages. That's when we find a flood of new words beginning with such forms as con-, de-, dis and ex- , and ending with such forms as -ment, -tion, -ity and -able .

The French suffix -able alone produced hundreds of words. It was immediately used not only with French loanwords, such as agreeable and changeable , but also with Old English words to produce such forms as knowable and doable . Doable , first recorded in the mid-1400s, is a good choice to represent the class. Do is one of the earliest known English verbs, found in some of the first Anglo-Saxon texts, and here it is happily being used with a French suffix. It shows that word-coiners are no respecter of origins.