A short history of English words 7 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1030.

. Skunk — an early Americanism (17th century)

In 1585, Thomas Hariot travelled with Sir Walter Raleigh in his attempt to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia. When he returned to England, he wrote A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia , in which he gives a great deal of information about the place and the people. He identifies ‘two kinds of small beasts greater than conies [rabbits] which are very good meat', naming them saquenúckot and maquówoc .

People have puzzled over which animals these must have been. Were they raccoons, opossums, muskrats… or even skunks? The first clear use of the name skunk doesn't turn up until 1634, in another account of early America. The Oxford English Dictionary derives it from a different Indian language from the one spoken in Roanoke. But saquenúckot certainly looks as if it might be the origin of skunk .

Skunk is an early Americanism. It was one of dozens of words that were borrowed from the Algonquian languages in the early 1600s. Many of them didn't last. Nobody today (except possibly in some dialects) talks about a sagamore (‘chief') or a pocosin (‘swamp'). But several words did survive, such as caribou , moccasin , moose , opossum , persimmon , powwow , tomahawk , totem and wigwam . Today there are hundreds of words that distinguish American from British English (§58).

It's sometimes difficult to recognise Indian words in early writings. The indigenous languages were very different from anything Europeans had encountered before, and they had no idea how to spell the words they heard. Captain John Smith arrived in Virginia in 1606 and explored the new territory at length, writing an account of the meetings between the colonists and the local tribes. He's best known for the famous story of his escape from execution by the Indian chief Powhatan through the intervention of Powhatan's daughter, Pocahontas. He sent an account of the colony back to England, where it was published in 1608.

His book contains many Amerindian place-names, and at one point — during a visit to the Powhatan Indians — a new noun:

Arriving at Weramocomoco, their Emperour proudly lying uppon a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelves Mattes, richly hung with Manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great Covering of Rahaughcums.

Rahaughcums ? A little later in his book he spells it Raugroughcuns . These are the first brave attempts to write down raccoons in English.

. Shibboleth — a word from King James (17th century)

The King James Bible, published in 1611, is often called the ‘Authorised Version' of the Bible because — as it says on its title-page — it was ‘appointed to be read in churches'. Earlier translations of the Bible, such as William Tyndale's (§37), had introduced many new words and idioms into English, but the King James Bible popularised them in a way that hadn't been possible before.

The team of translators didn't actually introduce many new words and phrases themselves. They say in their Preface that their job was not to make a new translation, but rather ‘to make a good one better'. They had no choice in the matter, actually, as they'd been given guidelines, approved by King James, which required them to use a previous edition (known as the Bishops' Bible) as their model. As a result, there are very few words and phrases which actually originate in the text of the King James Bible.

Only forty-three words are currently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as having a first recorded use there. They include several religion-specific expressions, such as Galilean (as a noun) and rose of Sharon , as well as a few general words, such as battering-ram, escaper and rosebud . Far more important are the idioms which the Bible popularised: there are over 250, such as salt of the earth, a thorn in the flesh, root and branch, out of the mouths of babes and how are the mighty fallen . Their significance in the shaping of English mustn't be forgotten. Idioms are part of vocabulary too.

Shibboleth is not among the forty-three, because this word had been used in all the earlier English translations. But there is nonetheless something distinctive about the way it appears in the King James Bible: its spelling. Shibboleth appears in the Old Testament Book of Judges. We are told how the regional accent of an unfortunate Ephraimite, who had fallen into the hands of the Gileadites, reveals his origins:

Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.

The spelling of the word varies in the earlier translations. In John Wycliffe's version, the Ephraimite seems to have more of a lisp, for he says Thebolech instead of Sebolech . Other versions have Schibboleth and Scibboleth . The Geneva Bible and the King James Bible both have Shibboleth , and it is this spelling which has prevailed.

But even biblical words and phrases don't stand still, and in later centuries shibboleth developed several new senses — a custom, a habit, a catchword, a moral formula, an imaginary error, an unfounded belief. There are lots of shibboleths in the study of language. Some people think it's wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (That's the man I spoke to ) or to split an infinitive (to boldly go ) or to pronounce H as ‘haitch', even though such forms are widely found in modern English. These are the kinds of issue, often called linguistic shibboleths , that have fuelled usage debates since the 18th century. They are debates in which emotions sometimes run high — though never, as far as I know, having an outcome like that of the biblical precedent.

. Bloody — an emerging swear-word (17th century)

On 11 April 1914, the Daily Sketch , a London tabloid newspaper, ran this headline:

TO-NIGHT'S ‘PYGMALION', IN WHICH MRS PATRICK CAMPBELL IS EXPECTED TO CAUSE THE GREATEST THEATRICAL SENSATION FOR YEARS.

What was all the fuss about? George Bernard Shaw had given Mrs Campbell, in the character of Eliza Doolittle, a dangerous line to say: ‘Not bloody likely.' Nobody had said such a swear-word on a public stage before. The paper went on:

Mr. Shaw Introduces a Forbidden Word.

WILL ‘MRS PAT' SPEAK IT?

She did. And the audience loved it. There was a gasp of surprise, then everyone roared with laughter.

It had taken bloody a thousand years to cause such a stir. It was first used by the Anglo-Saxons with such meanings as ‘bleeding' and ‘stained with blood', and it developed a range of related senses to do with slaughter and bloodshed. It's a point we have to watch when we listen to Shakespeare. When Macbeth tells us that his ‘bloody cousins' have fled from Scotland (Macbeth III.i.29), he isn't swearing but accusing them of a murderous stabbing.

The word began to be used in an emphatic way towards the end of the 17th century — meaning ‘very', but with an intensifying force. When Jonathan Swift, writing a letter to Stella in 1711, talks about the day being bloody hot , he means ‘very hot indeed'. There's no hint of any impropriety. The word seems to have been used in colloquial speech by all kinds of people at that time.

But during the 18th century the sensitive ears of the aristocratic and respectable classes turned against bloody , probably because of its associations with rowdiness and rough behaviour. Aristocratic rowdies were known as bloods , so to be bloody drunk was to be ‘drunk as a blood'. (We have the same association today, when we say ‘drunk as a lord'.) The historical association with blood and mayhem would have appealed to those for whom rough behaviour was a way of life, and this reinforced upper- and middle-class antipathy. By the middle of the 18th century it was definitely a ‘bad word'. Dr Johnson described it in his Dictionary of 1755 as ‘very vulgar'. That settled it.

People who wanted to be emphatic had to find socially more acceptable alternatives. Deuced , rattling and ripping became popular. Bleeding was used first by Cockneys in the 1850s, but — perhaps for that very reason — never acquired upper-class respectability. Blooming , used from the 1880s, was more successful. Ruddy , slightly less so. Dozens of words became fashionable, such as devilish, damned, jolly, awfully and terribly .

It was all a very British thing. Americans have never understood the British timidity towards using bloody , and Australians find it even more puzzling. In both Australia and the USA, the word is used as an intensifer, yet without the aura of rudeness which is part of its historical baggage in the UK.

Usage in Britain is slowly adapting to the world scene — though very slowly. Bloody is no longer printed as b----y , and it isn't one of the words relegated to late-night television viewing. But the sensitivity is still there. In 2006 a television ad for Tourism Australia included the sentence ‘So where the bloody hell are you?' This was too much for the regulators at the British Advertising Clearance Centre, who cut it out, and restored it (for late-evening viewing) only after a huge row. So I'm not expecting to hear a BBC weather forecaster say in the foreseeable future: ‘It's been bloody hot today…'

. Lakh — a word from India (17th century)

Here are two recent newspaper headlines from India.

Nearly 5 lakh foreigners throng India for cheap treatment

Rs 50-lakh divorce for runaway wife

Lakh . A Hindi word meaning 100,000. So, 5 lakh is half a million. 50 lakh (Rs = rupees) is 5 million. It's one of the words you need to know. The figures get bigger when you turn to the business pages. There you find people talking about crores as well. A crore is 10 million.

These words arrived in English in the early 1600s. Already several Indian words had entered the language from earlier contacts. A godown is a place where goods are stored — a warehouse. It's recorded in a voyager's report of 1588. It comes from a Malay word, godong , and probably took its English form because people heard it as ‘go down' — the storehouses were often in cellars.

Once the British East India Company was established (in 1600), travel to and from the region greatly increased. It wasn't long before the local languages began to provide English with new words, and several eventually lost their cultural associations with India. From the north of the Indian subcontinent, where Indo-European languages such as Hindi were spoken, we find such 17th-century words as bungalow, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, punch (the drink) and pundit . Examples from the south, where Dravidian languages such as Tamil were spoken, were atoll, catamaran, cheroot, pariah, teak and curry . In the Far East, Tibetan, Malay, Chinese, Japanese and other languages all began to supply new words, such as ginseng, bamboo, ketchup, kimono, junk (the ship) and chaa — this last one not immediately recognisable in that form, but the origin of tea (and, of course, colloquial char ).

The various routes to India also brought English into renewed contact with languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Quite a few Arabic words, for example, had come into Middle English, especially introducing scientific notions such as alchemy and almanac , but in the 16th and 17th centuries there is a significant expansion. In many cases, the Arabic words entered English through another language: assassin , for example, is ultimately from Arabic hash-shashin (‘hashish-eaters'), but came to English via Italian assassino .

The new words reflect local life and customs. Arabic loans include fakir, harem, jar, magazine, sherbet, minaret, alcove and sofa . From Turkish we find vizier, horde, kiosk, coffee and yoghurt . From Persian, bazaar, caravan, divan, shah and turban . From Hebrew, sanhedrin, shekel, shibboleth, torah and hallelujah .

Today, the regional English vocabulary of a country like India is extensive indeed, and continues to develop. The 20th century has seen a host of food words such as tandoori , samosa and pakora . Among the colloquial words to arrive have been cushy , doolally and loot (‘money'). A new lease of computational life has been given to avatar . And in Indian newspapers of the 2000s we will find such local forms as speed-money (‘bribe'), timepass (‘way of passing the time'), timewaste (‘time-wasting') and petrol bunk (‘petrol station'), as well as new uses of older forms, such as hi-fi (‘fancy', as in hi-fi clothes ). Even the basic vocabulary of the language can be affected, such as kinship terms. Who is your co-brother ? The man who married your wife's sister. And your cousin-sister ? Your female first cousin.

. Fopdoodle — a lost word (17th century)

People started to use the word fopdoodle in the 17th century. It was a combination of fop and doodle , two words very similar in meaning. A fop was a fool. A doodle was a simpleton. So a fopdoodle was a fool twice over. Country bumpkins would be called fopdoodles. But so could the fashionable set, because fop had also developed the meaning of ‘vain dandy'. Dr Johnson didn't like them at all. In his Dictionary he defines fopdoodle as ‘a fool, an insignificant wretch'.

Fopdoodle is one of those words that people regret are lost when they hear about them. There are several delightful items in Johnson's Dictionary which we no longer use. He tells us that nappiness was ‘the quality of having a nap'. A bedswerver was ‘one that is false to the bed'. A smellfeast was ‘a parasite, one who haunts good tables'. A worldling was ‘a mortal set upon profits'. A curtain-lecture was ‘a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed'.

Every generation gives us new words which eventually disappear. I once did a study of words that were being fêted as ‘new' in the 1960s. Over half of them have gone out of everyday use now. Do you recall Rachmanism, Powellism, peaceniks, dancercise, frugs and flower people ? All frequent in the 1960s. Historical memories today.

It's always been like this. But dictionaries are notoriously reluctant to leave words out — for the obvious reason that it's very difficult to say when a word actually goes out of use. You can spot a new word easily; but how do you know that an old word has finally died? Did grody (slang ‘nasty, dirty') die out in the 1970s, or is it still being used in the back streets of Boston?

On the whole, dictionaries keep words in, either until constraints of space force some pruning, or a new editorial broom looks at the word-list afresh and says ‘Enough is enough'. That's presumably what happened in 2008, when the editors of the Collins dictionary decided that some words are so rare these days that nobody would ever want to look them up. They blamed pressure on space in the dictionary: with 2,000 new words to include, several old words would, regrettably, have to go. They included abstergent (‘cleansing or scouring'), compossible (‘possible in coexistence with something else'), fatidical (‘prophetic'), fubsy (‘short and stout'), niddering (‘cowardly') and skirr (‘a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight').

^{9. A group of US scholars offer a toast to Samuel Johnson, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of his Dictionary in 1955. A Johnson Society was founded in 1910, based in his home town of Lichfield, where the Birthplace Museum has a permanent exhibition of his life and times.}

The Times was having none of this. In its issue of 22 September 2008 it launched a campaign: ‘How you can help to save some cherished words from oblivion.' People could vote to save the words they fancied. Collins, which is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times , agreed that words would be granted a reprieve if evidence of their popularity emerged.

It was a curious headline, if you think about it, for if these words were being genuinely cherished, why should they be in this list at all? Nevertheless, there was quite a reaction. Andrew Motion went on record as supporting skirr . Stephen Fry was all for saving fubsy . Indeed, a ‘save fubsy' online petition group was set up.

Just because words are left out of a dictionary of standard English doesn't mean that they have disappeared from the language, of course. Some of the words remain alive and well in regional dialects. I know niddering and skirr are still used in parts of Scotland and the north of England, and fubsy (along with fub , ‘stout') is mentioned in several dialect books.

It's a daring decision, to leave a word out, because you can never predict the future with language. A word or phrase can be obsolescent, then suddenly have its fortunes reversed by being used by some celebrity. Or attitudes change towards a word, so that one generation loves it and the next hates it and the next loves it again. But whatever has happened to words in the past, the future is going to be very different. The internet is changing everything, because in an electronic world dictionaries can be of unlimited size, pages are time-stamped and nothing disappears (§83). The internet is already the largest corpus of attested historical language data we have ever known. In that dictionary words never die. Even fopdoodle , attracting a lowly 8,000 hits on Google in 2011, will live on. If words could talk, they would say they had finally achieved what they always wanted: immortality.

. Billion — a confusing ambiguity (17th century)

As scientists extended the boundaries of knowledge, so they needed larger numerals to talk about what they found. A million, known since the Middle Ages, wasn't enough. They needed billions, trillions and more. Popular usage followed suit. People were already saying things like a million to one and one in a million in the 17th century. Then inflation set in. One in a billion sounded much more impressive.

But what did billion mean, exactly? The English thought of the six zeros in a million (1,000,000) as being a functional unit, so the next value up was going to be twice six zeros (1,000,000,000,000). Billion in Britain thus meant ‘a million millions' — a ‘long-scale system', as it later came to be called. But French mathematicians later went in a different direction. They thought of 1,000,000 as two groups of three zeros, so for them the next unit up was three groups of three zeros — that is, 1,000,000,000. In France, billion thus meant ‘a thousand million' — a ‘short-scale system'.

The history of usage is complicated and varies enormously from country to country. Britain stayed with the long-scale system, but in the 19th century the USA adopted the short-scale system. For over a century, American English dictionaries recommended ‘thousand million' and British dictionaries ‘million million'. Then, in 1974, Britain capitulated. The prime minister of the time, Harold Wilson, made a statement to the House of Commons:

The word ‘billion' is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other sense.

However, usage doesn't take kindly to government statements. Although officially a billion is now a thousand million in the UK, people are still aware of the older use, and uncertainty is common. So whenever I use billion , I gloss it. If I say that ‘English is spoken by 2 billion people', I immediately add, ‘2 thousand million', to be on the safe side.

It's the normal state of affairs in a language for everyday words to have more than one sense. We only have to look in a dictionary to see that. There's usually no ambiguity, because when we use the words in sentences we see which sense is involved. On its own, bed is ambiguous: it could mean (for example) a place where we sleep or a place where we plant flowers. But we have no problem interpreting I stayed in bed until ten or Look at that lovely bed of roses .

It's unusual to find a scientific term developing an ambiguity of the kind displayed by billion . Normally, when scientists create terms, they're accepted by the whole scientific community. There are standard definitions of such words as hydrogen , atom and pterodactyl , and we don't expect to find differences between American and British usage. But here's a mathematical term which is not only ambiguous but where the ambiguity doesn't disappear when we put it in a sentence. When we read, ‘The disaster has lost the company a billion pounds', we can't tell how much has been lost. Billion reminds us of the ever-present dangers of ambiguity in the history of the language.

Of course, for most of us, the difference isn't important. It's simply ‘a lot'. And the language has come to reflect this ‘couldn't care less' attitude. The -illion ending is now used to express very large but indefinite amounts. In the mid-20th century we find zillion and bazillion , later gazillion and kazillion . People with really huge amounts of money were zillionaires . The Record , a New Jersey newspaper, took the coinages to new heights when it talked about an economic crisis in 1990:

The savings-and-loan industry bailout, which as of yesterday was expected to cost taxpayers $752.6 trillion skillion, is now expected to cost $964.3 hillion jillion bazillion, not including the Christmas party.

Doubtless these words got a new lease of life during the banking crisis twenty years later.

. Yogurt — a choice of spelling (17th century)

How do you spell yogurt ? When the word arrived in English from Turkish in the early 17th century, people made several stabs at it. The first recorded usage is yoghurd . Then we get yogourt . Then yahourt, yaghourt, yogurd, yoghourt, yooghort, yughard, yughurt and yohourth . In the 19th century, there was a trend to simplify, and yogurt emerged as the front runner. It still is. In 2011 it was getting some 14 million hits on Google, with yoghurt 8 million and everything else a long way behind.

Preferences vary somewhat between countries, however. Yogurt is the norm in the USA. In the UK, both are used, but yoghurt is three times more common than yogurt . Yogourt has achieved some presence in Canada, because of its French-looking character, but even there yogurt is more widespread. In Australia and New Zealand, yoghurt is commoner than yogurt , but yogurt is catching up, probably because of exposure to American and internet usage. Yogurt is catching up in the UK too. You have to be careful where you look, when you consult a dictionary. Some give yogurt as the headword, which places it after yogi and yogic . Others give yoghurt as the head-word, which places it before.

Yogurt is not the only word that turns up at different places in a dictionary depending on how it's spelled. The differences between British and American spelling can lead to very different locations. Depending on the dictionary you use, you'll look under either MO- or MU- for moustache/mustache , under PY- or PA-for pyjamas/pajamas and under FO- or FE- for foetus/fetus . The problem is especially noticeable when the first letters of a word are affected. At least aeroplane and airplane keep you in letter A, and tyre and tire in T. But we have to make some big jumps with oestrogen and estrogen , aesthetics and esthetics and kerb and curb . A good dictionary will always anticipate the problem and include a cross-reference to get you from one place to the other.

Probably the commercial use of the word will condition the ultimate success of one yogurt spelling over the others. If you explore the yogurt-making world, you'll encounter a whole family of derived forms. There are compound words such as yogurt machine, yogurt maker and yogurt freezer . Adjectives such as yogurt-like, yogurtish and yogurty . And brave new worlds too, it seems, judging by the name of an American international chain of frozen yogurt stores — Yogurtland .

. Gazette — a taste of journalese (17th century)

The year 1665 is known for the Great Plague. Charles II moved his court out of London to Oxford. But how would the court keep in touch with the news? Publisher Henry Muddiman was authorised to produce what is often called ‘the first English newspaper', the Oxford Gazette . When the danger was over, and the court moved back to London, the paper changed its name, becoming the London Gazette in February 1666.

The word gazette had come over from the continent, where it was used to describe a popular — though by all accounts not very reliable — news-sheet. One commentator described gazettes as including ‘idle intelligences and flim flam tales' — frivolous nonsense. Perhaps for that reason, it was soon displaced in everyday usage by the word newspaper , whose first recorded use is in 1667, written as two words: news paper . However, gazette remained as the name of various official journals. If you were gazetted , you were the subject of an official announcement. And the journalists who wrote for them were called gazetteers .

^{10. The front page of The Oxford Gazette, published in Oxford in November 1665.}

The early newspapers looked very different from those of today. Notably, they had no banner headlines running across the page. A news item in the Oxford Gazette began simply with its place of origin and the date, such as Paris, Nov 18 . Banner headlines didn't become a feature of the daily press until the end of the 19th century.

Once they did, there was an immediate effect on language. The headline had to catch the eye and capture interest. With a very limited amount of space available, short words became privileged, and a new lexical style quickly evolved. We see it mainly in the tabloid press, but all newspapers are to some extent influenced by the need to keep headlines short and snappy.

So we are less likely to see headlines in which people abolish, forbid, reduce, swindle and resign . Rather, they will axe, ban, cut, con and quit (or simply go ). We will rarely read of a division of opinion , an encouraging sign , an argument or an agreement . Instead, it will be a rift, boost, row or deal . And many short words are doubly appealing because they carry an extra emotional charge: fury, clash, slam, soar …

All this is a long way from the cultivated and elaborate language of the Oxford Gazette , reporting events in the Anglo-Dutch War:

Not knowing what account the Publick has hitherto received of the progress of the prince of Munster's Arms, we have thought it not improper without further repetition, to give an account of such places as he at present stands possest of in the enemies Country…

The writer goes on to list the various forts and ships that the prince had captured. How might a modern newspaper deal with such a situation? If past tabloid performance is anything to go by, it might even be a single word. Few headlines have stayed in the popular memory longer than the one that appeared in The Sun for 4 May 1982, reporting the attack on the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War: GOTCHA (§88).

. Tea — a social word (17th century)