A short history of English words 12 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1136.

Some areas of vocabulary are more productive than others. I once went through a dictionary pulling out all the ways there are in English for saying ‘good' things about the world (such as wonderful, happily, a marvel ) and all the ways there are for saying ‘bad' things (such as awful, clumsily, a disaster ). I found 1,772 expressions of positive sentiment and 3,158 expressions of negative sentiment. It's almost twice as easy to be critical in English, it seems.

Everyday concerns attract the largest vocabularies, especially as slang. Drugs, sex and booze have each generated hundreds of expressions. And so has money, both for the general meaning and for specific units and amounts. The different currency systems of English-speaking countries have added to the diversity (§31). Even old terms can live on in idioms: people still say in Britain that someone is worth a few bob , even though bob for a shilling (‘12 old pence') disappeared decades ago. In Australian English we find buckaroo (‘a dollar coin'), brick (‘$10') and shrapnel (‘small change'). In Jamaica, a coil is a ‘roll of banknotes'. In Trinidad, a dog is a ‘$20 bill' — perhaps an echo of the days when people used dog dollars (‘dollar coins where an original lion design had been worn away into something resembling a dog').

Slang words for ‘money' vary greatly. Some go back hundreds of years. In Britain, brass , associated with the colour of gold coins, is found from the late 16th century. Ready (= ‘ready money') is recorded from the 17th, now heard only in the plural readies . Also from the 17th century is quid , originally referring to a sovereign or guinea. It probably comes from the Latin word for ‘what' (quid ), which transmuted into a jocular sense of ‘the wherewithal' at a time when Latin was widely known.

Cockney rhyming slang has given us several expressions. Bread is from bread and honey (= ‘money'). Five (‘£5') produces beehive ; a fiver is a lady (from Lady Godiva ). Ten (‘£10') gives us Big Ben as well as cock and hen . Eight (‘£8') is a garden , thanks to garden gate . Amounts and numerals sometimes appear as back-slang: dunop, evif, nevis, yennep . The rhyming practice crossed the sea. In Australia we find Oscar Asche (an Australian actor of the early 20th century) for cash , Oxford scholar for dollar and bugs bunny for money . In South Africa, ‘money' is sometimes called tom (from tomfoolery = ‘jewellery'). And new rhyming slang is still being coined. In the late 20th century, we find ayrton as a word for ‘£10', Why? Racing driver Ayrton Senna = tenner .

The USA has a huge range of slang expressions, some widely known thanks to their regular use in films and television, such as (for dollars) bucks and greenbacks , and (for money in general) dough , potatoes , lettuce and cabbage (the last two from the green colour of the banknotes). The origin of some of the words is a real puzzle. There has been plenty of speculation, but no firm conclusion, over moolah and spondulicks (both occurring in various spellings). And if I offer you fifty smackers , is this because people often kissed banknotes or plonked them down on the table? Mazooma is from Yiddish. So is motza (also in various spellings), used chiefly in Australia.

New words continue to arrive. The 20th century brought lolly (probably from lollipop ) and dosh (perhaps related to a doss , ‘a place to sleep in a common lodging-house'). A surprising development was archer for ‘£2,000'. It came from the court case involving British author Jeffrey Archer in which a bribe of this amount was alleged to have been used. It probably won't be part of the language for long.

The vast majority of these words stay in their country of origin. We don't find Americans describing dollars as quids or the British describing pounds as bucks. That's why grand is so interesting. It's one of the few money words to have travelled. First used in the USA in the early 1900s, meaning ‘$1,000', it was very quickly shortened to G . The term then transferred to British usage, meaning ‘£1,000'. British people happily talk about something costing a grand . But the digital age seems to have pushed G out of fashion. During the 1980s K , influenced chiefly by kilobyte , became the abbreviation of choice for ‘thousand' in business plans and job advertisements. No city gent seems to earn Gs any more.

. Mega — prefix into word (20th century)

Mega- became a popular prefix towards the end of the 19th century. Scientists found it a useful way of expressing something that was very large or abnormally large. So, a relatively large bacterium was called a megabacterium . As a unit of measurement, it expressed a millionfold increase, as in megawatt . And in the 20th century, from around the 1960s, it came to mean anything of great size or excellence. In the city, takeover bids involving large sums of money were megabids . Large shopping complexes were megacentres . An extremely successful song or film was a megahit . People attended megafestivals .

With all this mega- about, the stage was set for the prefix to become an independent word. And in the late 1960s, we find it being used to mean ‘huge' (Those are mega achievements ), ‘excellent' (That's a mega idea ) and ‘very successful' (She's mega in France ). It could even be a sentence on its own. A reaction to a brilliant stage performance might simply be an awed Mega!

Quite a few prefixes have started a life of their own as words. Garments and vehicles have been called midis , minis and maxis . If someone proposes a course of action, we can be pro or anti (or con ). We can weigh up the pros and cons . If you're an ex , you're a former something — usually a former husband or wife, though any previous office-holder or member of an organisation could in principle be called one.

The words can go in various directions. If we hold extreme views, especially in politics or religion, we might be called ultra , or labelled one of the ultras . But ultras are also people who have extreme tastes in fashion. And since the 1970s a long-distance run of great length, especially one that is much greater than a marathon, has been called an ultra .

Multi- is another prefix that has developed a wide range of meanings as an independent word. If we heard the sentence Multis are everywhere these days , the speaker could be referring to cinemas (multiplexes ), yachts (multihulls ), buildings (designed for several families — multi-family houses), fashions (multi-coloured ), very rich people (multimillionaire s), bridge players (making an opening bid of two diamonds — multi-purpose ), international businesses (multinationals ) or products that contain a range of vitamins (multivitamins ). This is really quite an exceptional range of senses, and all came to be used in the second half of the 20th century. Multi , in short, has become mega.

. Gotcha — a non-standard spelling (20th century)

When The Sun reported the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in 1982, the headline attracted almost as much attention as the event itself: GOTCHA. And a generation on, it is the headline that has stayed in the popular mind. It was the non-standard spelling that caught the public imagination. The effect disappears when we re-spell it as GOT YOU.

Not everybody liked it. Gotcha has playful connotations. We say it when somebody is caught out in an argument or discovered in a game of hide-and-seek. Yet this was a story about war, with lives being lost. Many thought non-standard usage wasn't an appropriate choice for such an event. But few headlines have had such staying power.

A surprising number of words appear in non-standard spelling in newspaper headlines, novels, advertisements, graffiti and other written genres. The Sun has many famous instances, such as its claim after the 1992 election, IT'S THE SUN WOT WON IT. Often it's a pun that motivates the spelling, such as the headline reporting cases of swine flu in Britain: PIGS 'ERE.

There comes a point when a non-standard spelling becomes so frequently used that it gets into the dictionaries as an ‘alternative' (§61). We'll find gotcha and gotcher in the Oxford English Dictionary , first recorded in 1932, as well as geddit? (‘get it?', 1976), ya (‘you', 1941), thanx (‘thanks', 1936), gotta (‘got to', 1924) and gonna (‘going to', 1913). In the 19th century we find luv (‘love', 1898), wanna (‘want to', 1896), wiv (‘with', 1898), dunno (‘don't know', 1842), wot (‘what', 1829) and cos (‘because', 1828). Sorta (‘sort of') is recorded as early as 1790.

^{19. The front page of The Sun, 4 May 1982.}

Have non-standard spellings ever become standard in recent times? The recorded examples suggest that their public presence is still quite limited. Because non-standard English is strongly associated with informal, jocular and intimate subject-matter, they typically occur in the creative, leisure, sports and comment pages of newspapers. The Sun is exceptional in using them for news. Thru for through has made great public progress in American English, where we also find it in compounds, such as drive-thru, see-thru, sell-thru and click-thru . But other forms seem to be restricted to special usages, such as Mr Chad's graffiti use of Wot (§10) or forms representing colloquial speech, such as Sez who?

Most often a non-standard spelling is an attempt to show a regional accent: There's gold in tham thar hills, A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do , Gawd help us. But we mustn't fall into the trap of thinking that only lower-class accents are the source of non-standard spelling. Upper-class speech can find its way into a non-standard spelling too: huntin', shootin' and fishin' ; dontcha know ; she's a nice gel .

. PC — being politically correct (20th century)

Political correctness has been with us longer than its current vogue might lead us to think. The phrase politically correct turns up in the US Supreme Court as early as 1793, though not with reference to language. Politically incorrect is much more recent: the first recorded usage in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1933. And the abbreviation PC is the most recent of all: 1986. PC began its life with many positive associations. Today, when someone says that a word is PC , the connotations are almost always negative. What happened?

Political correctness is a linguistic movement which went out of control. Its supporters started out with the best of intentions, drawing attention to the way language can perpetuate undesirable social discrimination in such areas as race, gender, occupation and personal development. Feminists, for example, pointed to the way masculine words, idioms and word-endings reinforced a world-view in which women were ignored or played a secondary role (as seen in all men are created equal, the man in the street, fireman, chairman ). The ‘innocent' historical use of these expressions, they argued, was no guide. The goal had to be an inclusive language, which would avoid bias and give no offence.

In some cases, the solution was easy. It wasn't linguistically difficult to change fireman to firefighter or all men to all people . Other changes required more ingenuity (air steward(ess) to flight attendant ), and in some cases (such as man in the street ) the language provided no idiomatic equivalent at all. Some changes (such as chairman to chairwoman, chairperson or chair ) proved controversial, on both sides of the gender divide, and some proposed replacements were disliked because of their awkwardness (such as using he or she for he ). Many argued that the alternatives often did nothing to remove any prejudice there might be about the condition: what was the advantage of persons with disabilities over the disabled ? The negative associations simply transferred to the new term, as seen with the search for a PC expression to describe people who are handicapped/disabled/physically challenged/differently abled … or people who are black/negro/coloured/Afro-American/African-American … And what was the point of changing a label if social conditions didn't change?

Problems grew when some PC activists took their linguistic case too far. Opposition to the word black in a racial context was one thing. Reading in racial prejudice behind all uses of the word black (as in blackboards and black sheep ) was another. Stories circulated of authorities falling over backwards to avoid a word in case someone found it offensive. Some of the stories were true; some were myths reported by the media. It became difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. How many nursery school teachers heard the story that it was wrong to sing the nursery rhyme ‘Baa baa black sheep', and that some other colour-word should be used instead? It probably started out as an urban myth (the ‘rainbow sheep myth'), but I know teachers who have indeed changed the words, worried in case the parents of the one black child in their class might complain.

Fact or fiction, the political right focused on such stories as a means of discrediting the progressives who were trying to get a better deal for disadvantaged groups. Politicians always exaggerate the perceived weaknesses of the other side, and in the case of PC, numerous accusations were made about how excessive deference was being given to some groups at the expense of others. Insults flew. Those who drew attention to ‘incorrect vocabulary' were charged with being ‘thought police'. Moderate reformers found themselves grouped along with extremists.

Today, few people would describe themselves as being PC. Rather they admit, rather self-consciously but with a certain pride, to being ‘non-PC'. They say such things as ‘I know this is politically incorrect, but…' and then they say what they have in mind. The PC movement has evidently had an effect, in that it has made them more conscious of the issues than they were before. But some disadvantaged groups might well be wondering what all the fuss has been about, for their situation hasn't changed a jot.

. Bagonise — a nonce-word (20th century)

People love the opportunity to create new words. Newspapers and magazines hold competitions for ‘words that should be in the language but aren't'. In the 1980s in the USA, comedian Rich Hall coined the term sniglets for his inventive lexical contributions to the show Not Necessarily the News . It was hugely popular; fans sent in their own ideas, and several collections were published.

I can personally confirm the popularity of the game, as I devoted one of the programmes in my BBC Radio 4 series English Now to it, and set listeners a competition. I got over a thousand proposals — far more entries than we received for any other competition. Bagonise was one of the winners. It means ‘to anxiously wait for your suitcase to appear on the baggage claim carousel at an airport'. Another was potspot , ‘that part of a toilet seat which causes the phone to ring the moment you sit on it'.

Sometimes the creativity lies in using old words in a new way. In the UK, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd published the best-selling The Meaning of Liff in 1983, in which place-names were given new meanings. Goole , for example, was ‘the puddle on the bar into which the barman puts your change'. Nantucket was ‘the secret pocket which eats your train ticket'.

These coinages are sometimes spontaneous, sometimes the result of a lot of thought; but they all have one thing in common. They are nonce-words — usages made up ‘for the nonce'. The expression is from Middle English (nonce = ‘once'), and in language study it refers to a word or phrase invented to meet the needs of a particular occasion. Nobody ever expects it to be used again.

Authors often invent a word in this way: there are hundreds in James Joyce, for example, such as twingty to twangty too (in Finnegans Wake : for ‘twenty to twenty-two'). Lewis Carroll's coinages in ‘Jabberwocky' (§67), such as brillig and toves , are nonce-words. In the film Mary Poppins , there is the amazing supercalifragilisticexpialidocious . It's a feature of everyday conversation, too. In recent days I've heard someone say that a female bishop is a bishopess and a cake was chocalicious .

Sometimes a nonce-word catches on. When Joyce introduced quark into his novel, he could not have imagined that one day it would be adopted as the name of a subatomic particle in physics. And it only takes a famous person to use a nonce-word, consciously or unconsciously, and it can make headlines: in 2010, US politician Sarah Palin said refudiate — a blend of refute and repudiate — and was widely criticised for doing so. But, as she said in her defence, it's the sort of thing Shakespeare did. And indeed, if she — or George W. Bush — had said compulsative for compulsory or irregulous for unruly , they would have been condemned. But both are Shakespeare's.

Some people feel so strongly about the value to the human race of their coinages that they use them as much as possible in the hope that one day they will get into the dictionary. The words that are most likely to have this happen are those which are invented several times independently. Bag + agonise is a fairly obvious combination, and as the circumstance is repeated millions of times every day it has probably been repeatedly coined. It's therefore only a matter of time before the word begins to appear in print. It already appears in the online Travel Industry Dictionary, labelled as ‘slang'. That's a start. And in 2011 it had over 600 hits on Google. It's bound to become standard English one day.

. Webzine — an internet compound (20th century)

In 1998, the American Dialect Society named e- the ‘Word of the Year', the one ‘most useful and most likely to succeed' (§95). It wasn't really a word, but they were right about its future. Thousands of e-coinages have since appeared, and many look set to be a permanent feature of the language, such as e-books, e-conferences, e-voting, e-cards, e-money and e-zines . Web was another success story, producing such phrases as web design, web address, web page and web publishing , as well as such compound words as webcam, webcast, webmaster and webzine . The proliferation began soon after the World Wide Web became public knowledge in 1991.

Webzine , for example, is recorded in 1994 — the latest in a line of other -zines , such as e-zines , fanzines , cyberzines and amazines (‘amateur magazines'). You can find them in zinestores and celebrate them at zinefests . If you are a regular reader, you are a zinester , and you may engage in zineswapping .

New compound words are one of the most noticeable features of internet vocabulary. Popular forms include click (clickthrough rate, cost-per-click , double-click ), net (netspeak, netiquette, netnews ), ware (firmware, freeware, shareware ), cyber (cyberspace , cyberculture , cybersex ) and bot (§78). Even the symbol @ has been made to do extra duty in word creation, both as a symbol and spelled out as a word (@-address, atcommand ). Some very strange compounds have been created. If you look names up in a remote database, the usual instruction is whois . If you want to find a person's e-address by entering a name and location, you type in whowhere .

The internet has also favoured a previously rare phenomenon called bicapitalisation (the use of a capital in the middle as well as at the beginning of a word), notably in company names. We find Alta-Vista , not Altavista — and similarly, AskJeeves, CompuServe, DreamWorks and GeoCities . Three capitals occur in QuarkXPress and aRMadillo Online . Sometimes just a middle capital is used, as in the i -prefix usages which have produced iMap, iPhone, iMac, iPad and other innovations — a pattern which has been picked up and used in a wide range of contexts, such as iDrugs, iDosing, iForms, i-Routes, iSense and hundreds more.

Domain names are likely to turn the world of lexicography upside down. Virtually every word in everyday English has now been bought, to be used as a domain name. Familiar compounds have gone the same way. To invent a new domain name these days you have to be really ingenious and play with spelling or unusual sequences, such as inventinganewword.com . These are all proper names, of course, so they don't really count when it comes to vocabulary. But an unknown (and, I suspect, large) number will eventually develop general uses, in much the way that place-names have (§80). Do you wiki? Are you in a Mac-forum? Have you been Amazoned yet?

. App — a killer abb (20th century)

In 1985 a writer in the trade newspaper Information World , describing a new kind of on-screen menu, used an abbreviation — and then felt he had better explain it: ‘apps', he wrote, adding ‘for applications'.

Most people would have needed an explanation at the time. The idea of an application — a computer function designed to meet a specific user requirement — had been around for over twenty years, but shortening it to app was a novelty. The word had never been abbreviated in that way before. It immediately caught on. There was something phonetically appealing about the short, perky syllable, which seemed to suit the exciting quickfire developments in digital communication of the time. And soon after, the idea of a killer app arrived — a function which, in the dreams of the multimedia industry, would be so appealing or superior that people wouldn't be able to do without it. If any word should achieve the status of a killer abb(reviation), it is this one.

There's nothing new about abbreviations, of course. They've been in English since its earliest days (§3). But the Anglo-Saxon scribes could hardly have predicted the extraordinary increase in shortened words and names that has taken place over the past century or so. One collection (§79) has over half a million abbreviations, with new editions adding thousands more each year. And no wordbook should ignore the way that electronic media generally, and the internet in particular, have become one of the most fruitful sources of present-day growth, especially in abbreviations consisting only of initial letters (acronyms ) — GPS (‘global positioning system'), SMS (‘short messaging service'), FAQs (‘frequently asked questions') and so on. Most are short — three letters is the norm. Just occasionally we encounter longer sequences, such as WYSIWYG (‘what you see is what you get'), or some of the humorous strings found in text-messaging, such as ROTFLMAO (‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off').

How many of these will last? Many, especially those used in texting, are likely to have a short life (§94). But app seems a safe bet for a permanent place in the language. The number of apps are now in the hundreds of thousands, and mobile phones are increasingly the technology of choice for internet connection, so this is plainly an abbreviation that is not going to go away. Who would use four syllables (applications ) in everyday speech when they can use one?

. Cherry-picking — corporate speak (20th century)

This chapter is going to bring to the table a brain-dump of buzzworthy outcomes.

By close of play you'll have seen the value-added, the wow factor, of this joined-up state-of-the-art, blue-sky thinking. It'll be a no-brainer, a win-win situation, a foot-on-the-ball result. I'll be thinking out of the box. I'll cherry-pick the low-hanging fruit so that you'll see cutting-edge practice. Think synergy. Think mission. The bottom line is you'll take ownership of my visioning.

Cherry-pick , meaning ‘choose selectively the most beneficial courses of action', is, like many other pieces of business jargon, a development of the 1960s. My pastiche is not unlike the ‘corporate speak generators' that can be found online, producing strings of humorous nonsense — the humour, of course, lying in the fact that the results are uncomfortably close to the realities of what is daily heard and read in many offices.

What is going on? It isn't just a matter of jargon. Every profession, trade or social group has its special language — the technical terms, abbreviations and idioms which show that you are an electrician, lawyer, priest, journalist, doctor… To insiders, these terms are unproblematic: they define their professionalism. People only start condemning such language as jargon when the insiders talk to outsiders in an unthinking or pretentious way, using obscure words without considering the effect on their listeners.

Corporate speak is more than jargon. While such terms as synergy, incentivise and leveraging can be difficult to grasp, there's nothing especially hard about wow factor , low-hanging fruit or (at least to cricket fans) close of play . But these phrases nonetheless attract criticism. The charge is that, even though they are simple, they have lost their meaning through overuse. They have become automatic reactions, verbal tics, a replacement for intelligent thinking. In short, they have become inappropriately used clichés.

These days the charges come from both inside and outside the world of business management. And the criticisms are particularly harsh when other domains pick up corporate speak. Government departments especially have to be careful if they lapse into it. A UK parliamentary select committee in July 2009 examined the matter, and the chairman introduced the topic using another pastiche:

Perhaps I could say, by way of introduction, welcome to our stakeholders. We look forward to our engagement, as we roll out our dialogue on a level playing field, so that, going forward in the public domain, we have a win-win step change that is fit for purpose across the piece.

Everyone in the room recognised the symptoms. And the subsequent discussion focused on the kinds of language routinely being used in government circles, such as unlocking talent, partnership pathways, a quality and outcomes framework and best practice flowing readily to the frontline . What could be done about it?

It's easier to identify symptoms than to suggest cures. And it's easy to parody. Eradicating habitual usage is hard. But there is a mood around these days that something has to be done. Whether in business or in government, recognising models of good practice, and rewarding them, will be an important first step.

. LOL — extspeak (20th century)

When LOL first appeared on computer and mobile phone screens, it caused not a little confusion. Some people were using it to mean ‘lots of love'. Others interpreted it as ‘laughing out loud'. It was an ambiguity that couldn't last. Who knows how many budding relationships foundered in the early 2000s because recipients took the abbreviation the wrong way? Today it's settled down. Almost everyone now uses LOL in its ‘laughing' sense. And it's one of the few text-messaging acronyms to have crossed the divide between writing and speech.

Dictionaries of text-messaging list hundreds of acronyms and give the impression that a new language, textese , has emerged. In fact, now that collections of real text messages have been made and studied, it transpires that only a few of those abbreviations are used with any frequency. Replacing see by c , you by u and to by 2 are some of the commonly used strategies. But the kind of message in which every word is an abbreviation (thx 4 ur msg c u 18r ) is really rather unusual. On average, only about 10 per cent of the words in a text are abbreviated. And in many adult texting situations, textisms are frowned upon, or even banned, because the organisers know that not everyone will understand them.