Top Quotes: “The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way” — Bill Bryson
Introduction
“For the airlines of 157 nations (out of 168 in the world), it is the agreed international language of discourse.”
“About 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist.””
“The Eskimos, as is well known, have fifty words for types of snow — though curiously no word for just plain snow. To them there is crunchy snow, soft snow, fresh snow, and old snow, but no word that just means snow. The Italians, as we might expect, have over 500 names for different types of macaroni. Some of these, when translated, begin to sound distinctly unappetizing, like strozzapreti, which means “strangled priests.” Vermicelli means “little worms” and even spaghetti means “little strings.” When you learn that muscatel in Italian means “wine with flies in it,” you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomic fiends.”
“The residents of the Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea have a hundred words for yams, while the Maoris of New Zealand have thirty-five words for dung (don’t ask me why). Meanwhile, the Arabs are said (a little unbelievably, perhaps) to have 6,000 words for camels and camel equipment. The aborigines of Tasmania have a word for every type of tree, but no word that just means“tree,” while the Araucanian Indians of Chile rather more poignantly have a variety of words to distinguish between different degrees of hunger.”
“The endless versatility of English is what makes our rules of grammar so perplexing. Few English-speaking natives, however well educated, can confidently elucidate the difference between, say, a complement and a predicate or distinguish a full infinitive from a bare one. The reason for this is that the rules of English grammar were originally modeled on those of Latin, which in the seventeenth century was considered the purest and most admirable of tongues. That it may be. But it is also quite clearly another language altogether. Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball in ice skates. The two simply don’t match. In the sentence “I am swimming,” swimming is a present participle. But in the sentence “Swimming is good for you,” it is a gerund — even though it means exactly the same thing.”
“In Japanese, the word for foreigner means “stinking of foreign hair.” To the Czechs a Hungarian is “a pimple.” Germans call cockroaches “Frenchmen,” while the French call lice “Spaniards.” We in the English-speaking world take French leave, but Italians and Norwegians talk about departing like an Englishman, and Germans talk of running like a Dutchman. Italians call syphilis “the French disease, while both French and Italians call con games “American swindle.” Belgian taxi drivers call a poor tipper “un Anglais.” To be bored to death in French is “être de Birmingham,” literally “to be from Birmingham” (which is actually about right). And in English we have “Dutch courage,” “French letters,” “Spanish fly,” “Mexican carwash” (i.e., leaving your car out in the rain), and many others. Late in the last century these epithets focused on the Irish, and often, it must be said, they were as witty as they were wounding. An Irish buggy was a wheelbarrow. An Irish beauty was a woman with two black eyes. Irish confetti was bricks. An Irish promotion was a demotion. Now almost the only slur against these fine people is to get one’s Irish up, and that isn’t really taken as an insult.”
“Not only have we discarded problems of gender with definite and indefinite articles, we have often discarded the articles themselves. We say in English, “It’s time to go to bed,” where in most other European languages they must say, “It’s the time to go to the bed.” We possess countless examples of pithy phrases — “life is short,” “between heaven and earth,” “to go to work” — which in other languages require articles.”
“There is, to be sure, a slight tendency to have words cluster around certain sounds. In English we have a large number of sp- words pertaining to wetness: spray, splash, spit, sprinkle, splatter, spatter, spill, spigot. And we have a large number of fl- words to do with movement: flail, flap, flicker, flounce, flee. And quite a number of words ending in -ash describe abrupt actions: flash, dash, crash, bash, thrash, smash, slash. Onomatopoeia does play a part in language formation, but whether it or any other feature alone can account for how languages are formed is highly doubtful.
It is intriguing to see how other languages hear certain sounds — and how much better their onomatopoeic words often are. Dogs go ouâ-ouâ in France, bu-bu in Italy, mung-mung in Korea, wan-wan in Japan; a purring cat goes ron-ron in France, schnurr in Germany; a bottle being emptied goes gloup-gloup in China, tot-tot-to in Spain; a heartbeat is doogan-doogan in Korea, doki-doki in Japan; bells go bimbam in Germany, dindan in Spain. The Spanish word for whisper is susurrar. How could it be anything else?”
“Pidgins are almost always very basic and their structure varies considerably from place to place — and indeed from person to person. They are essentially little more than the language you or I would speak if we found ourselves suddenly deposited in some place like Bulgaria or Azerbaijan. They are makeshift tongues and as a result they seldom last long.
When children are born into a pidgin community, one of two things will happen. Either the children will learn the language of the ruling class, as was almost always the case with African slaves in the American South, or they will develop a creole (from French créole, “native”). Most of the languages that people think of as pidgins are in fact creoles. To the uninitiated they can seem primitive, even comical. In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the word for beard is gras bilong fes (literally “grass that belongs to the face”) and the word for a vein or artery is rop belong blut (“rope that belongs to the blood”). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as bak sit drayva (“back seat driver”), wesmata (“what’s the matter?”), and bottom-bottom wata waka (“submarine”).”
“Creoles are not in any way inferior. In fact, it is worth remembering that many full-fledged languages — the Afrikaans of South Africa, the Chinese of Macao, and the Swahili of east Africa — were originally creoles.”
“Of ancient Thracian, an important language spoken over a wide area until as recently as the Middle Ages, we have just twenty-five words — and in the face of remarkable indifference on the part of the ancient Greeks and Romans, neither of whom ever bothered to note the details of a single other language. The Romans even allowed Etruscan, a language that had greatly contributed to their own, to be lost, so that today Etruscan writings remain tantalizingly untranslated.”
“Just within Europe the degree of divergency is so great that only relatively recently have two languages, Albanian and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European.
Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has changed the least — so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian can understand simple phases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian has preserved many more of the inflectional complexities of the original Indo-European language than others of the family.”
“Celtic, I must hasten to add, is not dead. Far from it. It is still spoken by half a million people in Europe. But they are scattered over a wide area and its influence is negligible. At its height, in about 400 B.C., Celtic was spoken over a vast area of the continent, a fact reflected in scores of place — names from Belgrade to Paris to Dundee, all of which commemorate Celtic tribes. But from that point on, its dominions have been constantly eroded, largely because the Celts were a loose collection of tribes and not a great nation state, so they were easily divided and conquered. Even now the various branches of Celtic are not always mutually comprehensible. Celtic speakers in Scotland, for instance, cannot understand the Celtic speakers of Wales a hundred miles to the south.”
“In English adjectives have just one invariable form with but, I believe, one exception: blond/blonde.
Sometimes languages fail to acquire what may seem to us quite basic terms. The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to roundabout expressions such as “I think not” and “This is so.” Italians cannot distinguish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to the English a, an, or the, and they do not distinguish between singular and plural as we do with, say, ball/balls and child/children or as the French do with chateau/ chateaux. This may seem strange until you reflect that we don’t make a distinction with a lot of words — sheep, deer, trout, Swiss, scissors — and it scarcely ever causes us trouble. We could probably get by well without it for all words. But it is harder to make a case for the absence in Japanese of a future tense. To them Tokyo e yukimasu means both “I go to Tokyo” and “I will go to Tokyo.” To understand which sense is intended, you need to know the context. This lack of explicitness is a feature of Japanese — even to the point that they seldom use personal pronouns like me, my, and yours.”
“According to Mario Pei, the human anatomy is capable of producing some 700,000 “distinct elementary gestures” of this type. We have nothing remotely like that number in English, but we have many more than you might at first think — from wagging a finger in warning at a child, to squeezing the nose and fanning the face to indicate a noisome smell, to putting a hand to the ear as if to say, “I can’t hear you.””
Evolution
“Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago.”
“Italian, such as it is, is not a national language, but really only the dialect of Florence and Tuscany, which has slowly been gaining preeminence over other dialects. Not until 1979 did a poll show for the first time that Italian was the dialect spoken at home by more than 50 percent of Italians.”
“Language is often an emotive issue in Belgium and has brought down many governments. Part of the problem is that there has been a reversal in the relative fortunes of the two main language groups. Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking half of Belgium, was long the economic powerhouse of the country, but with the decline of traditional heavy industries such as steel and coal, the economic base has moved north to the more populous, but previously backward, region of Flanders. During the period of the Walloon ascendancy, the Dutch dialect, Flemish, or Vlaams, was forbidden to be spoken in parliament, courts, and even in schools. This naturally caused lingering resentment among the Dutch-speaking majority.
The situation is so hair-triggered that when a French-speaking group of villages in Flanders known as the Fourons elected a French-speaking mayor who refused to conduct his duties in Dutch, the national government was brought down twice and the matter clouded Belgian politics for a decade.
Even more bitter has been the situation in French-speaking Canada. In 1976, the separatist Parti Québécois, under the leadership of René Lévesque, introduced a law known as Bill 101, which banned languages other than French on commercial signs, restricted the number of admissions to English schools (and required the children of immigrants to be schooled in French even if both parents spoke English), and made French the language of the workplace for any company employing more than fifty people. The laws were enforced by a committee with the ominous name of Commission de Surveillance de la Langue Française. Fines of up to $760 were imposed by 400 “language police.” All of this was a trifle harsh on the 800,000 Quebec citizens who spoke English, and a source of considerable resentment, as when “Merry Christmas” greetings were ordered to be taken down and 15,000 Dunkin’ Donuts bags were seized. In December 1988, the supreme court of Canada ruled that parts of Bill 101 were illegal. According to the court, Quebec could order that French be the primary language of commerce, but not the only one. As an immediate response, 15,000 francophones marched in protest through the streets of Montreal and many stores that had bilingual signs were vandalized, often by having the letters FLQ (for Front de Libération de Québec) spray-painted across their windows. One was firebombed.”
“Even a thousand miles from Quebec linguistic ill feeling sometimes surfaces. Because Canada is officially bilingual, a national law states that all regions of the country must provide services in both French and English, but this has caused sometimes bitter resentment in non-French-speaking areas such as Manitoba, where there are actually more native speakers of German and Ukrainian than of French. French Canadians are a shrinking proportion of the country, falling from 29 percent of the total population in 1961 to 24 percent today and forecast to fall to 20 percent by early in the next century.”
Old English
“Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a fact rather quaintly preserved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden’s wife, Frig: (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.) It is difficult to conceive of the sense of indignity that the Celts must have felt at finding themselves overrun by primitive, unlettered warriors from the barbaric fringes of the Roman empire. For the Celts, without any doubt, were a sophisticated people. As Laird notes: “The native Celts had become civilized, law-abiding people, accustomed to government and reliable police, nearly as helpless before an invading host as most modern civilian populations would be.” Many of them enjoyed aspects of civilization — running water, central heating — that were quite unknown to the conquering hordes and indeed would not become common again in Britain for nearly 1,500 years. For almost four centuries they had been part of the greatest civilization the world had known, and enjoyed the privileges and comforts that went with it.”
“The harsh, clacking guttural Anglo-French had become a source of amusement to the people of Paris, and this provided perhaps the ultimate — and certainly the most ironic — blow to the language in England. Norman aristocrats, rather than be mocked for persevering with an inferior dialect that many of them ill spoke anyway, began to take an increasing pride in English. So total was this reversal of attitude that when Henry V was looking for troops to fight with him at Agincourt in 1415, he used the French threat to the English language as a rallying cry.”
“Chaucer used hi, hem, and her for they, them, and their (her for their survived up to the time of Shakespeare, who used it at least twice in his plays). Similarly his, where we now use its, was the usual form until about 1600, which is why the King James Bible is full of constructions like “If the salt has lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted?” Similarly, which was until about the same time often used of animate things as well as inanimate, as in the form of the Lord’s Prayer still used in England: “Our Father which art in heaven.”
In Old English there were at least six endings that denoted plurals, but by Shakespeare’s time these had by and large shrunk to two: -s and -en. But even then the process was nowhere near complete. In the Elizabethan Age, people sometimes said shoes and sometimes shoen, sometimes house and sometimes housen. It is interesting to reflect that had the seat of government stayed in Winchester, rather than moved the sixty miles or so to London, we would today very probably be talking of six housen and a pair of shoen. Today there are just three of these old weak plurals: children, brethren, and oxen. However, even though -s (or -es after an -sh spelling) has become the standard form for plurals, there are still traces of the complex Old English system lurking in the language in plurals such as men, women, feet, geese, and teeth.”
“Other words underwent changes, particularly those beginning with n, where there was a tendency for this letter to drift away from the word and attach itself to the preceding indefinite article. The process is called metanalysis. Thus a napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, and an ekename became (over time) a nickname.”
“The changing structure of English allowed writers the freedom to express themselves in ways that had never existed before, and none took up this opportunity more liberally than Shakespeare, who happily and variously used nouns as verbs, as adverbs, as substantives, and as adjectives —often in ways they had never been employed before. He even used adverbs as adjectives, as with “that bastardly rogue” in Henry IV, a construction that must have seemed as novel then as it does now. He created expressions that could not grammatically have existed previously such as “breathing on’s last” and “backing a horse.”
No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language. He coined some 2,000 words — an astonishing number — and gave us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him.
Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remembrance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on.”
“Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn’t that seem a useful term? Or how about slubberdegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn’t it a shame to let it slip away? Our dictionaries are full of such words — words describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.
And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms — words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little. We have a possessive impersonal pronoun its to place alongside his, her, and their, but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal whose. Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as “The house whose roof” or resort to periphrasis. We have a word to describe all the work you find waiting for you when you return from vacation, backlog, but none to describe all the work you have to do before you go. Why not forelog? And we have a large number of negative words — inept, disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt — for which the positive form is missing.
English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, “She’s so sheveled,” or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert. Many of these words did once have positive forms. Ruthless was companioned by ruth, meaning compassion. One of Milton’s poems contains the well-known line “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.” But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation.
Why should we have lost demit (send away) but saved commit? Why should impede have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful expede expired? No one can say.”
Grammar
“A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and tribulations, hem and haw, spick-and-span, kith and kin, dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, vim and vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let or hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.”
“The polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words — the length of a short novel — to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.
Generally polysemy happens because one word sprouts a variety of meanings, but sometimes it is the other way around — similar but quite separate words evolve identical spellings.”
“Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure, but a horse that has bolted has taken off. If you wind up a meeting you finish it; if you wind up a watch, you start it. To ravish means to rape or to enrapture. Quinquennial describes something that lasts for five years or happens only once in five years. Trying one’s best is a good thing, but trying one’s patience is a bad thing. A blunt instrument is dull, but a blunt remark is pointed. Occasionally when this happens the dictionary makers give us different spellings to differentiate the two meanings — as with flour and flower, discrete and discreet — but such orthological thoughtfulness is rare.”
Borrowed Words
“We take words from almost anywhere — shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, caucus from the Algonquin Indians, ketchup from China, potato from Haiti, sofa from Arabia, boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, slogan from Gaelic.”
“We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we’ve absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally “light of hand”), or R.S.V.P. for répondez sil vous plaît. (Instead they write: “Prière de répondre.”) The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.”
“Who would guess that our word puny was once the Anglo-Norman puis né or that curmudgeon may once have been the French coeur méchant (evil heart), or that breeze, so English-sounding, was taken from the Spanish briza, or that the distress signal mayday was lifted from the French cry m’aidez (meaning “help me”) or that poppycock comes from the Dutch pappekak, meaning “soft dung”? Chowder came directly from the French chaudière (cauldron), while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian expression banca rotta, meaning “broken bench.” In the late Middle Ages, when banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up. Sometimes the foreign words came quietly, but other times they needed a good pummeling before they assumed anything like a native shape, as when the Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and the Amerind raugroughcan became raccoon.”
“One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are mouth/oral, book/literary, water/ aquatic, house/ domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, sun/ solar, town/urban. This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say, earthly and terrestrial, motherly and maternal, timely and temporal.
Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues — deriving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock — others have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 percent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 percent. A final curious fact is that although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German.”
“WORDS ARE CREATED. Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take dog. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog — a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word — displaced it. No one has any idea why.
This sudden arising of words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of this phenomenon are yuppie and sound bites, which seem to have burst forth spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-speaking world.
Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to prominence — again quite mysteriously. Scrounge and seep are both of this type. They have been around for centuries and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield came into general use before 1900.
Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original.”
“For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology — words like lunar module and myocardial infarction — rather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience. Shakespeare’s vocabulary changed considerably as he aged. Jespersen notes that there are some 200 to 300 words to be found in the early plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later shed, but which independently made their way into the language later — among them cranny, beautified, homicide, aggravate, and forefathers.”
“According to Mary Helen Dohan, in her absorbing book Our Own Words, the military vehicle the tank got its name because during its secretive experimental phase people were encouraged to think it was a storage receptacle — hence a tank. The curiously nautical terminology for its various features — hatch, turret, hull, deck — arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the army.”
Changes
“WORDS CHANGE BY DOING NOTHING. That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice — as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer’s day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thought, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James Il first saw St. Pauls Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.”
“Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression “neck of the woods.” Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a fossil.”
“Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule.” Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can’t. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible — the exception tests the rule. A similar misapprehension is often attached to the statement “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
Sometimes words change by becoming more specific. Starve originally meant to die before it took on the more particular sense of to die by hunger. A deer was once any animal (it still is in the German tier) and meat was any food (the sense is preserved in “meat and drink” and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it). A forest was any area of countryside set aside for hunting, whether or not it was covered with trees. (In England to this day, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire is largely treeless, as are large stretches of the New Forest in Hampshire.) And worm was a term for any crawling creature, including snakes.”
Oddities
“We have six ways of making labyrinth into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. We have at least eight ways of expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, il-, im-, ir-, un-, and non-. It is arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible, but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but impossible. Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless. Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.
Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of angry and hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in no other common words in English. Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, hazardous, and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wedlock and warlock and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form. Equally some common-seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for- is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others.”
Phonetics
“In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is always “k,” an l eternally and comfortingly “I.””
“In English, for example, we don’t have words like fwost or zpink or abholve because we never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there’s no reason why we couldn’t if we wanted to. We just don’t. Chinese takes this matter of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic — which can itself be almost absurdly limiting — but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling “i” can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between “oh” and “oh?” and “oh!” but essentially we function by relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.”
“It differentiates between fifty-two sounds used in English, divided equally between consonants and vowels, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five for purely English sounds, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. So whether the number in English is forty-four or fifty-two or something in between, it is quite a lot.”
“When we use a “k” sound at the start of a word, we put a tiny puff of breath behind it (as in kitchen and conquer) but when the “k” follows an s (as in skill or skid) we withhold the puff. When we make an everyday observation like “I have some homework to do,” we pronounce the word “hav.” But when we become emphatic about it-“I have to go now” —we pronounce it “haff.” Each time we speak we make a multitude of such fractional adjustments, most of which we are wholly unaware of. But these only begin to hint at the complexity of our phonetics. An analysis of speech at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by Dr. John R. Pierce detected more than ninety separate sounds just for the letter t.
We pronounce many words — perhaps most — in ways that are considerably at variance with the ways they are spelled and often even more so with the ways we think we are saying them. We may believe we say “later” but in fact we say “lader.” We may think we say “ladies,” but it’s more probably “laties” or even, in the middle of a busy sentence, “lays.” Handbag comes out as “hambag.” We think we say “butter,” but it’s really “budder” or “buddah” or even “bur.” We see wash, but say “worsh.” We think we say “granted,” but really say “grannid.” No one says “looked.” It’s “lookt.” “I’ll just get her” becomes “aldges gedder.” We constantly allow sounds to creep into words where they have no real business. We introduce a “p” between “m” and “t” or “m” and “s” sounds, so that we really say “warmpth” and “somepthing.” We can’t help ourselves. We similarly put a “t” between “n” and “s” sounds, which is why it is nearly impossible for us to distinguish between mints and mince or between prints and prince. Occasionally these intruders become established in the spellings. Glimpse (coming from the same source as gleam) was originally glimsen, with no “p,” but the curious desire to put one there proved irresistible over time. Thunder originally had no “d” (German donner still doesn’t) and stand had no “n.” One was added to stand, but not, oddly, to stood. Messenger never had an “n” (message still doesn’t), pageant never had a “t,” and sound no d.”
“As listeners we can distinguish between the most subtle gradations of emphasis. Most people, if they are reasonably attentive, can clearly detect the difference between that’s tough and that stuff, between I love you and isle of view, and between gray day and Grade A even though the phonics could hardly be more similar.”
“Despite these occasional drawbacks, listening is something we do remarkably well. Speech, by contrast, is a highly inefficient process. We are all familiar with the feeling of not being able to get the words out fast enough, of mixing up sounds into spoonerisms, of stumbling over phonetically demanding words like statistics and proprietorial. The fact is that we will never be able to speak as quickly as we can hear. Hence the tendency to slur. There has been a clear trend over time to make our pronunciations less precise, to let letters lapse into silence or allow sounds to merge and become less emphatic.”
“Sometimes changes in pronunciation are rather more subtle and mysterious. Consider, for example, changes in the stress on many of those words that can function as either nouns or verbs — words like defect, reject, disguise, and so on. Until about the time of Shakespeare all such words were stressed on the second syllable. But then three exceptions arose — outlaw, rebel, and record — in which the stress moved to the first syllable when they were used as nouns (e.g., we re bel’ against a reb’el; we re ject’ a reject). As time went on, according to Aitchison, the number of words of this type was doubling every hundred years or so, going from 35 in 1700 to 70 in 1800 and to 150 by this century, spreading to include such words as object, subject, convict, and addict. Yet there are still a thousand words which remain unaffected by this 400-year trend, among them disdain, display, mistake, hollow, bother, and practice. Why should this be? No one can say.”
“Presumably because of their proximity to France (or, just as probably, because of their long disdain for things French) the British have a somewhat greater tendency to disguise French pronunciations, pronouncing garage as garridge,” fillet as “fill-ut,” and putting a clear first-syllable stress on café, buffet, ballet, and pâté.”
Accents
“According to some estimates almost two-thirds of the American population, living on some 80 percent of the land area, speak with the same accent — a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.
Some authorities have suggested that once there was much greater diversity in American speech than now. As evidence, they point out that in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain needed seven separate dialects to reflect the speech of various characters, even though they all came from much the same area.”
“When an American airline received anonymous telephone threats, the linguistics authority William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania was able to identify the caller as coming from within a seventy-five-mile radius of Boston. His testimony helped to clear a man from greater New York accused of the crime.”
“The colonists along the Eastern seaboard naturally had closer relationships with England than those colonists who moved inland. That explains at least partly why the English of the Eastern seaboard tends to have so much in common with British English — the tendency to put a “yew” sound into words like stew and Tuesday, the tendency to have broader and rounder “a” and “o” sounds, the tendency to suppress “r” sounds in words like car and horse. There are also similarities of vocabulary. Queer is still widely used in the South in the sense of strange or odd. Common still has a pejorative flavor (as in “She’s so common”) that it lacks elsewhere in America. Ladybugs, as they are known in the North, are still called ladybirds in the South and sidewalks in some areas are called pavements, as they are in Britain. All of these are a result of the closer links between such East Coast cities as Boston, Savannah, and Charleston and Britain.”
“Dialects are sometimes said to be used as a shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally attentive to clues as to whether a person is Catholic or Protestant, and generally assume that if he has a North Down or east Belfast accent he is Protestant, and that if he has a South Armagh or west Belfast accent he is Catholic. But the differences in accent are often very slight — west Belfast people are more likely to say “thet” for that, while people in east Belfast say “hahn” for hand — and not always reliable. In fact, almost the only consistent difference is that Protestants say “aitch” for the eighth letter of the alphabet while Catholics say “haitch.””
“National accents can develop with considerable speed. Within only a generation or so of its colonization, visitors to Australia were beginning to notice a pronounced accent.”
“It appears that size and population dispersal have little to do with it. It is far more a matter of cultural identity.
When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical features such as they had never seen. “It is probably not too much to say,” wrote Otto Jespersen, “that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed.” Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines, were billabong for a brackish body of water, didgeridoo for a kind of trumpet, bombora for a navigable stretch of river containing dangerous rocks, and of course boomerang, koala, outback, and kangaroo.”
“Although historically tied to Britain, linguistically Australia has been as receptive to American influences as to British ones. In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits; politicians run for office, not stand as in Britain; they drive station wagons rather than estate cars; give their money to a teller rather than a cashier in a bank; wear cuffs on their pants, not turnups; say mail, not post; and cover small injuries with a Band-Aid rather than a plaster. They spell many words in the American way — labor rather than labour, for instance — and, perhaps most significantly, the national currency is the dollar, not the pound.”
“Most native Londoners can tell whether someone comes from north or south of the Thames. Outside London even greater precision is not uncommon. I live in a dale in Yorkshire that is just five miles long, but locals can tell whether a person comes from up the dale or down the dale by how he speaks. In a nearby village that lies half in Lancashire and half in Yorkshire, people claim to be able to tell which side of the main street a person was born on. There may be some hyperbole attached to that, but certainly Yorkshire people can tell in an instant whether someone comes from Bradford or Leeds, even though the two cities are contiguous. Certain features of British dialects can be highly localized. John Knowler notes that he once knew a man whose odd pronunciation of the letter r he took to be a speech impediment until he happened to visit the man’s childhood village in an isolated part of Northumberland and discovered that everyone there pronounced is in the same peculiar way.
In England, dialects are very much more a matter of class and social standing than in other countries, as George Bernard Shaw well understood when he wrote that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.””
“In the whole of the north topcoat is the usual word, but in Shropshire there is one small and inexplicable island of overcoat wearers. In Oxfordshire, meanwhile, there is a lozenge-shaped linguistic island where people don’t drink their drinks, they sup them. Sup is the northern word for drink. Why it should end up being used in an area of a few square miles in a southern county by people who employ no other northern expressions is a mystery to which there is no logical answer. No less mysterious is the way the terms twenty-one and one-and-twenty move up the country in alternating bands. In London people say “twenty-one,” but if you move forty miles to the north they say “one-and-twenty.” Forty miles north of that and they say “twenty-one” again. And so it goes right the way up to Scotland.”
“ The casual affirmative word yeah was also until fairly recently a quaint localism confined to small areas of Kent, Surrey, and south London. The rest of Britain would say yes, aye, or ar.”
“In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue. Cajun is still spoken by a quarter of a million people (or more, depending on whose estimates you follow) in parts of Louisiana. The name is a corruption of Acadian, the adjective for the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia (based on Nova Scotia, but taking in parts of Quebec and Maine) who settled there in 1604 but were driven out by the British in the 1750s. Moving to the isolated bayous of southern Louisiana, they continued to speak French but were cut off from their linguistic homeland and thus forced to develop their own vocabulary to a large extent. Often it is more colorful and expressive than the parent tongue.
The Cajun for hummingbird, sucfleur (“flower-sucker”), is clearly an improvement on the French oiseaumouche. Other Cajun terms are rat du bois (“rat of the woods”) for a possum and sac à lait (“sack of milk”) for a type of fish. The Cajun term for the language they speak is Bougalie or Yats, short for “Where yat?” Their speech is also peppered with common French words and phrases: merci, adieu, c’est vrai (“it’s true”), qu’est-ce que c’est (“what is it”), and many others. The pronunciation has a distinctly Gallic air, as in their way of turning long “a” sounds into “eh” sounds, so that bake and lake become “behk” and “lehk.” And finally, as with most adapted languages, there’s a tendency to use nonstandard grammatical forms: bestest and don’t nobody know.
A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English. Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why.”
“Without any doubt, the most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America. Tristan is the most isolated inhabited place in the world, 1,500 miles from the nearest landfall, and the local language reflects the fact.
Although the inhabitants have the dark looks of the Portuguese who first inhabited the islands, the family names of the 300-odd islanders are mostly English, as is their language — though with certain quaint differences reflecting their long isolation from the rest of the world. It is often endearingly ungrammatical. People don’t say “How are you?” but “How you is?” It also has many wholly local terms. Pennemin is a penguin; watrem is a stream. But perhaps most strikingly, spellings are often loose. Many islanders are called Donald, but the name is always spelled Dondall. Evidently one of the first users misspelled it that way generations ago and the spelling stuck.”
Alphabets
“All words in Chinese are formed from these and 212 other radicals. Radicals can stand alone or be combined to form other words. Eye and water make teardrop. Mouth and bird make song. Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.
Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters, of which about 4,000 are in common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute. But even the most complex Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of the characters available. If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide — about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together. Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most dictionaries the language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the spelling you seek.
The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code. In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last problem, the Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was assigned a number. Person, for instance, was 0086. This process was equally cumbersome, but it did have the advantage that an American or Frenchman who didn’t know a word of Chinese could translate any telegram from China simply by looking in a book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in peoples heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.
However, Chinese writing possesses one great advantage over other languages: It can be read everywhere.”
“An equally useful advantage of written Chinese is that people can read the literature of 2,500 years ago as easily as yesterday’s newspapers.”
“Even more complicated is Japanese, which is a blend of three systems: a pictographic system of 7,000 characters called kanji and two separate syllabic alphabets each consisting of 48 characters. One of these alphabets, katakana (sometimes shortened to kana), is used to render words and names (such as Dunkin’ Donuts and Egg McMuffin) that the ancient devisers of kanji failed to foresee. Since many of the kanji characters have several pronunciations and meanings — the word ka alone has 214 separate meanings — a second syllabic alphabet was devised. Called hiragana and written as small symbols above the main text, it tells the reader which of the many possible interpretations of the kanji characters is intended.
All this is so immensely complicated that until the mid-1980s, most Japanese had to learn English or some other Western language in order to use a personal computer. The Japanese have now managed to get around the pictographic problem by using a keyboard employing katakana syllables which are converted on the screen into kanji characters, rather as if we were to write twenty percent by striking three keys — “20,” “per,” and “cent” — and then seeing on the screen one symbol: “20%.””
Linguistics
“We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.); we can spell “o” in more than a dozen ways (go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and “a” in a dozen more (hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc.).”
“We have some forty sounds in English, but more than 200 ways of spelling them. We can render the sound “sh” in up to fourteen ways (shoe, sugar, passion, ambitious, ocean, champagne, etc.); we can spell “o” in more than a dozen ways (go, beau, stow, sew, doe, though, escargot, etc.) and “a” in a dozen more (hey, stay, make, maid, freight, great, etc.).”
“Colonel is perhaps the classic example of this orthographic waywardness. The word comes from the old French coronelle, which the French adapted from the Italian colonello (from which we get colonnade). When the word first came into English in the mid-sixteenth century, it was spelled with an r, but gradually the Italian spelling and pronunciation began to challenge it. For a century or more both spellings and pronunciations were commonly used, until finally with inimitable illogic we settled on the French pronunciation and Italian spelling.”
“With the rise of printing, there was suddenly a huge push toward regularized spelling. London spellings became increasingly fixed, though differences in regional vocabulary remained for some time — indeed exist to this day to quite a large extent.”
“Unluckily for us, English spellings were becoming fixed just at the time when the language was undergoing one of those great phonetic seizures that periodically unsettle any tongue. The result is that we have today in English a body of spellings that, for the most part, faithfully reflect the pronunciations of people living 400 years ago.
In Chaucer’s day, the k was still pronounced in words like knee and know. Knight would have sounded (more or less) like “kuh-nee-guh-tuh,” with every letter enunciated. The g was pronounced in gnaw and gnat, as was the l in words like folk, would, and alms. In short, the silent letters of most words today are shadows of a former pronunciation. Had Caxton come along just a generation or so later English would very probably have had fewer illogical spellings like aisle, bread, eight, and enough.
But it didn’t end there. When in the seventeenth century the English developed a passion for the classical languages, certain well-meaning meddlers began fiddling with the spellings of many other words in an effort to make them conform to a Latin ideal. Thus b’s were inserted into debt and doubt, which had previously been spelled dette and doute, out of deference to the Latin originals, debitum and dubitare. Receipt picked up a p by the same method. Island gained its s, scissors its c, anchor its h. Tight and delight became consistent with night and right, though without any etymological basis. Rime became rhyme. In several instances our spelling became more irregular rather than less. Sometimes these changes affected the pronunciation of words, as when descrive (or descryve) became describe, perfet (or parfet) became perfect, verdit became verdict, and aventure had a d hammered into its first syllable. At first all these inserted letters were as silent as the b in debt, but eventually they became voiced.
A final factor in the seeming randomness of English spelling is that we not only freely adopt words from other cultures, but also tend to preserve their spellings. Unlike other borrowing tongues, we are generally content to leave foreign words as they are. So when, say, we need a word to describe a long counter from which food is served, we absorb buffet, pronounced “buffay,” unconcerned that it jars with the same word meaning to hit but pronounced “buffit.” In the same way it seldom bothers us that words like brusque, garage, and chutzpah all flout the usual English pattern. Speakers of many other languages would not abide such acoustic inconsistency.”
“What is less often noticed is that spelling reform has been quietly going on for centuries, in a small but not insignificant way, and without the benefit of any outside agencies. In that splendidly random way that characterizes most facets of English development, it just happened. Many words have shed a pointless final e — deposite, fossile, and secretariate, for instance. Musick and physick similarly gave up their needless ks. The tendency continues today with simplified spellings like catalog, dialog, and omelet gradually easing out the old spellings of catalogue, dialogue, and omelette, at least in America. Two hundred years ago there were scores of words that could be spelled in two or more ways, but today the list has shrunk to a handful — ax/axe, gray/grey, inquire/ enquire, and (outside North America) jail/gaol — but even here there is a clear tendency in every English-speaking country to favor one form or the other, to move toward regularity.”
“It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions — like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity.”
“American lexicographer, suggests that the average well-read person has a vocabulary of about 20,000 words and probably uses about 1,500 to 2,000 in a normal weeks conversations. McCrum puts an educated person’s vocabulary at about 15,000.”
“At the turn of the century words were being added at the rate of about 1,000 a year. Now, according to a report in The New York Times [April 3, 1989], the increase is closer to 15,000 to 20,000 a year. In 1987, when Random House produced the second edition of its masterly twelve-pound unabridged dictionary, it included over 50,000 words that had not existed twenty-one years earlier and 75,000 new definitions of old words. Of its 315,000 entries, 210,000 had to be revised.
That is a phenomenal amount of change in just two decades. The new entries included preppy, quark, flexitime, chairperson, sunblocker, and the names of 800 foods that had not existed or been generally heard of in 1966 – tofu, piña colada, chapati, sushi, and even crêpes.”
American v. British English
“The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language – a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather than runneth. Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as gotten.
The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees (“John Cheese”). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight. Often the new immigrants borrowed Indian terms, though these could take some swallowing since the Indian languages, particularly those of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American English, Our Own Words, an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian had to devise the word kummogkodonattootummooetiteaonganunnonash for the phrase “our question.” In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as “You fish on that side, we’ll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the middle.” Not surprisingly, such words were usually shortened and modified. The English-sounding hickory was whittled out of the Indian pawcohiccora. Raugraoughcun was hacked into raccoon and isquonterquashes into squash.”
“Despite the difficulties of rendering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for the names of more than half our states and for countless thousands of rivers, lakes, and towns. Yet we borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian words for everyday objects — among them canoe, raccoon, hammock, and tobacco.
From the early Spanish settlers, by contrast, we took more than 500 words — though many of these, it must be said, were Indian terms adopted by the Spaniards. Among them: rodeo, bronco, buffalo, avocado, mustang, burro, fiesta, coyote, mesquite, canyon, and buckaroo. Buckaroo was directly adapted from the Spanish vaquero (a cowboy) and thus must originally have been pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Many borrowings are more accurately described as Mexican than Spanish since they did not exist in Spain, among them stampede, hoosegow, and cafeteria. Hoosegow and jug (for jail) were both taken from the Mexican-Spanish juzgado, which, despite the spelling, was pronounced more or less as “hoosegow.” Sometimes it took a while for the pronunciation to catch up with the spelling. Rancher, a term borrowed from the Spanish rancho, was originally pronounced in the Mexican fashion, which made it something much closer to “ranker.””
“From the French, too, we borrowed liberally, taking the names for Indian tribes, territories, rivers, and other geographical features, sometimes preserving the pronunciation (Sioux, Mackinac) and sometimes not (Ilinois, Detroit, Des Plaines, Beloit). We took other words from the French, but often knocked them about in a way that made them look distinctively American, as when we turned gaufre into gopher and chaudière into chowder. Other New World words borrowed from the French were prairie and dime.
Oftentimes words reach us by the most improbable and circuitous routes. The word for the American currency, dollar, is a corruption of Joachimsthaler, named for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded use of the word in English was in 1553, spelled daler, and for the next two centuries it was applied by the English to various continental currencies. Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on a Money Unit for the United States, plumped for dollar as the name of the national currency on the ground that “the [Spanish] dollar is a known coin and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people.” That may be its first recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the people the term had already been in use for some time. At all events, Jefferson had his way: In 1785 the dollar was adopted as America’s currency, though it was not until 1794 that the first dollars rolled off the presses. That much we know, but what we don’t know is where the dollar sign ($) comes from.”
“In addition to borrowing hundreds of words, the Mundus Novians (far better word!) devised many hundreds of their own. The pattern was to take two already existing English words and combine them in new ways: bullfrog, eggplant, grasshopper, rattlesnake, mockingbird, catfish. Sometimes, however, words from the Old World were employed to describe different but similar articles in the New. So beech, walnut, laurel, partridge, robin, oriole, hemlock, and even pond (which in England is an artificial lake) all describe different things on the two continents. Settlers moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe features of their new outsized continent — mesa, butte, bluff, and so on — but also outsized words that reflected their zestful, virile, wildcat-wrassling, hell-for-leather approach to life. These expressions were, to put it mildly, often colorful, and a surprising number of them have survived: hornswoggle, cattywampus, rambunctious, absquatulate, to move like greased lightning, to kick the bucket, to be in cahoots with, to root hog or die. Others have faded away: monstracious, teetotaciously, helliferocious, conbobberation, obflisticate, and many others of equal exuberance.
Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguably America’s single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K, is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“Lunch was O.K.”), verb (“Can you O.K. this for me?”), noun (“I need your O.K. on this”), interjection (“O.K., I hear you”), and adverb (“We did O.K.”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “O.K.”), to great enthusiasm (“O.K.!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was O.K.”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“O.K., can I have your attention please?”).”
“A fashion developed among young wits of Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for “oll wright,” O.K. for “oll korrect,” K.Y. for “know yuse,” and so on. O.K. first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Had that been it, the expression would no doubt have died an early death, but coincidentally in 1840 Martin Van Buren, known as Old Kinderhook from his hometown in upstate New York, was running for reelection as president, and an organization founded to help his campaign was given the name the Democratic O.K. Club. O.K. became a rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great haste established itself as a word throughout the country. This may have been small comfort to Van Buren, who lost the election to William Henry Harrison, who had the no-less-snappy slogan “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.”
Although the residents of the New World began perforce to use new words almost from the first day they stepped ashore, it isn’t at all clear when they began pronouncing them in a distinctively American way. No one can say when the American accent first arose — or why it evolved quite as it did. As early as 1791, Dr. David Ramsay, one of the first American historians, noted in his History of the American Revolution that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which he attributed to the fact that people from all over Britain were thrown together in America where they “dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all.” But that is not to suggest that they sounded very much like Americans today. According to Robert Burchfield, George Washington probably sounded as British as Lord North. On the other hand, Lord North probably sounded more American than would any British minister today. North would, for instance, have given necessary its full value. He would have pronounced path and bath in the American way. He would have given ‘r’s their full value in words like cart and horse.”
“Until about 1840 America received no more than about 20,000 immigrants a year, mostly from two places: Africa in the form of slaves and the British Isles. Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more than one million. Then suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval elsewhere, America’s immigration became a flood. In the second half of the nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the pace quickened further in the early years of the twentieth century. In just four years at its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million Austro-Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens of thousands of other people from scores of other places.
At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.
Often, naturally, these people settled in enclaves. John Russell Bartlett noted that it was possible to cross Oneida County, New York, and hear nothing but Welsh. Probably the most famous of these enclaves — certainly the most enduring — was that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania and spoke a dialect that came to be known, misleadingly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. (The name is a corruption of Deutsch, or German.) Some 300,000 people in America still use Pennsylvania Dutch as their first language, and perhaps twice as many more can speak it. The large number is accounted for no doubt by the extraordinary insularity of most Amish, many of whom even now shun cars, tractors, electricity, and the other refinements of modern life. Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of institutionalized broken English, arising from adapting English words to German syntax and idiom. Probably the best known of their expressions is “Outen the light” for put out the light. Among others:
Nice day, say not? — Nice day, isn’t it?
What’s the matter of him? — What’s the matter with him?
It’s going to give rain. — It’s going to rain.
Come in and eat yourself. —Come and have something to eat.
It wonders me where it could be. — I wonder where it could be.
Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also have a tendency to speak with semi-Germanic accents — saying “chorge” for George, “britches” for bridges, and “tolt” for told. Remarkably, many of them still have trouble, despite more than two centuries in America, with “v” and “th” sounds, saying “wisit” for visit and “ziss” for this. But two things should be borne in mind. First, Pennsylvania Dutch is an anomaly, nurtured by the extreme isolation from modern life of its speakers. And second, it is an English dialect. That is significant.
Throughout the last century, and often into this one, it was easy to find isolated speech communities throughout much of America: Norwegians in Minnesota and the Dakotas, Swedes in Nebraska, Germans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and many others. It was natural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very. least result in widely divergent dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its prevailing immigrant group. But of course nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the very opposite was the case. Instead of becoming more divergent, people over the bulk of the American mainland continued to evince a more or less uniform speech. Why should that be?
There were three main reasons. First, the continuous movement of people back and forth across the continent militated against the formation of permanent regionalisms. Americans enjoyed social mobility long before sociologists thought up the term. Second, the intermingling of people from diverse backgrounds worked in favor of homogeneity. Third, and above all, social pressures and the desire for a common national identity encouraged people to settle on a single way of speaking.
People who didn’t blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders.”
“Every person in America uses a great many expressions and pronunciations familiar to Shakespeare but which have since died out in England — gotten, fall (for the season), the short a of bath and path, and so on.”
“Sick likewise underwent a profound change of sense in Britain that was not carried over to America. Shakespeare uses it in the modern American sense in Henry V (“He is very sick, and would to bed”), but in Britain the word has come to take on the much more specific sense of being nauseated. Even so, the broader original sense survives in a large number of expressions in Britain, such as sick bay, sick note, in sickness and in health, to be off sick (that is, to stay at home from work or school because of illness), sickbed, homesick, and lovesick. Conversely, the British often use ill where Americans would only use injured, as in newspaper accounts describing the victim of a train crash as being , “seriously ill in hospital.”
Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress as a verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression), deck of cards (the English now say pack), slim in the sense of small (as in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy, trash for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for pig, mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the expression I guess. Many of these words have reestablished themselves in England, so much so that most Britons would be astonished to learn that they had ever fallen out of use there. Maybe was described in the original Oxford English Dictionary in this century as “archaic and dialectal.” Quit in the sense of resigning had similarly died out in Britain.”
“In 1930, a Conservative member of Parliament, calling for a quota on the number of American films allowed into Britain, said: “The words and accent are perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language”. More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: “If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.”
“The revised edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, noted that under the influence of American usage the British had begun to change aim at doing into aim to do, haven’t got to don’t have, begun using in instead of for in phrases like “the first time in years,” and started for the first time using begin to with a negative, as in “This doesn’t begin to make sense.” And these changes go on.
Just in the last decade or so, truck has begun driving out lorry. Airplane is more and more replacing aeroplane. The American sense of billion (1,000,000,000) has almost completely routed the British sense (1,000,000,000,000).
American spelling, too, has had more influence on the British than they might think. Jail rather than gaol, burden rather than burthen, clue rather than clew, wagon rather than waggon, today and tomorrow rather than to-day and tomorrow, mask rather than masque, reflection rather than reflexion, and forever and onto as single words rather than two have all been nudged on their way toward acceptance by American influence. For most senses of the word program, the British still use programme, but when the context is of computers they write program.”
“People don’t often appreciate just how much movies and television have smoothed the differences between British and American English, but half a century ago the gap was very much wider.”
“In Britain homey is a flattering expression (equivalent to homey); in America it means “ugly.” In Britain upstairs is the first floor; in America it is the second. In Britain to table a motion means to put it forward for discussion; in America it means to put it aside. Presently means “now” in America; in Britain it means “in a little while.” Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression “I’ll knock you up in the morning,” which means “’ll knock on your door in the morning.” To keep your pecker up is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously, pecker has the same slang meaning there), but to be stuffed is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, “I couldn’t eat another thing; I’m stuffed,” an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone’s fanny; in England it means a woman’s pudenda.
Other terms are less graphic, but no less confusing. English people bathe wounds but not their babies; they bath their babies. Whereas an American wishing to get clean would bathe in a bathtub, an English person would bath in a bath. English people do bathe, but what they mean by that is to go for a swim in the sea. Unless, of course, the water is too cold (as it always is in Britain)”
“Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post.”
Cross-Pollination
“According to a study by Magnus Ljung of Stockholm University, more than half of all Swedes now make plurals by adding -s, after the English model, rather than by adding -ar, -or, or -er, in the normal Swedish way.”
“Other nations have left the words largely intact but given the spelling a novel twist. Thus the Ukrainian herkot might seem wholly foreign to you until you realized that a herkot is what a Ukrainian goes to his barber for. Similarly, unless you heard them spoken, you might not instantly recognize ajskrym, muving pikceris, and peda as the Polish for ice cream, the Lithuanian for moving pictures, and the Serbo-Croatian for payday. The champion of this naturalization process must be the Italian schiacchenze, which is simply a literal rendering of the English shake hands.
The Japanese are particular masters at the art of seizing a foreign word and alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds something like a native product. Thus the sumato (smart) and nyuu ritchi (newly rich) Japanese person seasons his or her conversation with upatodatu expressions like gurama foto (glamour photo), haikurasu (high class), kyapitaru gein (capital gain), and rushawa (rush hour). Sebiro, for a suit of clothes, looks convincingly native until you realize that it is a corruption of Savile Row, the London street where the finest suits are made.”
“The most relentless borrowers of English words have been the Japanese. The number of English words current in Japanese has been estimated to be as high as 20,000.”
“As a result of these various efforts, the French are forbidden from saying pipeline (even though they pronounce it “peepleen”), but must instead say oleoduc. They cannot take a jet airplane, but instead must board an avion à réaction. A hamburger is a steak haché. Chewing gum has become pâte à mâcher. The newspaper Le Monde sarcastically suggested that sandwich should be rendered as “deux morceaux de pain avec quelque chose au milieu.”
Estimates of the number of anglicismes in French have been put as high as 5 percent, though Le Monde thinks the true total is nearer 2 percent or less. (Someone else once calculated that an anglicisme appeared in Le Monde once every 166 words — or well under 1 percent of the time.) So it is altogether possible that the French are making a great deal out of very little. Certainly the incursion of English words is not a new phenomenon. Le snob, le biftek, and even le self-made man go back a hundred years or more, while ouest (west) has been in French for 700 years and rosbif (roast beef) for 350. More than. one observer has suggested that what really rankles the French is not that they are borrowing so many words from the rest of the world but that the rest of the world is no longer borrowing so many from them. As the magazine Le Point put it: “Our technical contribution stopped with the word chauffeur.”
The French, it must be said, have not been so rabidly anglophobic as has sometimes been made out. From the outset the government conceded defeat on a number of words that were too well established to drive out: gadget, holdup, weekend, blue jeans, self-service, manager, marketing, and many others. Between 1977 and 1987, there were just forty prosecutions for violations of the language laws, almost always involving fairly flagrant abuses. TWA, for instance, was fined for issuing its boarding passes in English only.”
Names
“A Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners — this is a basic requirement of most British institutions — and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.
However unlikely a pub’s name may sound, there is usually some explanation rooted in the depths of history. British inns were first given names in Roman times, 2,000 years ago, but the present quirky system dates mostly from the Middle Ages, when it was deemed necessary to provide travelers, most of them illiterate, with some sort of instantly recognizable symbol. The simplest approach, and often the most prudent, was to adopt a royal or aristocratic coat of arms. Thus a pub called the White Hart indicates ancient loyalty to Richard II (whose decree it was, incidentally, that all inns should carry signs), while an Eagle and Child denotes allegiance to the Earls of Derby and a Royal Oak commemorates Charles II, who was forced to hide in an oak tree after being defeated by Cromwell during the English Civil War. (If you look carefully at the pub sign, you can usually see the monarch hiding somewhere in the branches.) The one obvious shortcoming of such a system was that names had to be hastily changed every time a monarch was toppled. Occasionally luck would favor the publicans, as when Richard III (symbolized by a white boar) was succeeded by the Earl of Oxford (blue boar) and amends could be simply effected with a pot of paint. But pubkeepers quickly realized that a more cost-effective approach was to stick to generic names, which explains why there are so many pubs called the Queen’s Head (about 300), King’s Head (400), and Crown (the national champion at more than 1,000).”
“Two people named, say, Peter living in the same hamlet might adopt or be given second names to help distinguish them from each other — so that one might be called Peter White-Head and the other Peter Son of John (or Johnson) — but these additional names were seldom passed on. The business of acquiring surnames was a long one that evolved over centuries rather than years.
As might be expected, it began at the top of the social scale and worked its way down. In England last names did not become usual until after the Norman conquest, and in many other European countries, such as Holland, they evolved much later still. Most surnames come ultimately, if not always obviously, from one of four sources: place-names (e.g., Lincoln, Worthington), nicknames (Whitehead, Armstrong), trade names (Smith, Carpenter), and patronymics, that is names indicating a familial relationship (Johnson, Robertson). In his lifetime a person might be known by a variety of names — for instance, as Peter the Butcher Who Lives by the Well at Putney Green or some such. This would eventually transmute into Peter Butcher or Peter Green or Peter Wells. Often in such cases the person would take his name from the figure on a nearby inn sign. In the Middle Ages, when the ability to read could scarcely be assumed, it was common for certain types of businesses to have symbols outside their doors. The striped barber pole is a holdover from those days. A wine merchant would always have a bush by his front door. Hence his neighbor might end up being called George Bush.
Two events gave a boost to the adoption of surnames in England. The first was the introduction of a poll tax in 1379, which led the government to collect the name of every person in the country aged sixteen or over, and the second was the enactment of the Statute of Additions in 1413, which required that all legal documents contain not just the person’s given name, but also his or her occupation and place of abode. These two pieces of medieval bureaucracy meant that virtually everyone had to settle on a definite and fixed surname.”
“Many others are not obvious, either because the craft has died or become rare, as with Fuller (a cleanser of cloths) and Fletcher (a maker of bows and arrows) or because the spelling has been corrupted in some way, as with Bateman (a corrupted form of boatman) or because the name uses a regionalism, as with Akerman (a provincial word for a plowman). It mustn’t be forgotten that this was a time of great flux in the English language, when many regional spellings and words were competing for dom-inance. Thus such names as Hill, Hall, and Hull could all originally have meant Hill but come from different parts of the country. Smith is the most common name in America and Britain, but it is also one of the most common in nearly every other European language. The German Schmidt, the French Ferrier, Italian Ferraro, Spanish Herrero, Hungarian Kovacs, and Russian Kusnetzov are all Smiths.”
“Another superficially puzzling thing is why many people have ecclesiastical names like Bishop, Monk, Priest, and Prior when such figures were presumably celibate and unable to pass on their names. The reason here is that part of the original name has probably been lost. The full name may once have been the “Bishop’s man” if he was a servant or “Priest’s Hill” if that was where he lived.”
“183 of the 200 most common last names in America are British. However, a few names that are common in America are noticeably less common in Britain. Johnson is the second most common name in the United States (after Smith), but comes much further down the list in Britain. The reason for this is of course the great influx of Swedes to America in the nineteenth century – though in fact Johnson is not a native Swedish name. It is an Americanizing of the Swedish Jonsson or Johansson. Another name much more often encountered in America than Britain is Miller. In Britain, millers were unpopular throughout much of history because of their supposed tendency to cheat the farmers who brought them grain. So it was not a flattering name. A modern equivalent might be the name Landlord. Most Millers in America were in fact originally Muellers or Müllers. The German word had the same meaning but did not carry the same derisory connotations.”
“In American speech there is a decided preference to stress the last or next to last syllable in a person’s name. Thus Italians coming to America who called themselves “Es-PO-si-to” had the name changed to “Es-po-SI-to.” Again, this happened with British names as well. Purcell, Bernard, and Barnett, which are pronounced in Britain as “persul,” “bernurd,” and “barnutt,” became in America “pur-SELL,” “ber-NARD,” and “bar-NETT.” But this process wasn’t extended to all names: Mitchell and Barnum, for instance, were left with the stress on the first syllable.”
“Yucatán in Mexico means “What?” or “What are you saying?” —the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The term Dutch is similarly based on a total misapprehension. It comes from Deutsch.”
“Rolls-Royce, the car group, deals with about 500 trademark infringement cases a year (mostly plumbers advertising themselves as “the Rolls-Royce of plumbers” and that sort of thing). Other companies have been less vigilant, or at least less successful — Aspirin, cellophane, yo-yo, and escalator were all once brand names that lost their protection.”
Swearing
“Some cultures don’t swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words.
But most cultures swear and have been doing so for a very long time. Dr. J. N. Adams of Manchester University in England studied swearing by Romans and found that they had 800 “dirty” words (for want of a better expression). We, by contrast, have only about twenty or so, depending on how you define the term.”
“Most of our swear words have considerable antiquity. Modern English contains few words that would be unhesitatingly understood by an Anglo-Saxon peasant of, say, the tenth century A.D. but tits is one of them. So is fart, believe it or not.”
“Pussy, for the vagina, goes back at least to the 1600s. Arse is Old English. Common names for the penis, such as dick, peter, and percy (used variously throughout the English-speaking world), go back at least 150 years, though they may be very much older. Jock was once also common in this respect, but it died out, though it survives in jockstrap.”
“Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, an English journalist, they are pithy poems that always start with someone’s name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject’s life. To wit:
Sir Humphry Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having invented sodium.”
“Occasionally people grow so carried away with the possibilities of wordplay that they weave it into their everyday language. The most famous example of this in America is boontling, a made-up language once spoken widely in and around Boonville, California. According one story on how it began (and there are several to choose from) two sets of brothers, the Duffs and the Burgers, were sitting around the Anytime Saloon in Boonville one day in 1892 when they decided for reasons of amusement to devise a private language based partly on their common Scottish-Irish heritage, partly on words from the Pomo Indians living nearby, but mostly on their own gift for coming up with colorful secret words. The dea was that no one would be able to understand what mey were talking about, but as far as that went the plan was a failure because soon pretty well everyone in town was talking Boontling, or harpin’ boont as they put it locally, and for at least forty years it became the common linguistic currency in the isolated town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. It became so much a part of the local culture that some people sometimes found it took them a minute or two to readjust to the English-speaking world when they ventured out of their valley. With time, the language grew to take in about 1,200 words, a good many of them salacious, as you might expect with a private language.
Many expressions were taken from local characters. Coffee was called zeese after the initials of a camp cook named Zachariah Clifton who made coffee you could stand a spoon up in. A hardworking German named Otto inspired the term otting for diligent work. A goatee became a billy ryan. A kerosene lantern was a floyd hutsell. Pie was called charlie brown because a local of that name always ate his pie before he ate the rest of his meal. A prostitute was a madge. A doctor was a shoveltooth on account of the protruding teeth of an early GP. Other words were based on contractions — forbs for four bits, toobs for two bits, hairk for a haircut, smalch for small change. Others contained literary or biblical allusions. Thus an illegitimate child was a bulrusher. Still others were metaphorical. A heavy rain was a trashlifter and a really heavy rain was a loglifter. But many of the most memorable terms were onomatopoeic, notably one of the terms for sexual intercourse, ricky chow, said to be the noise bedsprings make when pressed into urgent service. A great many of the words had sexual provenance, such as burlapping, a euphemism for the sexual act, based on a local anecdote involving a young couple found passing an hour in that time-honored fashion on a stack of old gunny sacks at the back of the general store.
Although some people can still speak Boontling, it is not as widely used as it once was.”
