A short history of English words 9 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1086.

We'll also find it in written English. Did you notice an example at the end of the previous chapter? It's by no means the first time that the expression has been used in print. Indeed, in 2002 it was part of a book title: You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet: The Future of Media and the Global Expert System . And several other titles have included an ain't , such as Ain't Misbehavin': A Good Behaviour Guide for Family Dogs and It Ain't Necessarily So: Investigating the Truth of the Biblical Past. The nonstandard form, unusual in print, grabs the attention.

In these last two cases there's an allusion to a well-known song. We seem to have stored away in our memory such phrases as ain't misbehavin' (the name of a Louis Armstrong hit from the 1929 musical comedy Hot Chocolates ) and can bring them out again as required, confident that other people will recognise the allusions. Nor is it only song that uses the word. It Ain't Half Hot, Mum has entered British consciousness as a result of a popular TV programme. It ain't over till the fat lady sings has prompted a sports commentary cliché.

Ain't has had an unusual history. It's a shortened form of several words — am not, are not, is not, has not and have not . It appears in written English in the 18th century in various plays and novels, first as an't and then as ain't . During the 19th century it was widely used in representations of regional dialect, especially Cockney speech in the UK, and became a distinctive feature of colloquial American English. But when we look at who is using the form in 19th-century novels, such as those by Dickens and Trollope, we find that the characters are often professional and upper-class. That's unusual: to find a form simultaneously used at both ends of the social spectrum. Even as recently as 1907, in a commentary on society called The Social Fetich , Lady Agnes Grove was defending ain't I as respectable upper-class colloquial speech — and condemning aren't I !

She was in a rapidly diminishing minority. Prescriptive grammarians had taken against ain't , and it would soon become universally condemned as a leading marker of uneducated usage. There was a chorus of criticism in 1961 when the editor of Webster's Third New International Dictionary decided it was so widespread, even among cultivated speakers, that he could not possibly omit it. Rarely has a single word attracted such fury. But, as gotcha and other non-standard spellings illustrate, it's by no means alone (§88).

. Trek — a word from Africa (19th century)

In 1883, Olive Schreiner published a novel in London under the pseudonym of Ralph Iron. It was called The Story of an African Farm — a tale about a strong, independent-minded woman working on an isolated ostrich farm. The first novel to come out of South Africa, it became a bestseller.

While she was writing her book, Schreiner knew she had a problem. How was she to present the South African setting in an intelligible way? The opening lines of her story paint a picture of the countryside. It talks about karroo bushes, kopjes and sheep kraals . How would British readers know what she was talking about?

Her solution was to put a glossary of the most important words at the front of the book. There the reader would learn that the karroo was a ‘wide sandy plain', a kopje was ‘a small hillock' and a kraal was ‘the space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches, into which sheep or cattle are driven at night'. The words included animals (meerkat , ‘a small weasel-like animal'), people (predikant , ‘parson'), food (bultong , ‘dried meat'), clothing (kappje , ‘a sun-bonnet') and various domestic objects and activities. Most of the words were of Afrikaans origin, but some were adaptations of British words. An upsitting , for instance, was a custom in Boer courtship: ‘the man and girl are supposed to sit up together the whole night.'

It was during the 19th century that words from Africa began to make an impact on English vocabulary. Previously, there had been very few. Yam and banana had arrived during the 16th century, and a few more followed, such as harmattan (a type of wind) and zebra . In South Africa, kraal appears in the 18th century, first in the sense of ‘village', then in Schreiner's sense of ‘animal enclosure'. Hundreds of words remained local to South Africa, such as bioscope (‘cinema') and dorp (‘village'), along with borrowings from indigenous languages, such as maningi (‘very') and induna (‘headman'). Several became part of standard English, such as commando, spoor and veld , as well as politically loaded terms such as resettlement and apartheid . But few have achieved such general usage as trek .

Trek arrived in the 1840s, meaning a journey by ox-wagon, very much associated with Boer movements in the region following the first ‘Great Trek'. It developed several senses in South African English and came to be used in a number of compounds, such as trek path (‘right of way') and trek swarm (‘migrating honey bees'). But a century later, it was being used for any arduous overland journey in any part of the world. It became the perfect media word to describe dramatic explorations of jungles, deserts and ice caps.

Then trek went in a different direction. People began to use it for activities which, in Boer terms, would have seemed totally trivial. A boring or routine trip to the shops was called a trek . People trekked from home to their offices. Trekking holidays became popular, with trekkers warned to choose a level of physical commitment they could cope with. It didn't even have to be a physical task. You could go on a mental trek , if you were going on an emotional journey or having difficulty thinking something out.

In the 1960s, there was an unpredictable development: a use developed with a capital T . Devotees of a new science fiction television series came to be called Trekkies or Trekkers (the choice was serious, as each name had its supporters and critics). In 1997 a documentary film about the fans was called Trekkies . The term began to be used beyond the series: anyone obsessed with fantasy space travel might be labelled a trekkie (with a small t ). Thanks to Star Trek , the word has regained its ‘long-distance' meaning, boldly going where no loanword has gone before.

. Hello — progress through technology (19th century)

It's such a natural expression, used every day as a greeting. Surely this is one of those words which has been in the language for ever? In fact, its first recorded use is less than 200 years old.

English people have been using h -words to catch each other's attention since Anglo-Saxon times. Hey and ho are recorded in the 13th century, and hi in the 15th. Hollo , hillo , holla , halloo and other shouts used in hunting are known from the 16th century, and are doubtless much older. For greetings, one of the words used by the Anglo-Saxons was hal (‘whole', ‘healthy') in such expressions as ‘be healthy'. Hail appeared in the 13th century. But we have to wait until the 19th century to see the modern greeting.

When it emerges, we find it in several spellings. All five vowels are used: hallo , hello , hillo, hollo and hullo . The variations arose because the stress in the word was on the second syllable, making it difficult to hear the quality of the vowel in the first. Today, hello is the usual spelling, about four times more common than hallo — except when authors are putting words into the mouths of policemen: Hallo, 'allo, 'allo says PC Palk, answering the phone in Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library .

^{13. An early advertisement for Bell Telephones in the USA, emphasising the social role of the phone in a family context. When the telephone first arrived, there was a degree of concern that it might herald the end of traditional face-to-face social interaction. Ads like this one were intended to counter that scepticism.}

Why did hello catch on? The word was around in the early 1800s, but used very informally, often as a part of street slang. The more formal usage seems to have emerged when the telephone was invented. People had to have a way of starting a conversation or letting the other person know they were there, especially if they were using a line where the connection was always open. Various forms were suggested, such as Ahoy! , Are you there? and Are you ready? , but Thomas Edison, the inventor of the telephone, evidently preferred Hello . This was the word he shouted into the mouthpiece of his device when he discovered a way of recording sound in 1877. And there is a famous letter which he wrote to a colleague about the telephone saying, ‘I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.' Within a decade, the women who were employed as the first telephone operators were being called hello girls .

Hello illustrates how technology can influence vocabulary, pushing a word in a new direction. Other uses continue to emerge, of course. In particular, since the 1980s hello has developed an ironic attention-getting use, implying that someone has failed to understand or has missed the point in some way: ‘I mean, hello! How crazy was that?' But its future as an informal greeting is being seriously challenged by Hi , which emerged in the USA in the 19th century. Hi is now heard globally across the age range — though it's rather less widespread among older people, where hello is still the norm — and has become frequent in written English too. It's the commonest way of beginning an email to someone we know. Two letters are quicker to type than five, no matter how old you are. Technology rules, once again.

. Dragsman — thieves' cant (19th century)

Dictionaries chiefly deal in the words used by the great and the good. Dr Johnson started a trend when he paid special attention in his Dictionary entries to the cultured usage of the best authors, ‘the wells of English undefiled'. There's little sign in his pages of the everyday slang of ordinary people — and certainly no coverage of the secretive usage (often called cant , or argot ) of criminals. But villains have vocabulary too.

It's not easy to study, though. If we wanted to collect the words used by criminals and establish their senses, we would have to enter their world and stay for quite some time. A risky business. But some intrepid lexicographers have done precisely that.

One of the first was George Andrewes, who compiled A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages in 1809. He had a highly practical aim in mind. Thieves have a language of their own, he says, so that when they get together in the streets passers-by won't understand what they're plotting. His Dictionary , he hopes, will make it easier to detect their crimes: ‘by the perusal of this Work, the Public will become acquainted with their mysterious Phrases; and be better able to frustrate their designs.'

Dragsmen were one of the types of villain he had in mind. In the 18th century, a drag was a private horse-drawn vehicle similar to a stage coach, with seats inside and on the top. A dragsman was its driver. But the term was also used for someone who stole (‘dragged') goods or luggage from vehicles. They were also called draggers , for obvious reasons. Drag went out of use for the name of a vehicle once the motor car was invented; but it surfaced again in the 1950s when the American sport of drag racing developed (initially along the drag , or main street, of a town).

Andrewes provides a long list of names for the different kinds of criminal activity. Some, such as footpads and coiners (‘counterfeiters'), are still used today. Fencer is close to what we now say for a receiver of stolen goods (a fence ). And we might guess what a water-pad is, on analogy with footpad . Someone who robs ships.

Several of the unfamiliar names are highly descriptive. A cloak-twitcher , as its form suggests, was someone who would lurk in a dark place and snatch a cloak from the shoulders of its wearer. A beau-trap was a well-dressed confidence trickster. A diver was a pickpocket. Others are less transparent, and their origins aren't known. Housebreakers were kencrackers , from an old slang term for a house, ken , but where that word comes from nobody knows. A prigger was a thief. A lully-prigger was a linen-thief. Nobody knows where these words come from either.

Two of the most puzzling terms listed by Andrewes are clapperdogeons and gammoners . A clap-perdogeon — also spelled clapperdudgeon — was a beggar. It seems to be a combination of clapper (‘lid of a begging dish') and dudgeon (‘hilt of a dagger'). Maybe beggars knocked the lid of their dish with it. A gammoner was a pickpocket's accomplice — someone who held the attention of the target while a pocket was picked. Give me gammon , the pickpocket might say to the accomplice. Maybe gammon comes from game , in its sense of a ‘scheme' or ‘intrigue' — we still say such things as so that's your little game and two can play at that game . Or could there be an obscure link with the game of backgammon (‘back-game')? Again, nobody knows.

. Lunch — U or non-U (19th century)

What do you call the meal you have in the middle of the day? For many readers, there is no question: lunch . For many readers, there is no question: dinner . Clearly, there's an issue here, and it's one that has been a feature of English vocabulary for a long time.

In Britain, the issue was highlighted in the 1950s, when considerable media attention was paid to the vocabulary differences between upper-class (or ‘U') speakers and those belonging to other classes (‘non-U'). It was claimed that U speakers said lunch or luncheon ; everyone else said dinner . And similarly, U-speakers were supposed to say vegetables , lavatory paper and bike ; non-U speakers greens , toilet paper and cycle . Long lists were compiled to illustrate the supposed linguistic ‘class war'.

The situation was never as neat and tidy as the distinction suggested. U-speakers certainly called their midday meal lunch(eon) , but if they had a dog they would give it its dinner at that time of day. One didn't invite one's dog to take lunch. Similarly, U-children would also be summoned to dinner , especially in school, where the meal in the middle of the day would be served by dinner ladies . Most Christmas dinners were eaten in the early afternoon. So were Thanksgiving dinners . And the words sometimes went in the opposite direction. Businessmen having an evening meal in a restaurant might nonetheless pay for it with luncheon vouchers .

The words have gone backwards and forwards in recent centuries. Originally, there was only dinner — a word that arrived from French in the 13th century to describe the chief meal of the day. This was usually eaten around midday — as is clear from many observations. In Shakespeare's As You Like It (IV.i.166), Orlando tells Rosalind he has to leave her for two hours: ‘I must attend the Duke at dinner. By two o'clock I will be with thee again.' It was the same in the 18th century. James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson , writes of being invited to ‘dinner at two'.

The words luncheon and lunch both arrived in the late 16th century, though not in their modern sense. A lunch(eon) was a thick piece of food — a hunk of something. People would talk about ‘a luncheon of cheese' or ‘a lunch of bacon'. Then luncheon began to move in the direction of its modern meaning. In the 17th century, it was a light repast taken between the main meals. There would be breakfast, then luncheon, then (midday) dinner; or, dinner, then luncheon, then supper. In the 1820s Thomas Carlyle writes about an evening luncheon . And in the USA there are instances of luncheons being served as late as midnight.

The modern usage of lunch isn't recorded until 1829, and not everyone liked it. Some considered it a vulgar abbreviation; others, a ridiculous affectation. At the same time, luncheon was attracting criticism as a word unsuitable for use in high society. But dinner was also being frowned upon, because of its growing lower-class associations. So what should people say? There were some strange coinages as they searched for a solution. Lunch-dinner is recorded a few times during the century, as are luncheon-dinner and dinner-supper . It must all have been very confusing.

Eventually, as we now know, the present-day use of lunch and dinner became established among the fashionable classes. As the 20th century dawned, the pages of Punch magazine are full of references to business lunches and evening dinner parties. Meanwhile, the lower orders of society continued to use dinner for their midday meal, and so the U/non-U distinction was born. But the story of lunch and dinner is not over yet. Expressions such as lunch-box and packed lunch have reinforced a change of usage among many non-U children, so that they now happily talk about school lunches (though still served by dinner ladies). However, when chef Jamie Oliver started his campaign on British television in 2005 for more nutritious food in school lunches, he called it Jamie's School Dinners.

. Dude — a cool usage (19th century)

Dude is another word whose origin is unknown. All we know is that it suddenly appeared in 1883 in New York. The London newspaper The Graphic reported its arrival in March of that year as ‘American slang for a new kind of American young man'. A couple of months later, the North Adams Transcript of Massachusetts confirmed its spread: ‘The new coined word “dude”… has travelled over the country with a great deal of rapidity since but two months ago it grew into general use in New York.' Rarely do we find such a precise dating of a word (§83). But who coined it, and why, remains a mystery.

Dudes were aesthetes and dandies — any man who was extremely fastidious about his clothes, speech and general behaviour. They often dressed in a British way and affected a British tone of voice. If you were clothed like a dude, you were duded up . But soon the word began to extend its meaning. Any city-dweller who went ‘out West' as a tourist would be called a dude. Dude ranches developed to cater for the demand from city dudes. And it wasn't long before the female dude was identified — and given a name: dudess or dudine , though neither of these words has survived.

By the turn of the century, anyone who stood out in a crowd was being called a dude. In small-group settings, such as school classrooms, street gangs and jazz clubs, it became a term of approval. Eventually any group of people hanging out together would refer to themselves as dudes. It became one of a large number of ‘cool' slang terms for people, such as cat (in the jazz world) and geek (in the computer world).

By the 1970s dude had become a chatty term of address for both men and women, especially popular in American university campuses and often heard in high school and college movies. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) contained such famous lines as ‘All we are is dust in the wind, dude!' and ‘How's it goin', royal ugly dudes?' Bill and Ted's teacher, Mr Ryan, is unimpressed by the usage.

Mr Ryan: So Bill, what you're telling me, essentially, is that Napoleon was a short, dead dude.

Bill: Well, yeah.

Ted (to Bill): You totally blew it, dude.

. Brunch — a portmanteau word (19th century)

We know the year that brunch entered the English language. According to the satirical magazine Punch , it was 1895. This is what a writer in August 1896 had to say about it:

To be fashionable nowadays we must ‘brunch'. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter's Weekly , and indicating a combined breakfast and lunch.

Indeed he did. Beringer's article, ‘Brunch: A Plea', proposed an alternative to the Sunday ‘postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savoury pies'. Brunch, said Beringer, ‘puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week'.

There certainly is a quirky freshness about the name, which is still with us. It caught on, and by the 1930s the noun was also being used as a verb: ‘I brunched with Jim', someone might say. We also find it being used to make compound words, such as brunch-style and brunch box . In the 1940s, a type of women's short house-coat was called a brunch coat . By the 1960s a new kind of eating-house had emerged: the brunch-bar . And Cadbury used that name for a chocolate-covered cereal bar.

The Punch writer called brunch a portmanteau word. A portmanteau , as its French origin suggests, was a small case which a horse-rider could use to carry (porter = ‘to carry') a cloak (manteau ) or other clothes or belongings. But it changed its meaning in the late 19th century, after Lewis Carroll used it in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) to explain his coinages in ‘Jabberwocky'. Slithy , says Humpty Dumpty, ‘means lithe and slimy … it's like a portmanteau — there are two meanings packed up into one word'. Today, linguists tend to call such words blends — but there is something rather appealing about Lewis Carroll's usage which has kept the older term in vogue.

The meaning of a portmanteau word is different from the sum of its parts. Brunch isn't two meals — breakfast and lunch — but a meal that is different from either. And this is the pattern we find in all portmanteau words. A spork is neither a spoon nor a fork, but a new device that mixes properties of both. A motorcade is not a motor car nor a cavalcade, but a new kind of procession.

Portmanteaus have been part of the English language for centuries. Tragicomedy dates from the 16th century; Oxbridge from the 19th. But blending became one of the most popular ways of coining new words during the 20th century. Spork is first recorded in 1909 and motorcade in 1913, and hundreds of others followed — such as gasohol, internet, interpol, motel, chocoholic, docusoap and guestimate . Informal English has a special liking for them — fantabulous, ginormous, happenstance . The process is especially popular today (§98).

Some of the most unusual blends appear in house-names — if Derek and Susan set up house together, they might call their place Dersan or Suerek . And the tabloid media love to join the names of famous couples together in a personal portmanteau. Who was/were Brangelina ? Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. And who was/were Bennifer ? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Whether the whole is different from the sum of the parts, in such cases, is a moot point.

. Dinkum — a word from Australia (19th century)

On 29 April 1770, Captain Cook arrived in Australia. Two months later he writes in his journal: ‘One of the Men saw an Animal something less than a greyhound; it was of a Mouse Colour, very slender made, and swift of Foot.' They soon learned its local name. Cook writes on 4th August: ‘called by the Natives Kangooroo, or Kanguru'. It was the first of many words that would eventually become a feature of Australian English.

The aboriginal languages of the region supplied some of the most distinctive items. Local animals, landscape and culture are reflected in billabong, dingo, koala, wombat, budgerigar, kookaburra and boomerang , Less distinctive, but more numerous, were words from British English used in new ways. A paddock in Britain was a small animal enclosure; now it described a vast tract of rural land. Swag was a slang word for a thief's booty; it came to mean a bundle of personal belongings carried by a traveller in the bush. A footpath is paved in Australia — what in Britain would be a pavement and in the USA a sidewalk .

Bush itself was one of these changes of sense, referring to the huge expanse of natural countryside that formed inland Australia. It became the basis of a wide range of expressions, such as bush mouse and bush turkey , bush cucumber and bush tomato , bush ballad and bush medicine . Few have travelled outside Australia. An exception is bush telegraph , meaning the rapid spread of news or rumours.

Words from British regional dialects often underlie an Australian usage. Dinkum is a case in point. This is one of the best-known Australianisms, especially in the phrase fair dinkum . It appears in the 19th century in Britain, and is recorded by Joseph Wright in his English Dialect Dictionary . He found dinkum in Derbyshire and fair dinkum in Lincolnshire. Dinkum meant ‘hard work', and fair dinkum was your ‘fair share of work'.

These senses travelled to Australia, but soon developed more general meanings of ‘honest, genuine' and ‘good, excellent', which is how the word is used today. Its popularity is suggested by the way it developed alternative forms, shortening to dink and lengthening to dinki-di . The origin of the word isn't known. There are other uses, such as dink meaning ‘finely dressed' and dinky meaning ‘neat, small', all with a history in British dialects, but it's difficult to see how they relate to the Australian use.

Thanks to the international popularity of Australian films and TV programmes, the English-speaking world has come to be familiar with dinkum and other informal expressions such as cobber (‘mate'), pom (‘British person'), sheila (‘woman'), tucker (‘food') and g'day (as a greeting), as well as abbreviated forms such as beaut (as a term of praise) and arvo (‘afternoon'). Just occasionally, a colloquialism becomes part of international informal English. Barbies (‘barbecues') have been with us since the 1970s.

The down side of media presence is that it often paints an exaggerated picture of Australian English. Outsiders hear colourful phrases and assume that everyone talks in the same way. Books of Australianisms have collected such expressions as miserable as a bandicoot , flat out like a lizard drinking and he couldn't find a grand piano in a one-roomed house , but it's debatable just how many people have actually ever used them.

. Mipela — pidgin English (19th century)

You won't find mipela or mifela in a dictionary of standard English, but these words belong to the language nonetheless — used in different varieties of pidgin English. Mipela is one of the pronouns used in the pidgin language of Papua New Guinea called Tok Pisin (‘Pidgin Talk'). People generally have a low opinion of pidgin languages. They think of them as primitive compared with standard English, with little or no grammar and a tiny vocabulary.

In fact, a pidgin like Tok Pisin is startlingly sophisticated. Its vocabulary is large enough to cope with translations of the Bible and Shakespeare. And sometimes its expression is more subtle than standard English. The standard pronoun system is pretty simple, really. We have first person I (for singular) and we (for plural). Second person is you for both singular and plural. Third person is he , she or it (for singular) and they (for plural). It's not the best of systems. You , in particular, is ambiguous. If I say I'm talking to you , it's not possible to tell whether I'm addressing one person or several.

^{14. A sign in Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. It reads: ‘Beware of cattle', literally ‘look out' + ‘for' + ‘bull and cow'. Long is a general-purpose preposition with functions expressing such notions as ‘in', ‘of', and ‘on'. It's a shortened form of belong. When Prince Charles visited Papua New Guinea in 1966 he was described locally as nambawan pikinini bilong misis kwin (‘the number one child of Mrs Queen'). Princess Anne, correspondingly, was the nambawan gel (‘girl') pikinini bilong misis kwin .}