A short history of English words 10 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1318.

Tok Pisin does much better. It has four different ways of saying ‘you'. Yu , on its own, means I'm talking to one person. If I'm talking to two people, I say yutupela (‘you two'). If I'm talking to three people, I say yutripela (‘you three'). And if I'm talking to more than three people, I say yupela .

The same system operates for the third person. If I say em , I mean ‘he, she or it'. If I say tupela , I mean ‘they two'. Tripela means ‘they three'. And ol means ‘they four or more'.

The first person is even more sophisticated, as, in addition to mi (‘I'), Tok Pisin allows speakers to distinguish how many people are included in the conversation. Imagine John and Mary talking to a group. John says, ‘We're going to be late'. Does he mean ‘Mary and I are going to be late' or ‘All of us are going to be late'? In English, it isn't possible to decide without further exploration. In Tok Pisin, however, the distinction is clear. If John meant ‘one of you and me', he would say yumitupela . If he meant ‘two of you and me', he would say yumitripela . And if he meant ‘all of you and me', he would say yumipela .

But he could do something else. He could also say, addressing Mary, mitupela , which would mean ‘he or she and me, but not you'. If he said mitripela , it would mean ‘both of them and me, but not you'. And if he said mipela , he would mean ‘all of them and me, but not you'. Here he is excluding Mary, whereas with the examples in the previous paragraph he was including her. Standard English has nothing like this. All it has is the highly ambiguous we .

The vocabulary of the pidgin Englishes of the world contain tens of thousands of words. Many have a spelling which shows a clear link with the source language, such as kap (‘cup') and galas (‘glass'). Other words are more difficult to interpret, such as liklik (‘little') and wantaim (‘together'). Taken as a whole, along with the distinctive grammar and pronunciation, some analysts consider the differences from standard English to be so great that they think of pidgin Englishes as new languages. If they're right, we now have an English ‘family of languages' on earth.

. Schmooze — a Yiddishism (19th century)

It's the initial two sounds that give schmooze away as a Yiddish word. English words traditionally don't allow the sound sh to appear before a consonant. A combination of s + consonant is fine, as in spin, still and skin . But if anyone said shpin , shtill and shkin , we would think they had a speech defect — or were engaging in a bad imitation of Sean Connery.

Things changed in the late 19th century, when a new kind of loanword arrived from Yiddish. English previously had borrowed few words from this language — matzo (‘unleavened bread') was a very early one, first recorded in 1650. But we don't find much evidence of them in writing until the 19th century, when we get such words as kibosh (‘finishing off', 1836), nosh (‘food', 1873) chutzpah (‘brazen impudence', 1892), pogrom (‘organised massacre', 1891) — and schmooze (‘leisurely intimate chat', 1897).

Schmooze wasn't alone as the century turned. Apart from its derived forms (schmoozer, schmoozing ), it was accompanied by several other words beginning with schl- or schm- , such as schlemiel (‘clumsy person') and schmuck (‘objectionable person'). During the 1920s and '30s we find schlep (‘haul, toil') and its related forms, such as schlepping and schlepper (‘person of little worth, scrounger'), schnozzle and schnozz (‘nose') and schmaltz (‘melted chicken fat'), schmaltzy and schmaltziness , whose ‘greasy' connotations led to the word coming to mean ‘excessive sentimentality', especially when talking about writing, music and song. Schm- in particular seems to have caught on, because by the end of the decade we find it being used in a remarkable way, forming nonsense words.

‘There's a crisis,' says one person, and another disagrees. ‘Crisis-schmisis!' The usage conveys scepticism, disparagement or derision. There's no crisis, and the first speaker is stupid to suggest there is one. It's a simple sound substitution, and it became hugely popular, especially in the USA. Spelling varies, with words often appearing with shm- , but all kinds of words have been modified in this way, as in surveillance-shmurveillance, marathon-schmarathon, fancy-shmancy, baby-schmaby and holiday-schmoliday . It even led to a proper name. Joe Schmoe is a fictitious name for the ordinary American guy.

. OK — debatable origins (19th century)

The little word OK has a linguistic reputation that belies its size. Over a thousand words in English have an etymology which, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary , is ‘origin unknown'. Nobody knows where bloke comes from, or condom, gimmick, nifty, pimp, pooch, queasy, rogue or skiffle . Theories abound, of course, some very ingenious. Did nifty arise as a shortened form of magnificat ? Is gimmick from magicians' use of gimac , an anagram of magic ? But no word has attracted more theorising than OK .

Is it from Scottish och aye ? Is it from French au quai (the goods — or girls — have safely arrived ‘at the quayside')? Is it from Choctaw oke (‘it is')? Is it from Wolof okeh (‘yes'). Is it from Latin omnis korrecta (‘all correct', sometimes written by schoolmasters on homework)? Is it from the Greek letters omega + khi (an early incantation against fleas)? Is it from Obediah Kelly , a railwayman who used to authorise freight movements with his initials? There are dozens more.

^{15. Residents of an estate in Fulham, London, celebrate the Queen's silver jubilee in 1977. Decades later, the slogan shows no sign of disappearing. When Kate Middleton married Prince William in 2011, the Mail on Sunday carried the headline: ‘The Middle Class Rules OK.'}

Thanks to a fine piece of research by American lexicographer Allan Walker Read, we now know that all of these theories are wrong. It first appeared in 1839 in a Boston newspaper, where there was a vogue for inventing humorous abbreviations using initial letters — an early instance of a language game. KY , for example, would be used for the phrase know yuse (= ‘no use'). And OK comes from oll korrect , a humorous adaptation of the words all correct .

Why didn't it disappear, like the other abbreviations did? Because in 1840 it came to be associated with a totally different use — as a slogan during the 1840 US elections. It was the shortened form of Old Kinderhook , the nickname of President Martin Van Buren — Kinderhook being the name of his home-town in New York State. There was a Democratic OK Club , with its members called the OKs , and they had a war-cry: ‘Down with the Whigs, boys, OK!'

The combination of the two usages, in a very short space of time, resulted in the rapid use of OK as an interjection meaning ‘all right, good'. Other senses soon developed, such as ‘fashionable' (the OK thing to do ) and ‘trustworthy' (He's OK ). A century on, and the word was still developing new uses, such as ‘comfortable' (Are you OK with that? ). In British English, it received huge graffiti exposure during the 1970s, when the fad of saying that someone or something rules OK (= ‘is pre-eminent') was seen on walls all over the country.

But OK has a linguistic reputation for a second reason: the number of variant forms it has accumulated over the years. There are variant spellings (okay, okey ), a shortened version ('kay ) and several expanded forms (okie-dokie, okey doke(s), okey-cokey ). Today, I suppose it's the basic OK form which is most often encountered, thanks to the dialogue button on our computer screens. Press OK and something will happen!

. Ology — suffix into word (19th century)

Suffixes, unlike prefixes (§87), are reluctant to become independent words, so when we find it happening, it's a notable moment. Ology is probably the most famous member of what is a very small club.

There have been -ology endings for a long time. Theology and astrology are two of the oldest, from the 14th century. More recent formations are sociology and ecology . Humorous and creative coinages abound, from James Joyce's codology (‘hoaxing') to the dragonology of some children's books and the quirky titles of internet sites, such as cheeseology , tattoo-ology and (I kid you not) fartology . The ending means ‘the science or discipline' of something, and comes from Greek logos (‘word'). It literally translates as ‘one who speaks in a certain way'.

Ology , as a noun for a science, is first recorded in 1811, and by the time Charles Dickens was writing it was in common use. In Hard Times , Mrs Gradgrind reflects to her daughter about her headmaster husband, ‘a man of facts and calculations':

You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds from morning to night. If there is any Ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name.

There certainly had been a flood of ologies in the previous century, many of them cheeky coinages such as dogology and bugology .

The usage is still with us. In the 1980s, actress Maureen Lipman, playing the part of Jewish matriarch Beattie in a series of British television commercials for British Telecom, is on the phone to her grandson, who has just admitted to failing most of his exams. However, he has passed sociology, to which she replies proudly: ‘An ology! He gets an ology and he says he's failed! You get an ology, you're a scientist!' When the script-book was published in 1989, it was titled You Got An Ology? In 2000, this ad was voted 14th in Channel 4's ‘The Hundred Greatest Adverts.

If an ology was a branch of knowledge, then an expert in that subject was an ologist — a usage first recorded in 1839. Anything related to an ology was ological . Mrs Gradgrind hopes Louisa will turn all her ological studies to good account. And anything related to an ologist would be ologistic — a usage which has been spotted just once, in the mid-19th century.

Few other suffixes have made such progress. People who have a strong like or dislike for something have sometimes been called phils or philes (for) and phobes (against). In medicine, a disease of a certain kind has sometimes been called an itis . They aren't common. The only ending that could compete with ology is ism . At least two reference books have been published with the title Ologies and Isms , listing all the subjects ending in these ways.

We first find ism as a separate word in the 16th century, usually in the plural, and in a context where the writer is being critical of religions (one writes: Puritanism, Jesuitism, and other isms ). Dozens of coinages such as Communism and Impressionism led to ism being extended to movements in politics and art, and eventually to all kinds of beliefs and practices (a 20th-century writer: isms like racism and sexism ). Today, the easiest way of being scornful about a set of topics is to call them isms .

During the 19th century, the word attracted its own endings. An adherent of an ism was an ismatic . Ismatics could be ismatical . The world of isms was ismdom . Turning a topic into an ism was to ismatise it. We only lack a record of ismism , and I'm sure this will turn up one day. In the meantime, the negative associations of the word are growing. There is now an internet site called the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings: ISMS.

. Y'all — a new pronoun (19th century)

The problem with saying you is that it's ambiguous — it can mean one addressee or several (§69). So it's hardly surprising that people have made up new forms to try to get round the problem. The obvious solution, following the usual pattern for nouns, is to make a new plural by simply ‘adding an s ', and this was one of the first variants to emerge. We find it recorded in Irish English in the early 19th century. God bless yees! says a character in one of Maria Edgeworth's tales. And the spellings began to proliferate: yeez, yez, yiz . The speaker was always talking to more than one person.

Similar forms developed elsewhere. Yous was another Irish creation, and it was probably this one which spread to various parts of England, Australia and the USA, often spelled youse and sometimes yows . But as it spread, it gradually lost its plural sense. Now just one person could be addressed as yiz or youse . I often heard it used like that, both as singular and plural, when I was a teenager in Liverpool. It was the same sort of development that had happened to you in the Middle Ages, once people stopped using thou . The ambiguity was back.

The you forms that developed in the USA showed a similar pattern of development. Dialect usages such as yowe yens from East Anglia probably travelled across in the Mayflower , and settled down as youns or you-uns in the eastern states. It's still used there today for both singular and plural addressees.

Y'all is the most famous of all the new pronouns. It's a shortened form of you all , first recorded in southern states of the USA in the early 19th century. Usage varies quite a bit, with some people restricting it to plural addressees and some using it for single addressees as well. It's the singular usage which can come as a shock to a British person, being addressed by y'all for the first time and realising that nobody else is included. When this first happened to me, in Texas in the 1960s, I was completely taken by surprise. As I entered a store, the assistant greeted me with a Howdy, y'all , and I actually looked round to see who else had come into the store with me. But there was only me there. And as I left he said Y'all take care now .

Nobody knows for certain whether y'all started out as a local usage among the southern black population or whether it was introduced by white immigrants. Either way, it rapidly established its presence, and then became more widely used throughout the country. It even travelled abroad, thanks to the many novels, movies and television serials reflecting life in the US south. Y'all is the usual spelling, but we'll also find ya'll , yawl , yo-all and others.

So, if you already exists in modern English, why use y'all ? The two forms can be used for either singular or plural, so that can't be the reason. Is there a difference between saying I hope to see y'all and I hope to see you ? Most people find y'all ‘warmer' — a sign of familiarity, friendliness, informality or rapport. Some are still a bit suspicious of it and don't use it, perhaps because it reminds them of past ethnic tensions. But for many, today, it's simply customer-friendly.

. Speech-craft — an Anglo-Saxonism (19th century)

It was only a matter of time before the huge influx of words from Latin, Greek and the Romance languages produced an antagonistic reaction. In the 16th century, the English scholar John Cheke thought English was being ‘mangled' by all the classical words that were entering the language — the so-called ‘ink-horn' terms (§41). And in the 20th century, George Orwell was a loud voice complaining about the way some writers went out of their way to use a Latin or Greek word when a good old Anglo-Saxon one would do.

Nobody took this position to such extremes as did the 19th-century Dorsetshire poet William Barnes. He felt that if all non-Germanic words could be removed from English, the language would immediately become much more accessible and intelligible. So he looked for Anglo-Saxon replacements for foreign words. He resurrected long-dead words from Old English, such as inwit for conscience and word-hoard for vocabulary . And if there was no Old English word, he invented one. Ornithology became birdlore . Pram (perambulator ) became push-wainling . Alienate became unfrienden . Accelerate became onquicken . Arriving and departing became oncoming and offgoing . The whole approach was described in his book An Outline of English Speech-Craft , published in 1878.

The interest continues today. In 1966, Punch celebrated the 900th anniversary of the Norman Conquest by having British humorist Paul Jennings translate passages of Shakespeare into what he called ‘Anglish', such as Hamlet's famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be: that is the ask-thing'. And in 2009 David Cowley published How We'd Talk if the English had Won in 1066 . He suggests hundreds of Anglo-Saxon equivalences; and several of his coinages, it has to be admitted, have a certain appeal, such as sorrowword for lamentation , sameheart for unanimous and thankworthy for acceptable . I think it unlikely that Alcoholics Anonymous will ever rechristen itself as Unnamed Overdrinkers or Americans start talking about the Forthspell of Selfdom (Declaration of Independence). But stranger things have happened, in the history of English.

. DNA — scientific terminology (20th century)

It's much easier to have DNA as the heading for a chapter on scientific words than its full form: deoxyribonucleic acid. Far more people will recognise the first than the second. But both versions are typical of the way scientific language works. On the one hand, we find lengthy compound words; on the other, we find the abbreviations that make it possible for us to talk about these things without running out of breath.

Who knows how many scientific terms there are in English? One of the leading chemical dictionaries contains the names of around half a million compounds. How many species of insect are there? Well over a million have so far been identified. Plant species? Around 400,000. Presumably each of them has a name. There's little point in asking questions about totals when such large numbers are involved. No dictionary could ever hope to include them all (§60).

What general dictionaries do is include the terms from science and technology that are likely to have some currency outside of their specialised source. But even here the numbers are substantial. It's thought that around 80 per cent of the words in an unabridged English dictionary are going to be scientific terms. Where do they come from?

A large number come from Greek or Latin — anatomical terms, for example, such as abdomen, femur , vertebra, cerebrum, trachea and thyroid . But far more are the result of stringing together separate roots to make compound words of sometimes extraordinary length. De-oxy-ribo-nucle-ic is already quite complex at five elements. And that's the short version. In its full form it's actually cited as the longest scientific name by the Guinness Book of Records , with 16,569 elements.

Prefixes and suffixes are especially important. Scientific terms, of course, use everyday prefixes, such as pre- , un- and de- , but several have special scientific relevance. For example, great use is made of prefixes that express numbers (bi- , mono- , poly- ) and metrical quantities (nano- , micro- , pico- ). Some of these are becoming more familiar from their use in computing (§99). A few years ago, prefixes such as kilo- , mega- and giga- would have been obscure to most people, but today, thanks to kilobytes , megabytes and gigabytes , they are in everyday use.

The -ic of nucleic is one of several suffixes we associate with chemistry. Others include the -ene of acetylene and benzene , the -ol of ethanol and alchohol , the -ium of chromium and sodium and the -ate of nitrate and sulphate . But each science has its own distinctive forms, as suggested by botany's spermatozoid , geology's cretaceous and zoology's stegosaurus . Indeed, some of these suffixes are so distinctive that they can prompt errors in the unwary. In 2010 it was reported that a student, in an essay, thought a thesaurus was a species of dinosaur from Jurassic Park .

. Garage — a pronunciation problem (20th century)

Words are identified through their spelling and their pronunciation, so it's a natural tendency to think that both are fixed. In fact, spelling often varies, as we have seen (§51). And we tend to underestimate the amount of variation that exists in pronunciation.

Choices vary between British and American English. Sometimes it's a straight swap: tomahto in Britain, tomayto in the US; the first syllable of yoghurt in Britain with the vowel of dog and in the US with the vowel of oh . Some US pronunciations have taken root in Britain: I normally say schedule with a sh- , but my children all say it with a sk- . As a result, I now use both pronunciations, and never quite know which one is going to pop up next in my speech.

In other cases, the situation is more complicated, because one of the dialects has alternatives. In British English, vase is ‘vahz', whereas in American English some people say ‘vaze' (rhyming with haze ) and some ‘vace' (rhyming with place ). Conversely, in American English glacier is pronounced ‘glaysher', whereas in British English it is either ‘glassier' or ‘glaysier'. Garage is like glacier . In America it is ‘garahge', with the stress on the second syllable. In Britain it is either ‘ga rahge' or ‘ga rridge'.

Garage is a good word to choose as a reminder that pronunciation is always changing. When the BBC was formed, it set up an Advisory Committee on Spoken English to advise announcers how they should pronounce words which were unfamiliar or had competing usages. In their 1926 publication, they recommended ‘garahge'. But by 1931 the members of the Committee had changed their mind. They say, ‘Garage has been granted unconditional British nationality, and may now be rhymed with marriage and carriage .' Both pronunciations are still heard today.

Several of the other BBC recommendations of the 1920s have long disappeared. They thought fetish should be pronounced ‘feetish', and Celtic (the race, not the football team) as ‘seltic'. They opted for airplane , not aeroplane . And they sometimes put the stress in places where hardly anybody — perhaps nobody — would put it now, such as acumen , anchovy and precedence . I have to say ‘perhaps', because the old pronunciations could still be in the consciousness of some senior citizens, much as some continue to say ‘forrid' for forehead .

Over half the words in a Pronouncing Dictionary will display alternative forms, though in many cases the differences are slight. Here are some of the more noticeable ones. Do you say the first letters of either with the sound of the vowel in see or in sigh ? Do you say example with the a as in cat or as in calm ? Envelope with the e of hen or the o of on ? Greasy with the s of see or the z of zoo ? Is it a hotel or an 'otel — or even an hotel ? Does tortoise rhyme with bus or voice ? Some stories depend on these variations, such as the one about the child who heard a priest ask the congregation to say ‘the prayer that Jesus taught us' and wondered why Jesus had a pet. People who say tortoice don't seem to find it funny.

. Escalator — word into name into word (20th century)

Imagine you invent something and you want to give it a name — say a device which automatically repairs non-functioning keys on computer keyboards. You think up a word which you think suits the product — Keefiks , shall we say, based on key + fix — check it hasn't been used by anyone else, protect it by registering a trademark and go into business. It takes off. You sell millions. And before you know it, the name has become part of the language. People talk about keefiksing their machines. The word becomes a metaphor. People start saying such things as I'm keefiksing my apartment and I need a spiritual keefiks .

You're quite pleased. And then along comes another firm with a keyboard-fixing technology that is different from yours, and people call it the latest keefiks , with a small k . You object. Keefiks should have a capital K , you insist. They'll have to call their product something else. You need to protect your brand. But it's too late. Other firms have already joined in. Shops start advertising all keefiks models now in stock . People ask for a keefiks for their birthday, regardless of make. A Hollywood movie about alien keyboard manipulators is called Keefiks Attacks . You appoint lawyers and go to court, arguing that others should not be using your word in this way. And you lose.

Dozens of real words have been through this scenario. One of the first was escalator . Various designs for moving staircase were invented in the 19th century, but the rights to the name escalator were purchased by the Otis Elevator Company. It was a word coined from scala (Latin, ‘a ladder') with a prefix and suffix on analogy with elevator . It's first recorded in 1900, and within a few years it was being used figuratively. People talked of escalator clauses in contracts, referring to a planned increase in prices. Ambitious politicians were said to be on a political escalator . The verb to escalate appears in the 1920s, and escalation soon after. Otis tried hard to retain their control over the name, but in 1950 a court case concluded that the word had developed a general (or generic ) meaning among the public, referring to any kind of ‘moving stairway' and not just Otis's original design. Otis lost.

Several trademarks have become generic, over the years, such as aspirin, butterscotch, heroin, thermos, yo-yo and zipper . Fedex, lego, meccano, kleenex, portakabin, rollerblade and hoover have also become lower-case in some of their uses. A few companies have fought a battle to retain the rights over their name. Xerox Corporation, for example, has generally succeeded in persuading people to say photocopy instead of xerox . But most realise that they can't do much about controlling everyday usage. It's one of the penalties of success.

Internet names are the latest to attract generic use. The popularity of the Slashdot web site has generated a verb: to be slashdotted is to be overwhelmed with messages. Google has generated to google , meaning ‘to search for information on the internet', regardless of which search engine is being used. Google has tried to prevent this extension in meaning, so far with some success. Several dictionaries now define the verb with reference to its originator, such as (in the Oxford English Dictionary ) ‘to use the Google search engine to find information on the Internet'. But whether this recognition has a long-term future, in the face of the steamroller of usage, remains to be seen.

. Robot — a global journey (20th century)

In 1921, Karel Čapek's play R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots had its premiere in Prague, and was translated into English for a New York production the following year. He needed a name for the factory-produced humanoid workers of the story, and was thinking of coining something based on the Latin word for ‘work', labor . But his brother Josef suggested an old Czech word for ‘forced labour', robota . And robot was born.