A short history of English words 11 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1014.

^{16. A 1920 poster for Karel Čapek's play, Rossum's Universal Robots . Details in the poster show (top left) the mechanism controlling arms, hands and head movements, (top right) the robot rising from its seat and bowing, (bottom right) the gear controlling standing, bowing and sitting actions, and (bottom left) a unit of the electrical mechanism for moving hands, arms and head.}

If the Čapeks had known English, they might have opted for one of the words with relevant senses that were already in the language. Automaton had been available since the 17th century and android since the 18th. But the succinct punchy sound of robot seemed to capture the public imagination, because within five years it was being used not only for intelligent artificial beings but for any machine capable of carrying out a complex set of movements. An American newspaper in 1927 talked about different kinds of electrical robots that could answer the telephone, open doors and switch on lights.

Traffic robots arrived in 1929 — automated traffic lights. The earliest recorded usage is Canadian, but when I discussed the origins of robot in a BBC programme in 2010, several octogenarians from the north of England wrote to me to say they had clear memories of hearing the word used by their parents in this sense around that time. The London Evening Standard in August 1931 has the headline Traffic ‘Robots' in the City . The northerners all pronounced it ‘rowbow'. Nobody uses robot in that way in Britain any more, nor in the USA, Australia or New Zealand. But in South Africa the usage has stayed. People say such things as Turn left at the robot and The robot's broken .

The notion of a robot as an ‘intelligent artificial being' continued to catch the public imagination. In real life, people talked about robot teachers, trains, petrol stations, planes and bombs. And in science fiction, the word took on new life, with writers such as Isaac Asimov writing acclaimed novels in which robots played a central role.

It was the science fiction writers who first shortened robot to bot , but none of them could have anticipated the explosion of usages which arrived in the 1990s, as the abbreviation came to be adopted in computing. Today, a bot is any piece of software that runs an automated task, such as in searching the internet or playing computer games. It has also become a suffix, with the function of the bot specified in the other part of the word, as in searchbot, infobot, spambot, spybot and warbot .

As early as 1923, George Bernard Shaw had applied the word robot to people who act mechanically, without emotion, usually because of the repetitive work they have to do. Now anyone accused of unthinking or automaton-like behaviour risks attracting the label. A movie star called Samantha who has taken on the same type of character too many times (in the eyes of the critic) might have her roles described as Samanthabots . And in 2009 Obamabots arrived — people who support Barack Obama without really knowing anything about him.

. UFO — alternative forms (20th century)

Words can be shortened in several different ways, as other parts of this book illustrate (§§3, 57, 92). Abbreviations are a natural process. They save time and energy. They can save money, if the cost of a message depends on the number of letters it contains. And they can be a sign of social or professional identity. People who belong to the same group, such as doctors, lawyers and plumbers, tend to use the same abbreviations when they talk and write to each other.

It's an impossible task to list all the shortened words in a language, because new ones are always being created. The largest collections in English, such as Gale's Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary , contain well over half a million items. Note the title. This book is trying to ensure that all kinds of shortening are included — words like info (‘information') and poss (‘possible'), as well as acronyms (strings of letters pronounceable as words, such as OPEC , the ‘Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries') and initialisms (where the individual letters are pronounced separately, such as BBC ).

There are some interesting mixes of the two types. How do you say the word UFO ? Is it ‘you eff oh' or ‘youfoh'? Both are possible. Similarly, some people pronounce internet FAQs as ‘eff eh cues' and some as ‘facks'. LOL in internet and texting slang means ‘laughing out loud': it's pronounced either as ‘ell oh ell' or as ‘loll' (§94). In American English, a VP (vice-president) is sometimes a ‘vee pee' and sometimes a ‘veep' — and the spelling veep is quite often seen in print these days.

But what does UFO mean? For most people, it is ‘unidentified flying object'. But for some it stands for ‘Ultralight Flight Organisation'. In the British military, it could be a ‘Unit Families Officer'. In physics it could be ‘universal fibre optic'. In computing, ‘user files online'. In medicine, an ‘unidentified foreign object'. In the events that take place in online fantasy worlds, it stands for ‘unwanted falling objects'. These are just some of the usages recorded in the dictionaries. There are at least twenty for UFO , and some acronyms have hundreds.

The ‘flying saucer' sense of UFO , along with its ‘youfoh' pronunciation, has allowed it to be the base for other words. In particular, the study of UFOs is called ufology and the students ufologists . Ufological and ufoish are also found. It's unusual for an acronym to generate a family of words in this way.

Acronyms are not just for technical and business uses. Many occur in everyday speech, and have done for centuries — IOU (‘I owe you') dates from the 17th century, as do NB , eg and pm , all derived from Latin words, though most people would be unable to say what the letters stand for (nota bene ‘note well', exempli gratia ‘for the sake of example', post meridiem ‘after noon'). RIP (‘requiescat in pace', conveniently also ‘rest in peace') and RSVP (‘répondez s'il vous plaît') date from the 19th century. During the 20th century we find such forms as ETA (‘estimated time of arrival'), FYI (‘for your information') and ASAP (‘as soon as possible'). The internet has also introduced a large number of acronyms, some motivated by the need to keep words as short as possible in text-messaging and tweeting (§92).

CD-ROM is an interesting mix, because it brings together an initialism (CD ) and an acronym (ROM ). The first part is sounded letter-by-letter, the second part is a whole word. Nobody would ever say ‘see dee ahr oh em'. Similarly, JPEG files are pronounced ‘jay peg'. Organisations which have three identical letters sometimes cheat: the American Automobile Association, or AAA , is often called Triple A . And IOU is unusual too, because it starts off as an acronym and ends up using a letter to replace a whole word. It should really be IOY .

. Watergate — place-name into word (20th century)

On 17 June 1972 a group of men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The evidence of Republican political involvement, and the attempted cover-up, grew into a national scandal which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The political fallout was great, but the linguistic fallout was longer-lasting. The -gate suffix became a permanent feature of the language, used by the media to refer to any actual or alleged scandal or cover-up, political or otherwise — especially one which leads to the downfall of the implicated person. It was a very convenient form, short and to the point. Perfect for headlines (§88).

Most -gate words have a very short life, lasting only as long as a scandal remains news. Who now remembers what Baftagate was about in 1991? (A voting controversy surrounding the BAFTA film and television awards.) What was Camillagate ? (A tape-recording of an intimate telephone conversation between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles in 1992.) How long will BP-gate (from the 2010 oil-spill disaster) remain in the public domain? Or the repercussions of the Iraq War continue to be called Iraq-gate ? Only one thing is certain: other coinages are waiting in the wings to replace them.

Place-names quite often end up as everyday words in English, developing a more general meaning in the process. People talk about another Watergate , meaning ‘another scandal of the Watergate kind'. Governments and civil services become identified with their locations (Whitehall, the White House ). Battles rarely make it into general use, with just a few exceptions, such as balaclava and armageddon . If you're engaged in a decisive and final contest of some kind, you will meet your Waterloo . And there is the remarkable verb use of Trafalgar , attested since the late 19th century in the phrase Trafalgar Square — to subject someone to a soap-box tirade. ‘He just Trafalgar Squared me.' It's not common, but it's there in the dictionary records.

Most place-names enter the general language in relation to products. We readily make new nouns out of wine locations, and some become so widely used that they lose their capital letter. ‘That's a lovely Bordeaux. Have a glass of champagne.' Other place-name drinks include martini, cognac, port, sherry and bourbon . The same applies to foodstuffs: Brie (cheese), Brussels (sprouts), Danish (pastries), hamburgers, frankfurters and sardines (from Sardinia). In the clothing world we find jeans, jerseys, bikinis, tuxedos and duffle coats .

But the process of making a word out of a place-name (a toponym ) is widespread. Tell someone a limerick? Drive in a limousine? Own an alsatian or a labrador? Play badminton or rugby? Run in a marathon? Dance the mazurka? You never quite know where a place-name is going to turn up.

. Doublespeak — weasel words (20th century)

In 1986, during the Australian ‘spycatcher' trial, held to prevent the publication of a book by a former MI5 employee, the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was asked by one of the lawyers to explain the difference between a misleading impression and a lie. ‘A lie is a straight untruth,' he said. The lawyer suggested that a misleading impression, then, was ‘a sort of bent untruth'? Armstrong replied: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being “economical with the truth”.'

He was referring to the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, who had once used the phrase ‘economy of truth'. But that usage didn't enter the language in the way the new one did. To be economical with the truth came to be frequently quoted in the media and applied to other situations. It seems to have earned itself a permanent place in English idiom — one of the latest examples of doublespeak .

Doublespeak, or doubletalk, is a term known since the 1950s. It was prompted by George Orwell's novel 1984 — a blend of his doublethink and newspeak . It describes any words which deliberately hide or change a meaning in order to achieve an ulterior motive. As the chair of the US Committee on Public Doublespeak said in 1973, it is language

which pretends to communicate, but really doesn't. It is language which tries to make the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, or the unpleasant seem attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility…

The important point to stress is that this kind of language isn't the result of lazy thinking. Rather, it's the product of very clear thinking on someone's part. Doublespeak has been carefully selected in order to mislead.

A factory reports that they have had a leak of biosolids from their plant. They mean ‘sewage'. An army reports a surgical strike on a town. They mean a ‘military attack'. One company says it is rightsizing . It means people are being sacked. Another says it is offering job flexibility . It means there are no permanent contracts. There is the hint in these cases that the new situation is a good thing. Bio- suggests life. Surgery suggests cure. Words like right and flexibility put a positive spin on a bad situation. Job seekers sounds better than unemployed , ethnic cleansing better than genocide .

It all depends on your point of view, of course. If an army is on your side, it intervenes in another country; if it isn't, it invades . If an armed group is on your side, their members are freedom fighters ; if not, they're terrorists . People can lapse into doublespeak for the best of intentions, believing they are really helping a cause. When a country is at war, few would doubt the importance of positive spin in maintaining national morale. When a company is worried about its share prices, it will do what it can to present itself in the best possible light.

But there comes a point when the public feels that the spin has gone too far, and several of the phrases highlighted by doublespeak campaigns — not only in the USA — have become so famous that they have lost their obscuring force. Everyone now knows what friendly fire means: you've killed your own men. And only the most hidebound of press officers would these days say collateral damage (for a raid in which bystanders are killed or injured) without embarrassment, because every journalist present would know exactly what was meant.

The Doublespeak Committee decided to give annual awards for the worst examples. In 2008 it gave the award to the phrase aspirational goal — as used, for instance, when talking about setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq or for reducing carbon emissions. The Committee observed:

Aspirations and goals are the same thing; and yet when the terms are combined, the effect is to undermine them both, producing a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire all that much '.

In other words: nobody has done anything about this yet.

How to reduce doublespeak? One way is to praise linguistic honesty; and the Committee does give Orwell Awards for good practice. Satire also helps. I especially like the report of a chess match in which one of the players proudly reports that he came second.

. Doobry — useful nonsense (20th century)

Or doobery , dooberry , doobrie , doobrey … It's never obvious how to spell the invented forms we use to talk about an object whose name we don't know. Fortunately it isn't a problem, most of the time, because these nonsense words are usually used only when we speak. ‘Where's the doobry?' someone might say, looking for the gadget which controls the television.

Doobry is the latest in a series of doo- forms that appeared during the 20th century. It's first recorded in British English in the 1970s. In earlier decades people used such forms as doodah , doofer , doodad , doings and dooshanks . Doodah seems to have been the first, recorded in 1928. Doofer came soon after, in the 1930s — probably derived from the phrase do for , as used in such sentences as that'll do for now . Workmen used to describe half a cigarette as a doofer . It became popular in Australia, where it also appeared as doover and doovah . In American English, the favoured forms, from early in the century, were doohickey and doojigger , and both are still used. Doodad also developed a more specific meaning in the USA, referring to fancy ornaments or articles of dress. There might be all kinds of doodads on a Xmas tree, for instance.

Nonsense words are a hugely useful feature of speech. They help us out when we're searching for a word and don't want to stop ourselves in mid-flow. They're a lifeline in cases where we don't know what to call something, or have forgotten its name. And they're available when we feel that something is not worth a precise mention or we want to be deliberately vague. Their importance is illustrated by the remarkable number of these words that have been coined over the centuries.

The oldest ones, recorded in writing since the 16th century, and likely to be much older in speech, are based on the word what . In their full form they appear as what do you call it/him/'em …, but they turn up in a wide range of contracted forms, such as whatdicall'um , whatchicalt and whatd'ecalt . Shakespeare uses one, when Touchstone addresses Jacques: ‘Good even, good Mr what ye cal't' (As You Like It , III.iii.74). He's avoiding the pronunciation of the name Jacques , which would have sounded like ‘jakes' in Elizabethan English — and jakes was a slang word for a toilet. Today the commonest forms are whatchacallit and whatchamacallit (from ‘what-you-may-call-it').

The curious forms giggombob , jiggembob and kickumbob all appear in the early 17th century — usually in plays — but seem to have fallen out of use a century later. They were probably overtaken by forms based on thing . Thingum and thingam are both recorded in the 17th century, especially in American English, and there was a reduplicated form too: thingum-thangum (§56). Then, in the 18th century, when sensitivities about using unfashionable or inelegant words reached new heights, we find a raft of new creations: thingy, thingummy, thingamerry, thingamajig, thingamabob, thingummytite, thingumty, thingumtitoy .

Nonsense words go in and out of fashion. Does anyone still use jigamaree or whigmaleerie nowadays? And what has happened to oojah ? An issue of the Washington Post in July 1917 refers to new British army slang, and mentions oojah as coming from the East — from Arabic or Persian, perhaps. It was very common in forces slang during the Second World War, when it developed into such forms as oojamaflop . My Uncle Bill, ex-RAF, used that one all the time. But I don't think I've ever used it myself, except in articles like this one.

. Blurb — a moment of arrival (20th century)

Is it ever possible to say exactly when a word was invented? Yes, if someone keeps a record (§65, 66). But more often we find new words known by the date the public got to know about them.

In 1906, the Huebsch company published a book by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, which sold very well. The next year, at a publishing trade association dinner, free copies were given out of a limited edition, printed — as was the association's custom — in a special dust jacket. Burgess had devised a jacket which showed a charming lady, Miss Belinda Blurb, ‘in the act of blurbing' — shouting out the title of the book and the name of its author. ‘YES, this is a “BLURB”!' said the headline. The accompanying text was full of unbelievable praise: ‘When you've READ this masterpiece, you'll know what a BOOK is'.

^{17. The book jacket which introduced the word blurb into the English language in 1906.}

The word caught on. Any testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a blurb . In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, Burgess defined his own term:

A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.

Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.

And the word has been with us ever since. There is a blurb on the back of this book.

We don't know the exact moment that Burgess invented the word, but we do know that it began to circulate after that dinner. The same thing happened to the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, launched by the Russians on 4 October 1957. Before that, the word sputnik (translated as ‘travelling companion') would have been known only to a small group in the Soviet Union. After the launch, it was everywhere.

The publication of a literary work has been the usual means of establishing the year in which a new word is introduced to the world. Catch-22 arrived in 1961, following the publication of Joseph Heller's novel of that name. Nymphet , in the sense of a sexually attractive young girl, came in 1955 with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita . Chortle appeared first in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass in 1871.

Cases of this kind are the closest we can get to the origins of a word. Usually all we can say is that the word appeared ‘in the early 1960s' or ‘in the late 14th century'. But the internet is changing everything (§49). If I activate the appropriate software, it is possible for the date, hour, minute and second at which I create a text to be time-stamped. And if that text happens to contain a new word, or a word in a new sense, its birthday will be known for ever.

. Strine — a comic effect (20th century)

In 1964 the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story about what had happened to the English author Monica Dickens while she was signing copies of her latest book in a Sydney bookshop. A woman handed her a copy and said, ‘Emma Chisit'. Dickens thought this was the woman's name, so she wrote ‘To Emma Chisit' on the flyleaf. The would-be purchaser was puzzled. ‘No. Emma Chisit', she repeated. Eventually it transpired that what she was saying was ‘How much is it?' in an Australian accent. And Strine was born.

The story is told at the beginning of Strine: The Complete Works of Professor Afferbeck Lauder (real name: Alistair Morrison). Strine is the supposed Australian pronunciation of the word Australian . Let Stalk Strine was a best-seller when it appeared in 1965, and it's still in print. It contained such fine examples as ebb tide for ‘appetite' (as in I jess got no ebb tide these dyes ) and cheque etcher for ‘did you get your' (as in Where cheque etcher big blue wise? ). The idea caught on, and several compilations of supposed regional dialect speech were published in other parts of the world, such as Lern Yerself Scouse (for the dialect of Liverpool).

Words coined for comic effect don't usually become a permanent part of the language. If I start speaking in a mock way, putting on a dialect voice or pretending to use an old spelling-pronunciation (such as saying yee oldee tea shoppee ), the effects are of the moment. Nobody would expect oldee to become a recognised pronunciation. But if a humorous form is used often enough, and begins to appear in novels and other literature, then it may well eventually enter the dictionary (with a warning that it is jocular). This is what has happened to stoopid (for stupid ), recorded since Thackeray used it in Vanity Fair (1848), and velly (mock-Chinese ‘very'), first recorded in the 1890s. Thanks to Rudyard Kipling and others, squat-tez-vous (mock-French for ‘sit down') has achieved some usage. So has el cheapo (mock-Spanish for ‘very cheap'), recorded since the 1950s. They're all in the Oxford English Dictionary .

Baby-talk can sometimes make its mark: toothy-pegs, wakey-wakey, pussy-cat, beddy-byes, din-din, ickle (‘little'), diddums and oopsie-daisy are all examples of nursery language which adults use when they're being playful. Comic proper names can get into the language too. Dr Seuss introduced everyone to a grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), and the word is now quite common for a spoilsport or ill-tempered person. Cartoon characters can introduce or popularise a comic word, such as Homer Simpson's D'oh , Elmer Fudd's wabbit , the Flintstones' Yabba dabba doo and Mr Jinx's I'll tear you meeces to pieces .

^{18. The cover of the first ‘strine' book, published in 1965.}

Jocular forms of grammatically irregular verbs also sometimes achieve a widespread use. How often have you heard people say they're fruz or froz , instead of frozen ? Or: Shakespeare thought every thought that's ever been thunk . Here too, literature can give these usages a blessing. Mark Twain is one of many whose characters smole a smile . James Joyce used thunk in Finnegans Wake . And so did Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh .

. Alzheimer's — surname into word (20th century)

Names are important in word-making. We've already seen how place-names can make words (§80) and first names (§28). Now it's the turn of surnames.

A remarkable variety of everyday objects come from the names of the people who invented them or who are closely associated with them. We find them in such areas as clothing (cardigan, leotard, mackintosh ), including hats (stetson ) and boots (wellingtons ), food (garibaldi, pavlova, sandwich ), flowers (begonia, dahlia, magnolia ), musical instruments (saxophone, sousaphone ) and guns (colt, derringer, mauser ). Creative people, especially (if they're famous enough), can have their surname turn into a general word. Film buffs talk about a movie being Hitchcockian , and similar coinages are found in other areas of the arts, such as Dickensian , Mozartian and Turnerian . Language buffs who admire Henry Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage have created no fewer than three adjectives to characterise his approach — Fowlerian , Fowlerish and Fowleresque .

Science, in particular, recognises achievements in this way. Think of all the names of physical constants that come from scientists, such as ampere, celsius, hertz, ohm and watt . Many terms in anatomy, physiology and medicine reflect their discoverers, such as the Rolandic and Sylvian fissures in the brain or the Eustachian tube between throat and ear. When diseases are person-named, they are usually shortened. So Ménière's disease becomes Ménière's , Parkinson's disease becomes Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease becomes Alzheimer's .

Derived uses soon follow, as the case of Alzheimer's shows. The disease was first described by the German pathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1907, and the name was soon used as an adjective in such phrases as Alzheimer patients and Alzheimer sufferers , sometimes with an 's and sometimes not. By the 1930s, the name of the disease was being abbreviated to Alzheimer's or (especially in the USA) Alzheimer , even in medical journals. Concern over the effect of the disease grew in the early 2000s, so much so that it became one of the few diseases to be identified by an initial letter: the big A . (The big C — cancer — is another.)

Surnames that become common nouns and adjectives don't have to belong to a real person. English literature has provided several examples of characters who have given their name to a general situation. What would it mean to call someone a Scrooge, a Cinderella, a Girl Friday, a Romeo ? In each case the situation described in the original book has been left behind, and the words are even sometimes written without the capital letters. Rather less usual is the use of two surnames together. A Jekyll and Hyde personality. A David and Goliath situation. A Holmes and Watson relationship . There aren't many of these.

Several fields go in for first name + surname. The world of roses, for example, has hundreds of examples of cultivars named after the whole name of an individual, including such well-known personalities as Cary Grant and Bing Crosby . And we'll find whole names in such domains as dog breeds (Jack Russell ), ships (USS Ronald Reagan ), locomotives (Winston Churchill ), cocktails (Rose Kennedy ) and cakes (Sarah Bernhardt ). Titles are not ruled out (Earl Grey tea). These do lead to some unusual English sentences: ‘Just smell that Cary Grant'; ‘Would you like some Earl Grey?'; ‘I'll have two Rose Kennedies.'

. Grand — money slang (20th century)