A short history of English words 13 page

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 1005.

The novelty of texting abbreviations has also been overestimated. Several were actually part of computer interaction in chatrooms long before texting arrived in the late 1990s. And some can be traced back over many years. In a poem called ‘An Essay to Miss Catherine Jay', an anonymous author begins:

An S A now I mean 2 write

2 U sweet K T J…

^{20. An illustration of cultural differences in the use of emoticons. In Western countries, emoticons are viewed sideways and focus on the mouth; in the East, they are horizontal and focus on the eyes.}

It was published in 1875. Lewis Carroll and Queen Victoria are among the many Victorians who played with such sound/letter substitutions.

On the other hand, there's nothing in older usage that quite lives up to the modern penchant for taking an abbreviation and adding to it. Thus, from the basic form imo (‘in my opinion') we find imho (‘in my humble opinion'), imhbco (‘in my humble but correct opinion') and imnsho (‘in my not so humble opinion'). And a similar thing happens to the other big innovation of contemporary electronic communication: the emoticon or smiley. Based on :), used to express a friendly reaction, we find :)), :))) and other extensions conveying increased intensity of warmth.

It's difficult to say how many of the novel computer abbreviations will remain in the language, once the novelty has worn off. Txt , txtng and related forms may survive, but only as long as the technology does. And who can say whether, in fifty years' time, people will still be typing such forms as brb (‘be right back') and afaik (‘as far as I know') and sending each other combinations of cat pictures + non-standard grammar (lolcats )? Will there still be keyboards and keypads then, even, or will everything be done through automatic speech recognition? With electronic communication, as I said earlier (§32), we ain't seen nothin' yet.

. Jazz — word of the century (20th century)

Since 1990, members of the American Dialect Society have voted on the ‘Word of the Year' (§91). The selection reflects social as much as linguistic factors. In 1999, they chose Y2K . In 2001, 9–11 . And the economic crisis of recent years is reflected in sub-prime for their 2007 choice and bailout for 2008. It's thus something of a relief to find tweet their selection for 2009 (§100).

Choosing a word for a year is difficult enough. Much more difficult is a ‘Word of the Decade'. In 2010 the members of the Society chose google . That seems fair enough. But what would you do for the ‘Word of the Century'?

They chose jazz . It was perhaps bending the truth a little, but not much. The word doesn't surface until the century is over ten years old. In 1913, a San Francisco commentator described jazz as ‘a futurist word which has just joined the language'. However, he wasn't referring to the musical sense, which didn't arrive until a couple of years later. He meant jazz as a slang term for ‘pep' or ‘excitement'. It also meant ‘excessive talk, nonsense'. This general sense is still known in the expression and all that jazz , meaning ‘and stuff like that'. As an adjective, it developed a wide range of senses — ‘lively', ‘vivid', ‘sophisticated'. There were jazz dances and jazz patterns (in clothing and furniture); there was jazz journalism and jazz language . Today we'd say jazzy .

The music sense is first recorded in the Chicago press of 1915 — and it quickly took off. It was used to describe hundreds of notions associated with the music — types of music (jazz blues, jazz classics ), musical instruments (jazz guitar, jazz clarinet ), players and singers (jazz pianist, jazz vocalist ) and performing groups (jazz quartet, jazz combo ). Virtually all the terms we now associate with jazz (band, club, music, singer, records ) were in use by the end of the 1920s.

The word acquired more applications as the century progressed. New musical trends motivate fusions, so we find such phrases as jazz-rock , jazz-funk and jazz-rap . In the 1950s and '60s, we encounter jazzetry (‘reading poetry to jazz') and jazzercise (‘performing physical exercises to jazz'). In the 1990s, we find jazz cigarettes (‘marijuana').

The early practitioners of jazz knew that they were living through a musical revolution: jazz era is first used in 1919; jazz age in 1920. Not everyone would agree with the voting of the Society members, which probably reflects their musical interests as much as anything else, but to my mind it was quite a good choice.

. Sudoku — a modern loan (21st century)

Sudoku has been in Japanese at least since the 1980s, when the game was first devised, but it didn't appear as a loanword in English until 2000, one of the first borrowings of the new millennium. It continued a trend to take words from Japanese that had been building up in the second half of the 20th century.

Karaoke seems to have been with us for ever, but its first recorded use in English is only 1979. And since 1950 increased tourism and international business has brought hundreds of words into English from Japanese, many quite specialised. If you're into sumo wrestling, for example, your loanwords will be quite extensive, such as yokozuna (‘highest rank of wrestler'), dohyo (‘the sumo ring'), okuridashi (‘a pushing technique') and torikumi (‘a bout'). The business world will make you familiar with shoshas (‘trading houses'), kanban (‘a just-in-time production method'), kaizen (‘improvements in practice') and zaitech (‘financial engineering').

Gardeners will know bonsai (‘dwarf plants'). Film buffs will know anime (‘animated films'). Artists will know shunga (‘erotic art'). Those who practise alternative medicine will know shiatsu (‘a finger-pressure therapy'). Martial arts practitioners will know shuriken (‘a type of weapon') and, of course, karate . Cooks will know dashi (‘cooking stock'), tamari (‘soy sauce') and teriyaki (‘a type of fish or meat dish'). Tourists will have travelled on the Shinkansen train and perhaps stayed in a ryokan (‘a traditional inn'). Hopefully they will not have encountered a yakuza (‘gangster'). At home they may still have a rusting Betamax — a name often thought to be a Greek coinage, but in fact from Japanese beta ‘all over' + max (imum ).

However, the trend seems to be slowing down. Very few 21st-century new words in English have so far been borrowings. Vuvuzela is a South African example from 2010, but it took an event of World Cup proportions to introduce it. Does this reflect a new national concern over identity?

. Muggle — a fiction word (21st century)

Much of the new vocabulary in 21st-century English reflects the major social changes and events that have taken place in the real world. New editions of dictionaries in the 2000s have included such expressions as social media, congestion charge, designer baby, flash mob, toxic debt, quantitative easing, geoengineering, WMDs (‘weapons of mass destruction') and wardrobe malfunction . More interesting, because more unexpected, are the words that have come from the world of fiction.

J. K. Rowling coined muggle in her first Harry Potter novel (1997) for a person who possesses no magical powers — adapting the associations of mug in the sense of ‘foolish or incompetent person' and somehow neatly bypassing its earlier senses. Nobody would have linked it to the 13th-century use of muggle meaning ‘fish-like tail' or the 17th-century use meaning ‘sweetheart', but I'm surprised it survived the sense of ‘marijuana' in American street slang, which had been around for most of the 20th century. Marijuana addicts were mugglers . It didn't seem to matter, as the power of the Harry Potter series grew.

By the turn of the millennium, the word had travelled well beyond the books and films. A muggle in the 2000s is any person thought to lack a particular skill. Some people use it in the same way as its source word, mug , and there are similarities too with the way muppet (a term popularised in the 1970s by Jim Henson) has left puppetry behind to mean — usually as an affectionate tease — an ‘idiotic or inept person'.

An unexpected development arose in the high-tech treasure-hunting game known as geocaching , devised in 2000, where people who don't know the game or who interfere with it in some way are described as muggles . Adventurers equipped with a GPS system try to locate hidden containers (geocaches ) around the world, using geographic co-ordinates registered on the geocaching web site. If a geocache has been vandalised or stolen, it's said to have been muggled .

Films have introduced hundreds of catch-phrases into English, such as Make my day! and May the Force be with you . Only occasionally, as we saw with matrix (§37), have they also provided new words, or new senses of old words. Muggle is one of those cases. And since 2000 we should also give due recognition to Winnie-the-Pooh , which has popularised tiggerish (‘very lively, cheerily energetic'), Austin Powers , which has introduced us to mini-me (‘a person closely resembling a smaller version of another') and Meet the Fockers , for fockerise (‘to introduce comedic chaos of the kind displayed in the film').

Television advertising has also been a rich source of catch-phrases and the occasional new word or sense, though these rarely travel outside the countries where an ad is shown. Pinta (‘pint of milk') entered British English in the late 1950s because of its use in the television jingle Drinka pinta milka day . And in the 2000s we find va-va-voom , used as an expression of admiration since the 1950s, but not widely known until it became the theme of a series of UK television commercials for Renault cars, starring footballer Thierry Henry, in which he tried to track down its real meaning. ‘Look,' he says apologetically in one of the ads, ‘I don't make the words.' But without him, I doubt if we would now have its latest meaning: ‘the quality of being exciting, vigorous or attractive'.

. Chillax — a fashionable blend (21st century)

This combination of chill (in its ‘calm down' sense) and relax arrived in the early 2000s — a coinage which has come to be loved and hated in about equal proportions. By 2010 it had become a newsworthy headline. A piece by Simon Hoggart in The Independent for 23rd February began: ‘Chillax man — or Gordon will get you ' — apparently referring to the then prime minister's use of the word while telling his advisers not to panic. If Gordon had been really cool, of course, he would have used the derived expression: Chillax to the max .

This is one of the latest blends, or portmanteau words — a technique of word creation (§67) that has become extremely popular in the 21st century. Chillax is gradually building up a word family of its own: already we have chillaxing and chillaxed . Podcast — a blend of iPod and broadcast — is even more productive: first used in 2004, it's now found as a noun (a podcast ), a verb (to podcast ), an adjective (a podcast experience ) and in several derived forms (podcasting, podcasters, a podcasted show ).

Dozens of new blends are around now: have you seen a threequel (a ‘second sequel'), eaten turducken (‘a combination of roast chicken, duck and turkey'), read about a bromance (‘affection between two men'), taken a staycation (‘vacation staying at home, or in one's home country') or daycation (‘a day-long holiday') or used a freemium (‘an internet business model in which basic features are free but advanced features are not')? You may have frenemies (‘people with whom you remain friendly, despite some sort of dislike'). You will certainly know some screenagers (‘teens who have an aptitude for computers and the internet').

And what about jeggings ? These are leggings designed to look like tight-fitting jeans, a blend of jeans + leggings , and one of the most fashionable clothing developments of 2010. The word family here is growing: meggings (‘men + leggings'), treggings (‘trousers + leggings'). It seems to be a trend within the fashion industry to mix different types of clothing, and the language is desperately trying to keep up. Have you worn a coatigan (‘coat + cardigan'), shacket (‘shirt + jacket'), skorts (‘skirt + shorts') or tankini (‘tank top + bikini')? Or a mankini (‘man + bikini', male skimpy swimwear such as that used by the film character Borat)? Then there are blurts (‘blouse + skirt'), cardigowns (‘cardigan + dressing gown'), mackets (‘mac + jacket'), shoots (‘shoe + boot') and skousers (‘skirt + trousers'). I sometimes wonder which came first — the design or the word?

. Unfriend — a new age (21st century)

In 2009 the New Oxford American Dictionary chose unfriend as its ‘Word of the Year'. It meant ‘to remove someone from a list of contacts on a social networking site such as Facebook'. A minor controversy followed. Some argued that the verb should be defriend . But the use of un- was already well established in the terminology of reversing computer actions, with undo, unerase, undelete, unbold and many more. As a New York Times article said in 2009 (15th September), we are living in an ‘Age of Undoing'.

Unfriend also probably appealed because it feels more English, as evidenced by a history of earlier uses dating from the 16th century (§44). Antonio describes Sebastian as ‘unguided and unfriended' in Twelfth Night (III.iii.10). A noun (an unfriend ) occurs as early as the 13th century. And in the 19th century, a member of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) could describe a non-member as an unfriend . Defriend , by contrast, had no such history, so it has been slower to take root. But both unfriend and defriend are found in the social networking world now, with unfriend almost twice as popular in 2011.

Prefixes and suffixes continue to make their presence felt in word coinages of the new millennium. We find ecogloom (‘depression about environmental progress') and bargainous (‘relatively cheap'), overthink (‘think about something too much') and underbudget (‘underestimate costs'), catastrophise (‘present a situation as worse than it is') and therapise (‘provide therapy'). As technology allows us to investigate smaller and smaller entities, previously obscure prefixes such as nano- have become widespread. It is, according to some commentators, a nano-age , with a nanocosm containing nanomachines using nanomaterials on a nanoscale , and investigated by nanoscientists . Virtually any word, it seems, is going to be prefixed by nano- sooner or later.

Nano- has left micro- a long way behind, though micro- did receive a boost with the advent of micromessaging . The posting of very short entries on a blog came to be called microblogging , and when Twitter arrived in 2006, with its 140-character message limitation, it was soon being described as a microblogging site . There are microbooks, micromovies, micromusicals and (§92) microapps now. Speaking as a lexical cool-hunter (a 1990s' marketing term: ‘a monitor of cultural trends'), I wouldn't write it off yet.

. Twittersphere — future directions? (21st century)

It's remarkable how a single sound can be taken to heart and used as a source of fresh word formation. In 2010, around 600 new words were listed in Twittonary , one of the online dictionaries collecting terms invented in connection with Twitter. That's an amazing total, given that this web site had then been in existence for only five years.

Most of the words are the result of people exploiting the playful possibilities in the name, especially those suggested by the unusual (in English) phonetic properties of the initial consonant cluster tw- . Two-thirds of the entries play with that cluster. Some replace an initial consonant, as in twictionary and tweologism . Some pretend to be a speech defect, replacing a tr- word, as in twendy and twaffic . Some add the cluster to the beginning of another word, as in twidentity theft and twaddiction . Blends are also very common, as in twitterhea, twitterati, twitterholic, celebritweet — and, summarising its entire world, twittersphere .

Most of these creations are likely to have a short linguistic life. Just a few will be long-term additions to the language — or, at least, for as long as Twitter exists. We can see this from what happened to an earlier internet phenomenon — blogging. In the early 2000s, the word blog (an abbreviation of web log , an individual's online diary or commentary) also generated a great deal of wordplay, but some of the coinages that were popular then are hardly ever seen these days.

The same word-building processes are found in the blogosphere as we find in the twittersphere . There's the same sort of substitution of clusters (blargon , ‘blog jargon') and syllables (blogathy , ‘blog apathy') and a similar range of blends (blogorrhea, blogerati, blogoholic, celebriblog ). The unique phonetic properties of the core term are also exploited: internal rhyme is seen in bloggerel , lexiblography and blogstipation (the sad state of affairs when a blogger can't think of anything to say).

Rather more technical are such blends as blog-roll and blogware , photoblog and moblog (‘posts sent by mobile phone'), or blawg (‘law blog') and vlog (‘video blog'), and such compounds as blog client and blog archive . These are the terms which seem to have achieved a long-term place in the language — though again, this will be the case for only as long as the technology exists. Important too are well-established words which have been given a new sense in the context of blogging, such as gadget, post, preview, archive and template .

As for Twitter, if you had asked me as recently as 2005 whether I thought there was anything interesting about the consonant cluster tw , I would have said ‘nothing at all'. If you had suggested that one day it would be the basis for coining hundreds of new words, I would have said you were mad. Moral: word buffs should never try to predict the future.