The Mother Tongue (11 page)

Sometimes words are created by false analogy or back-formation. One example of this is the word
pea.
Originally the word was
pease,
as in the nursery rhyme “pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.” But this was mistakenly thought to signify a plural and the word
pea
was back-formed to denote singularity. A similar misunderstanding gave us
cherry
(from
cerise
). Etymologically
cherries
ought to be both singular and plural—and indeed it once was. The words
grovel
and
sidle
similarly came into English because the original adverbs,
groveling
and
sideling,
were assumed to contain the participle
-ing,
as in walking and seeing. In fact, it was the suffix
-ling,
but this did not stop people from adding a pair of useful verbs to the language. Other back-formations are
laze
(from
lazy
),
rove, burgle, greed
(from
greedy
),
beg
(from
beggar
), and
difficult
(from
difficulty
). Given the handiness and venerability of the process, it is curious to note that language authorities still generally squirm at the addition of new ones to the language. Among those that still attract occasional opprobrium are
enthuse
and
donate.

Finally, erroneous words are sometimes introduced by respected users of the language who simply make a mistake. Shakespeare thought
illustrious
was the opposite of
lustrous
and thus for a time gave it a sense that wasn't called for. Rather more alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word
twat
in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was
Pippa Passes,
written in 1841 and now remembered for the line “God's in His heaven, all's right with the world.” But it also contains this disconcerting passage:

Then owls and bats,

Cowls and twats,

Monks and nuns in a cloister's moods,

Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word
twat
—which meant precisely the same then as it does now—but pronounced it with a flat
a
and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him.

2.
WORDS ARE ADOPTED.
This is of course one of the glories of English—its willingness to take in words from abroad, rather as if they were refugees. We take words from almost anywhere—
shampoo
from India,
chaparral
from the Basques,
caucus
from the Algonquin Indians,
ketchup
from China,
potato
from Haiti,
sofa
from Arabia,
boondocks
from the Tagalog language of the Philippines,
slogan
from Gaelic. You can't get much more eclectic than that. And we have been doing it for centuries. According to Baugh and Cable [page 227], as long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from more than fifty other languages—​a phenomenal number for the age. Sometimes the route these words take is highly circuitous. Many Greek words became Latin words, which became French words, which became English words.
Garbage,
which has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was brought to England by the Normans, who had adapted it from an Italian dialectal word,
garbuzo,
which in turn had been taken from the Old Italian
garbuglio
(a mess), which ultimately had come from the Latin
bullire
(to boil or bubble).

Sometimes the same word reaches us at different times, having undergone various degrees of filtering, and thus can exist in English in two or more related forms, as with
canal
and
channel, regard
and
reward, poor
and
pauper, catch
and
chase, cave
and
cage, amiable
and
amicable.
Often these words have been so modified in their travels that their kinship is all but invisible. Who would guess that
coy
and
quiet
both have the same grandparent in the Latin
quietus,
or that
sordid
and
swarthy
come jointly from the Latin
sordere
(to be soiled or dirty), or that
entirety
and
integrity
come from the Latin
integritus
(complete and pure)?

Occasionally a single root gave birth to triplets, as with
cattle, chattel,
and
capital, hotel, hostel,
and
hospital,
and
strait, straight,
and
strict.
There is at least one quadruplet—
jaunty, gentle, gentile,
and
genteel,
all from the Latin
gentilis
—though there may be more. But the record holder is almost certainly the Latin
discus,
which has given us
disk, disc, dish, desk, dais,
and, of course,
discus.
(But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon root,
bear,
has given birth to more than forty words, from
birth
to
born
to
burden.
)

Often words change meanings dramatically as they pass from one nation to another. The Latin
bestia
has become variously
biscia
(snake) in Italy,
bitch
(female dog) in England,
biche
(female deer) in France, and
bicho
(insect) in Portugal [cited by Pei, page 151].

We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use
nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain
(literally “light of hand”), or
R.S.V.P.
for répondez s'il vous plaît. (Instead they write: “Prière de répondre.”) The Italians do not use
brio
and although they do use
al fresco,
to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.

Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can be a surprise to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our word
puny
was once the Anglo-Norman
puis né
or that
curmudgeon
may once have been the French
coeur méchant
(evil heart), or that
breeze,
so English-sounding, was taken from the Spanish
briza,
or that the distress signal
mayday
was lifted from the French cry
m'aidez
(meaning “help me”) or that
poppycock
comes from the Dutch
pappekak,
meaning “soft dung”?
Chowder
came directly from the French
chaudière
(cauldron), while
bankrupt
was taken literally from the Italian expression
banca rotta,
meaning “broken bench.” In the late Middle Ages, when banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up. Sometimes the foreign words came quietly, but other times they needed a good pummeling before they assumed anything like a native shape, as when the Gaelic
sionnachuighim
was knocked into
shenanigan
and the Amerind
raugroughcan
became
raccoon.

This tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common. In New York, Flatbush was originally Vlacht Bos and Gramercy Park was originally De Kromme Zee. British soldiers in World War I called Ypres Wipers and in the 1950s, American soldiers in Japan converted the song “Shi-i-Na-Na Ya-Ru” into “She Ain't Got No Yo-Yo.”

One of our more inexplicable habits is the tendency to keep the Anglo-Saxon noun but to adopt a foreign form for the adjectival form. Thus fingers are not fingerish; they are digital. Eyes are not eyeish; they are ocular. English is unique in this tendency to marry a native noun to an adopted adjective. Among other such pairs are
mouth/oral, book/literary, water/aquatic, house/domestic, moon/lunar, son/filial, sun/solar, town/urban.
This is yet another perennial source of puzzlement for anyone learning English. Sometimes, a Latinate adjective was adopted but the native one kept as well, so that we can choose between, say,
earthly
and
terrestrial, motherly
and
maternal, timely
and
temporal.

Although English is one of the great borrowing tongues—deriving at least half of its common words from non-Anglo-Saxon stock—others have been even more enthusiastic in adopting foreign terms. In Armenian, only 23 percent of the words are of native origin, while in Albanian the proportion is just 8 percent. A final curious fact is that although English is a Germanic tongue and the Germans clearly were one of the main founding groups of America, there is almost no language from which we have borrowed fewer words than German. Among the very few are
kindergarten
and
hinterland.
We have borrowed far more words from every other European language, and probably as many from several smaller and more obscure languages such as Inuit. No one has yet come up with a plausible explanation for why this should be.

3.
WORDS ARE CREATED.
Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take
dog.
For centuries the word in English was
hound
(or
hund
). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages,
dog
—a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word—displaced it. No one has any idea why. This sudden arising of words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known pedigree are
jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick
(the golf club),
noisome, numskull, jalopy,
and countless others.
Blizzard
suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and
rowdy
appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of this phenomenon are
yuppie
and
sound bites,
which seem to have burst forth spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-speaking world.

Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to prominence—again quite mysteriously.
Scrounge
and
seep
are both of this type. They have been around for centuries and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield [
The English Language,
page 46], came into general use before 1900.

Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one-tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But then Shakespeare lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology—words like
lunar module
and
myocardial infarction
—rather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us:
barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant,
and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience. Shakespeare's vocabulary changed considerably as he aged. Jespersen notes that there are some 200 to 300 words to be found in the early plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later shed, but which independently made their way into the language later—among them
cranny, beautified, homicide, aggravate,
and
forefathers.
It has also been observed by scholars that the new terms of his younger years appeal directly to the senses (
snow-white, fragrant, brittle
) while the coinages of the later years are more often concerned with psychological considerations.

Shakespeare was at the center of this remarkable verbal outburst but not alone in it. Ben Jonson gave us
damp, defunct, clumsy,
and
strenuous
among many other useful terms. Isaac Newton coined
centrifugal
and
centripetal.
Sir Thomas More came up with
absurdity, acceptance, exact, explain,
and
exaggerate.
The classical scholar Sir Thomas Elyot fathered, among others,
animate, exhaust,
and
modesty.
Coleridge produced
intensify,
Jeremy Bentham produced
international
(and apologized for its inelegance), Thomas Carlyle gave us
decadent
and
environment.
George Bernard Shaw thought up
superman.