by Bill Bryson
Many other words owe their existence to mishearings. Buttonhole was once buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard. Bridegroom was in Old English bryd-guma, but the context made people think of groom and an r was added. By a similar process an l found its way into belfrey. Asparagus was for 200 years called sparrow-grass. Pentice became penthouse. Shamefaced was originally shamefast (fast here having the sense of lodged firmly, as in “stuck fast”). The process can still be seen today in the tendency among many people to turn catercorner into catty-corner and chaise longue into chaise lounge.
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 foundin
g 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.
Many new coinages didn’t last—often for obvious reasons. Jonson’s less-inspired efforts included ventositous and obstupefact. Shakespeare gave us the useful gloomy, but failed with barky and brisky (formed after the same pattern but somehow never catching on) and failed equally with conflux, vastidity, and tortive. Milton found no takers for inquisiturient, while, later still, Dickens tried to give the world vocular. The world didn’t want it.
Sometimes words are made up for a specific purpose. The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go).
According to Mary Helen Dohan, in her absorbing book Our Own Words, the military vehicle the tank got its name because during its secretive experimental phase people were encouraged to think it was a storage receptacle—hence a tank. The curiously nautical terminology for its various features—hatch, turret, hull, deck—arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the army.
4. WORDS CHANGE BY DOING NOTHING. That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice—as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer’s day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thought, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul’s Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.
This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as widespread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.
According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, “You scold me so much in a nice long letter . . . which I have received from you.”
Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon “the unattractive exterior of Farfrae’s erection” or in Bleak House, where Dickens writes that “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.” [Taken from “Red Pants,” by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 1989 issue of Verbatim.]
This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to drift around the body. This is particularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at different rates and now often signify quite separate things. An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from wh
at he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don’t need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don’t need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?)
Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression “neck of the woods.” Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a fossil. Other examples of fossils are the italicized words in the following list:
short shrift
hem and haw
rank and file
raring to go
not a whit
out of kilter
newfangled
at bay
spick-and-span
to and fro
kith and kin
Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule.” Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can’t. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule. A similar misapprehension is often attached to the statement “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”
