The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  English is anything but isolated. To return to a figure from a moment ago, English has absorbed words from more than 350 other languages. Borrowings have their origins in a political or diplomatic moment, and testify at a more profound level to a social, cultural or economic motive. Languages become ‘great’ not because of any inherent qualities they may be deemed to have, but because of the political, military and intellectual force behind them. When colonists arrive in a country, they exchange their language with the native inhabitants, and sometimes force it down their throats. They may also try to foist their religion on them. Yet at the same time they adopt indigenous terms. An invader’s vocabulary will expand to reflect the concerns of those he has invaded. In such situations, bilingualism has often been necessary and inevitable. But English-speakers without any capability in a foreign language have assimilated snippets here and there, and these new elements have assured English’s opulently international character. The hybridity of the British and the Americans and other English-speaking communities (in Canada, for instance, and Australia) is registered in the hybrid languages we employ. A borrowed word is distinguished from other new terms in having already ‘proved’ itself: a compound or a word I make up has no pedigree, but a loanword has previously shown itself, in another language, to be viable. About half of English words have been borrowed, and many of the other half are compounds or mutations of earlier borrowings. The linguist John McWhorter comments, ‘English’s vocabulary is like San Francisco’s architecture: thriving and beautiful but with ultimately sparse roots.’9

  Moreover, since the time of Chaucer in the fourteenth century, its number of inflexions has dramatically decreased, and as an ‘analytic’ language – that is, one in which meaning is mainly shaped by word order and the use of particles such as prepositions and conjunctions – it has been able to absorb words without any concern for how to fit them into its grammar. In an English sentence, word order is paramount: change the order and you radically change the meaning (‘Fred ate ostrich’ is obviously different from ‘Ostrich ate Fred’) – something untrue of Latin or Basque or Sanskrit or the Australian Aboriginal language Dyirbal. This feature of English has allowed its writers and speakers a remarkable flexibility. A newly adopted noun can easily be turned into an adjective – once you know what a chimera is, you’re just a whisper away from chimerical – and just about anything can be made into a verb. If I have accepted the Japanese words shiatsu and sashimi, I’ll have no problem saying, ‘I’m going to get shiatsued’ or ‘Let’s sashimi the tuna.’

  Studying a language involves an understanding of its syntax, punctuation, rhetorical nuances and patterns of formality. This book, however, is concerned with vocabulary. Except in circumstances where there is strong cultural pressure to assimilate other features of a different language, borrowing is restricted to this domain, for languages (and people) resist adopting new forms of grammar. The development of the word-stock is a measure of society’s development. Words – or lexemes, as linguists call them – are ‘the means by which we make direct reference to extralinguistic reality, converting our basic perception of the world around us into language’, and they ‘serve as labels for segments of … reality which a speech community finds nameworthy’.10 In our daily lives we are continually conscious of our growing or changing personal vocabularies, and from an early age this is the domain where our increasing competence is most clear. Later – much later – this is one of the domains where our decline is first registered: we forget words, and are troubled by our doing so. We’ve most of us had the experience of watching an elderly relative groping for a particular noun: voucher or colander or blanket.

  New ideas and products are named, and their names usually tell us something of where they have come from. Borrowings have a ‘psychological climate’.11 Rather than using history to explain language, we can use details of language to open up a historical vista. Before the sixteenth century there are no significant borrowings from Spanish and Portuguese; those that followed tell us about the competition between the different European seaborne empires and about the rewards of exploration. In similar vein, if we look at loans from Latin and Greek we can draw conclusions – albeit perhaps rather impressionistic ones – from the fact that area and crisis were borrowed earlier than alibi and dogma, which in turn came before persona and euphoria.

  If we can quickly grasp why the words Bolshevik and Soviet first appear in the English-language press in 1917, it may be more titillating to find out that we can trace to 1966 – the year England won the football World Cup – The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citations of chlamydia, jacuzzi, freak-out and mind-fuck. We would be surprised to find a reference to the artistic avant-garde in Jane Austen, but it would not seem out of place in Virginia Woolf; and when we come across the avant-garde in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, which was published in 1485, we recognize it must be an obsolete military term. Some borrowings are much earlier than we would tend to expect. It seems odd to find Dr Johnson mention a duvet, as he does in a magazine essay dating from 1758, or to find a volume from 1698 referring to a shaman – a word acquired from Russian, which had absorbed it from the Tungusic languages of eastern Siberia. Parachute and commuter were adopted earlier than we might expect (1785 and 1865), as was electron (1891), but of course, one can talk about something before it exists. Communist made its first appearance before Marx and Engels drew up their Communist Manifesto. It is perhaps also a surprise to find that déjà vu was until fifty years ago a specialized term of psychology, and that the Latin Jesus, ultimately from the Aramaic language spoken by Christ himself, established itself only in the sixteenth century, displacing the French Iesu and the common abbreviation IHS.

  To paraphrase Wittgenstein, the limits of our language mark the limits of our world. At its most trivial there is the sensation that many readers will recognize: you come back from a foreign holiday with new terms of approval and terms of disgust, and at the same time you have certain new enthusiasms and an appreciation of new flavours – and possess new words with which to bring them to life. When King James VI of Scotland travelled to Oslo in the winter of 1589 to claim his bride, he returned with the toast skol. It’s not hard to imagine what he must have got up to while he was there. Less than half a century later, Englishmen serving alongside Swedes during the Thirty Years War learnt the word plunder, which the Swedes had acquired from their German allies, and it was widely used during the Civil War, mainly in connection with the rapacious Royalist troops.12

  More immediate examples are readily available. In the last few decades cheap air travel has made the world seem smaller, and few parts of the globe appear to be beyond our reach. Not many of the words we pick up on our travels survive the return journey: when you are in Bangkok it may be useful to know that a canal is a klong, and in Greece you may well discover that the word malaka, meaning ‘wanker’, is often used in all-male groups as a jocular term of endearment, but neither is likely to become a staple of your life at home. In general, loanwords cluster around a momentous event or a powerful phenomenon, not some brief encounter.

  Essentially, there are two kinds of loan: words to denote phenomena that have never before been given expression, and words to denote phenomena for which there already exist quite adequate terms. In the second camp there are a number of striking subsets: words adopted because they seem especially colourful and felicitous, or for reasons of decorum, or in a spirit of technical exactitude, or for reasons of fashion. When a word is imported even though an equivalent term already exists, the result tends to be that the meaning of the older word changes.

  There is, to use a well-worn phrase, a ‘tipping point’ where esoteric usage slips into the mainstream. Normally the transfer of a foreign word into English is effected by someone who has a good knowledge of both languages, but soon the word will be used by people who know little or nothing of the donor language and may even be unaware that the word is borrowed. As this happens, specialists worry about their lang
uage being cheapened by everyday use, and the layperson worries about being swamped by jargon. Here is the Roman poet Horace in the Ars Poetica:

  Why should I be grudged the right to add a few words to the stock if I can … ? It has always been accepted, and always will be, that words stamped with the mint-mark of the day should be brought into currency. As the woods change their foliage with the decline of each year … so words die out with old age; and the newly born ones arrive and prosper just like human beings in the vigour of youth … It is usage which regulates the laws and conventions of speech.13

  More than this, usage is what makes words live. And usage will always prevail over theory.

  At what point can a word truly be said to have been borrowed? One conventional view is that a ‘foreign’ word, even if in fairly common use, will be recognizable by its retaining a plainly un-English pronunciation and any accents or other diacritic signs such as, say, a circumflex; when it appears in print, it will be set in italics. But within the compass of such a rule there is, in practice, plenty of grey area. Most of us will accept that elite has been fully assimilated and that égalité hasn’t, but what of élan, esprit, entrepôt, or for that matter ensemble? And, staying with French, what of papier mâché, which means something different to us from what it means in France, where it signifies little more than ‘chewed paper’? (The French name for our papier mâché is carton-pâte.) We would tend to accept that papier mâché has been completely absorbed, but it does not fit the rule I cited a moment ago. Other examples are plentiful; the rule is flawed. Vive la différence.

  The language scholar David Crystal provides the example of a purportedly English-language menu in a Nigerian restaurant including such items as agidi, edikagong and foofoo.14 Someone whose first language is English and who is living in Nigeria or has Nigerian friends may be familiar with these dishes, but most English-speakers in Sunderland, Seattle or Singapore probably won’t be. (Restaurant, we may note in passing, is pronounced in three distinct ways; none is quite the same as the French version, and each bears witness to a different degree of comfort with its Frenchness.) A list from 1969 of ‘common Hawaiian loans in English’ comprises 205 items, although on closer inspection the list consists of words with which few readers will be acquainted: representative examples are malihini, meaning ‘a newcomer’, and humuhumunukunukuapuaa, a type of fish with a snout like a pig’s – the name maybe longer than the fish.15 Many more readers, though, will accept that the Hawaiian ukulele is now an English word, and will be at ease with aloha, hula, kahuna as a word for an expert and the garland called a lei. We will tend to dispute the status of individual borrowings, as our experiences differ. An English-speaking native of East Harlem is more likely than I am to have picked up and accepted a Spanish word. On the other hand, having travelled quite widely in the British Isles, I am more likely to know a few words of Gaelic and Welsh.

  Eventually a borrowed word may be ‘conventionalized’: its frequent use, together with changes in the way it is pronounced, means that it stops being considered foreign at all. Moreover, its meaning may rapidly alter after it has been assimilated. Even though a borrowing may begin with the need to remedy a particular deficiency in our language, the word acquired is highly susceptible to change, not only because it is novel, but also because it is isolated. Its links with the language from which it was borrowed are broken, and it has no semantic connections with other words in the language into which it has been absorbed.16

  It is the borrowings from Latin, French and Scandinavian that have made the clearest impression on English, but many other languages have contributed: Greek, Italian, Spanish and Dutch have all been generous lenders, and among those that have provided at least a hundred borrowings we find, perhaps surprisingly, Russian, Urdu, Turkish and Malay. Some of the contacts have occurred within the British Isles: penguin, corgi and flummery are all borrowed from Welsh, while puffin and bludgeon appear to be Cornish, and slogan derives from a Gaelic battle cry. (Curiously, penguin derives from the Welsh words for ‘white’ and ‘head’, whereas of course penguins have black heads.) Others have been more remote: elixir is Arabic, futon Japanese, and chimpanzee comes from the West African language Tshiluba. Sauna is Finnish, marmalade is Portuguese (and originally referred to quince jelly), while shibboleth, which I used a few pages ago, is a Hebrew word for a stream, and enabled the people of Gilead to identify their Ephraimite enemies, who habitually mispronounced it. Some words’ sources are unexpected. I can remember being surprised to find that kiosk is Turkish – as may be the card game bridge – and that berserk, like geyser and narwhal, is Icelandic: it seems to derive from the name of the bearskin coats worn by the fiercest Norse warriors. Loan itself is Norse. It has even been proposed – originally by Robert Ripley, in one of his widely syndicated Believe It or Not columns, and subsequently by people impressed by Ripley’s suggestion – that talk is our one direct borrowing from Lithuanian. Sadly, the word does not come from this source, and there may in fact be no English word adopted directly from Lithuanian, though eland, the name of a type of antelope, may have come from the Lithuanian for a type of elk, via Dutch.

  One of the effects of English’s very diverse borrowings is that, while slivers of other languages look and sound familiar to us, there is no one language to which ours feels truly proximate. A German listening to a Dutchman will often be struck by the closeness of their vocabularies. Momentary illusions notwithstanding, speakers of English do not share this experience – except if they visit a few island communities off the coast of northern Germany.

  While the adoption of foreign terms can facilitate traffic between the English-speaking world and other cultures, such language is sometimes used not in the interests of clarity, but for less democratic reasons. Loans tend to enjoy a certain mystical allure, and sometimes they are used to endow ordinary thoughts with extraordinary lustre. (Allure, by the way, is an example of a foreign word that has been adopted, has fallen into obsolescence, and has then been adopted afresh.) Elites, or those who consider themselves elite, reach for exotic vocabulary to impress those they consider their inferiors or to signal their distance from them. Perhaps a particular writer likes the German word Weltanschauung, believing that it projects her meaning more elegantly than the English ‘world view’: if she speaks it, though, she may be greeted with a few cheery Gesundheits. Throughout the history of English, the decision of a speaker or writer to borrow a word – be it from Latin, Greek, Hindi or Japanese – has been divisive, possibly an act of snobbery or self-importance, and an at least covert statement about his or her education.

  Naturally, words of this stripe are not used just in the interests of self-promotion. At their most valuable, they compress a great deal of information into a small amount of space. Looking at another German word that has been adopted into English, Schadenfreude, we can see that it expresses in very compact form an idea that would otherwise call for several words – along the lines of ‘a nasty pleasure in other people’s misfortunes’. According to the OED, it first crops up in an essay by the philologically minded cleric Richard Chenevix Trench in 1852, not long before he became dean of Westminster. A few years later Thomas Carlyle had a stab at a brief definition, suggesting it was joy not so much in making mischief as in seeing justice done. There is nothing intrinsically German about enjoying the misadventures of others, but this German word is more succinct than anything English can otherwise muster. The Germans also have a word that neatly conveys the idea of a song you are unable to get out of your head. This is Ohrwurm – literally, an ‘ear worm’, burrowing into the soft pulp of your brain. Of course the German language does not have a monopoly on this kind of concision.Terms from Latin can be every bit as spruce: at first blush, procrastination may seem a long word for an everyday phenomenon, but it would be hard to put the idea across any more briefly. By much the same token, the French have borrowed from English le weekend because it conveys the weekend’s opportunities for relaxation and leisure more decisively th
an the native la fin de semaine.

  Still, borrowed words are often redolent of the environment from which they were acquired. I may be able to refer to moped without thinking of Sweden – I mean the motorized scooter, not the past participle of mope – or to a paper tiger without any sense of its origins in the Chinese, but I am pretty much certain to be aware that in using yin and yang I am deploying Chinese terms, and to feel some intangible quality of Swedishness when referring to a smorgasbord. Such associations can give us great opportunities for nuance – for subtle gradations of register and meaning. As the horrible and bewilderingly well-informed narrator of John Lanchester’s novel The Debt to Pleasure remarks, ‘One should note that to be bourgeois is not at all the same thing as to be middle-class … Styles of self-satisfaction vary from country to country, just as to be bored is not the same thing as to suffer from ennui. The condition of feeling einsam is not identical with being lonely, and Gemütlichkeit is to be distinguished from comfiness.’17

  Sometimes loanwords seem to manifest and affirm stereotypes: thus, regrettably, many British people are hostile to Germany and Germans, and their idea of Germany is immediately evoked by the words Gestapo and Nazi, by the dubious charms of lederhosen and kitsch, or maybe by the romantic pessimism of Weltschmerz. While this pattern of thought may seem odious and crude, the fact remains that what we take from a culture becomes what we know of it. The ambiguity of those last few words is deliberate and fertile. For example, what we know of India is encapsulated in a vocabulary of Indianness which we sense we possess. And at the same time the aspects of Indianness that find their way into our language are ‘becoming’; they are compatible with our needs and values, with what we want or feel able to believe.

  This theme of appropriating what we find congenial is implicit in a further category: the loan translation or ‘calque’. This comes from the French verb calquer, meaning ‘to trace’ (as in making a copy using tracing paper), and derives ultimately from the Latin verb calcare. Many English calques are sourced in French. When we speak of a marriage of convenience, the phrase is a version of the much older mariage de convenance. Other examples are man of letters (which renders homme de lettres), to hold one’s peace (tenir sa paix), bluestocking (bas-bleu) and the order of the day (l’ordre du jour). So too we have hit or miss, to learn by heart, a thousand thanks and to cut one’s nose off to spite one’s face, all of which apparently ‘trace’ the form of French phrases. Right here may be another example, and that goes without saying is calqued on the French cela va sans dire, while notwithstanding is calqued on the Old French non obstant. As it happens, loanword is a calque of the German Lehnwort, and a couple of other instances of loan translations from German are antibody (which is based on Antikörper) and wishful thinking (from Wunschdenken), while, to give just one more example, barefoot doctor is a calque of a term in Chinese.