We may demur at Johnson’s talk of corrupt language and depraved manners, but he neatly limns the essential business of the English abroad. Without other people’s resources, their little island could not wield much power. It was forever stretching for more: more land, more goods, more connections, more words. As England became Britain, and as Britain’s possessions overseas increased, so its society was ‘caught up in, transformed, and sometimes traumatised by the business of empire’.23 Empire was not something scrupulously planned: the process of its growth was littered with accidents, both happy and unhappy. The people’s experience of it was richly various. And as they absorbed this experience, they taught those they governed the chief features of their own society. According to the historian Niall Ferguson, the most impressive of these were
1. the English language;
2. English forms of land tenure;
3. Scottish and English banking;
4. the Common Law;
5. Protestantism;
6. team sports;
7. the limited or ‘night watchman’ state;
8. representative assemblies;
9. the idea of liberty.24
It is fitting that language heads the list, for there is no clearer legacy of empire than the international prevalence of English, and at the same time the English word-stock is, we can see, strongly marked by imperial rivalries and the variety of imperial treasures.
6. Genius
Natural ability and special endowments; the prevailing character (of an institution, place or language); the tutelary god assigned to a person at birth, which shapes his or her fortunes and character
From the Latin, and ultimately from the Greek verb for ‘to be born’ or ‘to come into being’
While adventurers conveyed the ‘treasure’ of English to strange shores and returned with impressive cargoes, on the home front England repeatedly had to brace itself for invasion. Even though no foreign troops broke the English defences, foreign words burst into the consciousness of a nation at once politically unsettled and culturally exuberant. ‘The Spanish are coming!’ exclaimed a character in John Marston’s Histriomastix (1599) – a line that was surely meant to get a laugh.1 But there were other incursions – real and imagined, novel and unfamiliar – that seemed to pose more subtle challenges to the state, the people and their language.
In 1605 a volume with the swanky title A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence was published in Antwerp. It was the work of an Oxford-educated man called Richard Rowlands, whose passion for all things Teutonic was so strong that it had led him to reclaim his ancestral surname, Verstegan. This same enthusiasm was clear in the Restitution, where Rowlands vigorously promoted Anglo-Saxon words and customs, and complained that his countrymen had lately borrowed so many terms from Latin, French and other tongues that English was ‘of itself no language at all, but the scum of many languages’. We might just as soon, he claimed, ‘fetch words fro[m] the Ethiopians, or East or West Indians, and thrust them into our language and baptise all by the name of English, as those which wee daily take from the Latin, or languages thereon depending’. In illustration of the problems facing English-speakers, he told the story of a London courtier writing to ‘a personage of authoritie in the north partes, touching the training of men and providing furniture for warre’. The courtier ‘willed him among other things to equippe his horses’: the letter’s recipient was stumped by this word, wondered if it was another way of talking about ‘quipping’ or, more plausibly, ‘whipping’, and in the end sent a messenger back to London ‘to learne the meaning thereof ’.2
As you may already have noticed, Verstegan is not wholly innocent of the crime he deplores. After all, the title of his book is hardly a model of Germanic simplicity. Moreover, according to the OED, he is the first to use the difficult words conjuncture, obiterly and confederated , among others, and he introduces blood royal, a calque of sang royal. For the indignant Verstegan things would get worse before they got better: the peak period of borrowing from Latin was around 1615. Nevertheless, he spoke for a generation who found their language both exciting and mystifying – and who debated its rights and wrongs in moral terms.
This was a period of dramatic change in English vocabulary. Of particular concern was the flood of new words that had poured into the language in the previous hundred years. And there really had been a huge number: a third of all the English words with Latin etymologies were first used in the 140 years between the arrival of printing and the death of Shakespeare. The position Rowlands took in A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence was essentially conservative, a rebuff to the wilful innovators who had puffed up the nation’s lexis. The sort of people its author was thinking of were the humanists Sir Thomas Elyot and Sir Thomas More.
Elyot, a diplomat and scholar, had been especially influential. His The Boke Named the Governour (1531) was at once a treatise on political education and a celebration of English and of verbal innovation. Elyot’s decision to write in English what was essentially a manual of upper-class instruction was itself a radical departure from received practice, and demonstrated a commitment to a new, popularizing, ideal of education. His solution to the commonly perceived deficiencies of the language was to bring in a large number of loanwords. Some of these have stood the test of time – Elyot is the earliest known user of encyclopedia, entertainment, modesty and hostility – but we may balk at concinnity and ingurgitation , the latter being an appropriately mouth-filling term for excessive guzzling.
Sir Thomas Elyot’s lexically voracious work was acclaimed by Henry VIII and went through eight editions in half a century. Yet, as one Victorian commentator could later observe, Elyot ‘endured the sneer of … cavillers, for his attempt to inlay our unpolished English with Latin terms’.3 Elyot’s contemporary Roger Ascham, who served as private tutor to Princess Elizabeth (teaching her Greek in the morning and Latin in the afternoon), worried that Elyot’s novelties were obstructive – that borrowings ‘make all things darke and harde’. Ascham argued the need for ‘propriety’ and plainness. Elyot and Ascham represented the opposing camps in what was little short of a war over the vernacular, its uses and its integrity. The plasticity of English – its capacity for adventure – was fiercely contested. A porous national language was interpreted, correctly, as a sign of the increasingly porous structure of society as a whole.
The influx of new language – new words, and new meanings – reflected a massive intellectual upheaval, which we now of course call the Renaissance. In fact the word Renaissance (or Renascence, as Matthew Arnold was apt to insist) did not find favour until the Victorian era, when it was given currency by two very different historians, Jules Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt: I use it here in the interests of convenience. Although the wholesale rediscovery of classical form – sometimes termed a rinascita – began in Italy in the fourteenth century, its effects were most urgently felt in England some 200 years later, in a period of intellectual and artistic rejuvenation. This cultural ferment teemed with new attitudes, ideas and concepts, as well as reintegrating old ones. Knowledge of the world was expanding fast, and a great deal of the language borrowed during the period reflects the need to equip English with a more sophisticated range of terms for dealing with abstract matters.
In theology, medicine, anatomy, and the study and naming of plant and animal life, new specialist understanding called for new, exact words. Writing in 1573, more than forty years after Elyot’s tsunami of strange terms, the logician Ralph Lever could still acknowledge that there were ‘moe things, then there are words to expresse things by’.4 But the words were catching up. Understandably, nouns headed the field, and many of them were abstract. The Greek pathos was first used in 1579, while chaos began to be used figuratively at this time; the Latin species is found in 1551, with specimen and spectrum in 1610 and 1611. There is at this time an emerging technical vocabulary, comprising words such as series, apparatus and complex. Furthermore, we can date genius to the early years of the sixteenth c
entury, acumen to Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, and decorum to Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570): these are examples of words adopted to denote not brand-new concepts, but brand-new ways of voicing those concepts and, beyond that, in response to an urge to dignify intellectual and personal accomplishments with fine, unsullied terms. Latin was favoured for inscriptions, because it seemed sacred and incorruptible, and bringing Latin into English seemed a way of endowing the vernacular with these qualities.
Some of the new words came directly from Latin, like dexterity, gratis and factotum; others, like tonic, cosmos, idiosyncrasy, misogyny and autodidact, came straight from Greek. Some were closely modelled on Greek, like anthropology, and yet others, such as dogma, atmosphere and enigma, came from Greek via Latin. At the same time, vocabulary of a different kind was drawn from French; while French could often be a ‘relay’ language for borrowings from Latin and Greek, its direct contributions tended to be concerned with the social arts. John Palsgrave in his Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse (1530) noted recent changes in both English and French, and among these he highlighted borrowings such as the verb to surmount, although he could in fact have found it in Troilus and Criseyde. French imports of the years immediately following Palsgrave’s work included maître d’hotel and perfume; a little later came portrait, rendezvous and masquerade, along with a crop of words of recoil – mediocre, naïf, grotesque and obscene.
The critic F. W. Bateson once analysed a substantial section of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary and found that ‘of every 100 words in use in 1600, 39 were introduced between 1500 and 1600.’ 5 In fact the most rapid growth seems to have spanned a period of approximately eighty years, running from around 1550 to 1630. As Seth Lerer observes, this is ‘about more than numbers. It is about the idea of numbers: about a rhetorical and social ideal of amplification, about a new fascination with the copiousness of worldly things, and about a new faith in the imagination to coin terms for unimagined concepts.’6 Heatedly – excitedly, or furiously – the Elizabethans recognized that their language was in flux. They thought of it as a stream, forever carrying items away from them and washing new ones into view.
One of the cardinal features of the period was the increase in the numbers of books published, and in the audiences they reached. While literacy levels were not high – as late as 1640 no more than a fifth of women and two-fifths of men were able to sign official documents, rather than just using a mark – there was an emergent popular culture, a demand for printed material among the yeoman and tradesman class, and a capacity among these groups for reflecting on what they read. Books disseminated every kind of English, from high-flown rhetoric drenched in Latin to the cant of the criminal underworld. In between, there was the lucid prose of the Authorized Version of the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, volumes that were instrumental in solidifying the status of English as the new language of authority. Two hundred and ninety editions of the Book of Common Prayer were produced between 1549 and 1642, and more than 500,000 copies were in circulation by the end of that period. The King James Bible built on the example of Tyndale; its linguistic temper is conservative. The Book of Common Prayer incorporates this same language in its liturgy. Neither ushered in many new words, although both would give lasting dignity to a wealth of expressions. To give just a couple of examples from the former: ‘the spirit … is willing, but the flesh is weak’, and ‘no man can serve two masters.’
There was plenty of other reading material to choose from: printed songs and ballads, pamphlets, copies of plays, expensive legal texts, and freshly minted verse at what were often wicked prices, as well as impressive manuscript collections of poetry.7 A wealth of new literary terminology reflected the increasingly rich culture of English letters. The English Renaissance, while offering many visual stimuli, conveyed its excitement chiefly through the written word. It was at this time that one began to refer to the distinct category of fiction, the role of the critic, juvenilia, and the lyric and dramatic classes of literature, and began as well to distinguish explicitly between forms such as the adage and the epigram. Moreover, against the background of these generic distinctions, there was fresh scope for eclecticism. The bright new terminology marked the emergence of a proudly national literature in the late sixteenth century – though the formula ‘English literature’ would not achieve currency until 200 years later. This national literature comprised works such as Shakespeare’s history plays, William Camden’s wide-ranging survey entitled Britannia, Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Michael Drayton’s celebration of England’s variety, Poly-Olbion. (The last of these affords our first sighting of nymphet, a noun given a scandalous twist some 350 years later by Vladimir Nabokov in Lolita.) One contemporary borrowing was the Greek chorography, a term to denote a map that was also a repository of proper names, such as those of places and people. Elizabethan chorographies drew attention to the pedigree of the nation and its inhabitants. 8 The new form represented the anatomy of England; national identity was embodied in the land and in the language which flowed through its arteries.
Another new form was the essay, introduced into English by Francis Bacon in 1597. Persuasive, imaginative and eloquent, Bacon’s Essays were modelled on the writings of the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne.9 More concise than Montaigne, Bacon was also less intimate; his writing thrives on images that are powerful, colloquial and oddly remote (‘All rising to great place is by a winding stair’; ‘Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats among birds’). Like most writers with a gift for aphorism, he was concerned more with common truths than with the subtle varieties of human experience. Many of his images exploit simultaneously the literal meaning of a word and its figurative meaning. His style can be oracular, but one of his central beliefs is that a philosophical writer must achieve ‘quiet entry’ into the minds of his audience. Thus he combines strict reason with sensuous poetry, and his writing is full of new terms. A few seem over-egged (conglutinant, obtenebration), but others have endured impressively.
Bacon has a particular way with adjectives, and in his writings we can spy the first appearances of versatile, prescient, ignoble, acoustic and juvenile. Items of this kind testify to his deep knowledge of Latin and Greek, yet his use of classical words is disciplined and seems always to be conditioned by a desire to express himself concisely rather than by the urge to flaunt his erudition. As Geoffrey Hughes puts it, ‘he realizes the potent capacity for dignified abstraction in the classical register and uses it to great effect.’10 Shelley thought that Bacon’s style was powerful enough to burst the circumference of the reader’s mind. But actually this wasn’t what Bacon wanted. He was sensitive to the intellectual frailty of a large part of his audience, and felt he had to create a new form of rhetoric that would imprint itself on both their reason and their imagination. He was, appropriately enough, the first to distinguish overtly between the ancients and the moderns, and it is to him that we owe the word progressive.
The educationalist Richard Mulcaster, one of whose more illustrious pupils was Edmund Spenser, promoted English as a medium for serious works, and felt it was a mark of English intelligence that borrowings from other languages were so frequent. ‘Our tung doth serve to so manie uses,’ he argued, ‘because it is conversant with so manie people, and so well acquainted with so manie manners, in so sundrie kindes of dealing.’ He pointed out that ‘it is not for foulls to be so well learnt.’11 Borrowing was done either out of necessity – to describe or explain new practices and new phenomena – or to garnish high-minded writing and thinking. A society without borrowing would, he saw, be poorer both materially and intellectually.
Yet anxiety about new coinages, around half of which were sourced from Latin, gnawed away at patriotic consciences. The result was an outpouring of public condemnation, which has come to be known as the ‘Inkhorn controversy’. Inkhorns were small vessels used for carrying ink, and the image summoned up by the controversialists was of writers spurting out horr
id polysyllables, almost as if intent on wasting their materials. Such addicts of exotic terms would rarely use a short word where a long alternative could be found. Their innovations were seen not as a mark of skill, but as evidence of a deranged pomposity. In fact the very word innovator was damning: in John Florio’s A Worlde of Wordes (1598), which glossed more than 40,000 Italian terms, it is deemed synonymous with ‘disturber’. The enraged purists argued that novel, imported terms weakened not just the English language, but the whole English character. The friends of the polysyllable were an enemy within. In one camp stood George Gascoigne, sometime Member of Parliament for Bedford and Midhurst, who equated a taste for verbal ornament with a betrayal of English values, and told aspiring poets to ‘thrust as few words of many syllables into your verse as may be’: in the other was George Chapman, who, despite a similar suspicion of the ‘many syllables in harsh collision’ found in French and Italian, insisted that poetry should be difficult and recondite, and spent eighteen years producing a rather loose translation of Homer that was later cherished by John Keats.
The debate was strenuous, and widely taken up. Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553), which voiced suspicion of ‘oversea language’ and ‘Englishe Italianated’, was reprinted seven times by three different printers. Another strongly argued contribution came from the Cambridge scholar Sir John Cheke, an advocate of simplified spelling, who spoke for all reformists when he pronounced, ‘I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, unmixt and unmangeled with borrowings of other tunges, wherein if we take not heed … ever borrowing and never paying, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt.’ His words, with their strikingly commercial metaphor (and their debt, in unmixt and unmangeled, to French), would become part of the preface to Sir Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation of Baldassare Castigilione’s hugely influential Il Libro del Cortegiano. Castiglione’s book proposed an ideal of gentlemanly conduct, and Cheke was adamant that such a work should allow ‘no counterfeitness of other tunges’, serving instead as an advertisement for elegant, plain English. It was with this in mind that Hoby translated Castiglione’s sprezzatura – a studied carelessness that was the essence of courtly refinement – as the less glamorous-sounding ‘recklessness’. Yet, as it happened, Castiglione had been quick to spot that meetings between different cultures resulted, inevitably, in the exchange of words, and he likened these words to ‘articles of trade’.
The Secret Life of Words Page 14
