The Secret Life of Words
Page 26
Since the middle of the seventeenth century, the most significant changes in English have been in vocabulary. In the eighteenth century, and especially in the second half of it, authors of grammar books established an ideal of English usage and busied themselves with disseminating it. They promised their readers the possibility of social advancement. According to their model, one’s choice of words was crucial to one’s public image. Propriety was their golden rule, and an aspect of ‘proper’ English was a freedom from foreign contaminants. The vision of Standard English that developed in the second half of the eighteenth century was an essentially prescriptive one, intolerant of regional usage and immune to the idea of the language’s lush plurality. The period’s grammarians, of whom there were a great number, spoke decisively, presenting their judgements as certainties. Readers looking at early editions of eighteenth-century novels can be surprised to find that most of the nouns begin with a capital letter – as in German today. This was a printing convention, yet it was the practice of many authors to stress nouns, as if marvelling at the sheer ‘thingness’ of the things about which they were writing. The grammarians, intent on putting an end to this, would here at least taste success.
What sorts of new word do we owe to the writers of the period? We have come across a few already, but there are many more worth comment. Thomas Sheridan, one of those most eager to send English to school, gave us the verb to bother; his son Richard gave us dressing gown and amadavat (‘an Indian song-bird’). We owe descriptive to Johnson, low-bred to his friend the actor David Garrick, and casino to another of his friends, Hester Thrale. The novelist Samuel Richardson seems to have adopted the verb to modernize from the French. Edmund Burke’s innovations included colonial and electioneering , and his responses to the political upheaval of the French Revolution include early sightings of the words guillotine and sans-culotte . The radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham came up with the adjectives secretarial and exhaustive. The first author to use the word adventuress was Horace Walpole, who more famously coined serendipity, that once rare but now adored word for the faculty of making pleasant, unexpected discoveries, inspired by the old name of that teardrop of a tropical island, Sri Lanka.18 John Gay, author of The Beggar’s Opera, seems to have been the first letter-writer to sign off ‘yours sincerely’.19 Optimism we owe to Voltaire’s satirical Candide (the full title of which was Candide, ou l’Optimisme), published in 1759; its first English user was the critic William Warburton, in a letter written that year. Appropriately, we owe intolerance to the grammarian Robert Lowth, whose A Short Introduction to the English Language (1762) offered a narrowly prescriptive view of the subject – a first inspiration for all those letters to newspaper editors that fulminate against split infinitives and dangling prepositions.
One feature of the age was the growth of a highly subjective language of appreciation: amusing, charming, exciting and fascinating, as well as their antithesis, boring.20 It is particularly fitting that interesting , although then a rather stronger adjective than it has since become, was first used in its usual modern sense by Sterne, in A Sentimental Journey. Sterne was a preacher and a lover of the salon; his works suggest the pleasures of eloquent company and its pitfalls – the importance to people of their particular hobby horses, the strange conflicts between words and body language, the comic possibilities of ambiguity. A literary magpie, he lifted ideas and phrases from Rabelais, Robert Burton and John Locke, and his language is a mix of lightly worn borrowings and zesty originality. ‘To write a book is for all the world like humming a song,’ he suggested, and his writing pulses with the music of conversation. He is the OED’s first source for bambino, but also for a wealth of words connected with types of feeling and behaviour, such as good-tempered, lackadaisical, muddle-headed, sixth sense, uncheery and whimsicality. His was an era in which ‘a culture which had been dominated by oral transactions came to be replaced by a culture predominantly based on the written text … [and] where printed communication took precedence.’ During this transition, ‘the ear is replaced by the eye in shifting perceptions of language … [and] the eye is ascribed the primordial role of deciphering words upon the printed page.’ Accordingly, in this period ‘language took precedence over images in aesthetic debates’ and ‘writing was often deemed … superior to speech.’21
Sterne plays joyously with the possibilities of the printed word. Nietzsche could pronounce him ‘the most liberated spirit of all time’, which is perhaps overdoing it, but Sterne’s writing is fanciful and strewn with innuendo, a performance stimulated by the sense that low things are always sprouting through the gaps between lofty ones. ‘I will tell you in three words what the book is,’ says Tristram Shandy of the work that bears his name. ‘It is a history.’ Sterne repeatedly conveys a delight in disorder, a game embrace of chaos. Tristram Shandy’s huge audience was united in feeling it was a book that played fast and loose with conventional morality. Yet its humour did not prevent seriousness. The novel is deeply concerned with failures of communication – with ‘the unsteady uses of words’, the ‘unhappy’ and inconvenient associations of particular terms, and also the difficulties of making sense of gesture.
Uncertainty is at the heart of Sterne’s work and its appeal. You can be sure of nothing, he seems to say, and his writing had lasting appeal for an audience intent on deliberately altering their perceptions. In Britain during the second half of the eighteenth century there emerged a fresh scientific, philosophical and cultural understanding of the business of looking and seeing. The smoked convex lens known as a Claude glass, which could be easily obtained from an optician, earned its name because it gave the landscapes reflected in it the shady, even gloomy, look of the paintings of Claude Lorraine. It was made fashionable by the cult of the picturesque – the French term popularized by Cumbrian clergyman William Gilpin – and other devices equally valuable as aids to perception were the camera lucida and the camera obscura. The panorama took its name from Greek; its innovator Robert Barker originally called it La Nature à Coup d’Oeil. (Coup d’œil was generally felt to be ‘a needless Gallicism’, but had credibility in military circles.)22 Barker first exhibited in Scotland in 1788, and the following year he took his ‘step-in’ spectacle to London. Panoramas, which created impressively realistic effects, were soon all the rage; they paved the way for the development of the stereoscope. This was successfully created by Sir David Brewster, an enterprising Scot, who also invented the kaleidoscope in 1817. Later came the zoetrope, initially known as the daedalum. Its flickering impression of simulated movement fascinated nineteenth-century audiences.23
The quest for new vistas contributed to the contemporary passion for climbing – an erotic embrace of danger summed up in a new word, mountaineering. The Critical Review took pains to define avalanche, only to observe, we may think a little stupidly, that ‘there can be no English word for a phenomenon of which there is no example in England.’ The Gentleman’s Magazine provided a detailed and incorrect explanation of jokul, an Icelandic synonym for the recently established glacier.24 Débâcle, before it acquired the sense we usually now understand, was a term in geology for a violent deluge that breaks up ice or other barriers. Moreover, the striking new perspectives were not just available to climbers: you could also see different things from a balloon – the term borrowed from the French following the Montgolfier brothers’ successful ascent in 1783, though it had been around for a couple of centuries as the name of a ball game imported from Italy. One of the results of these fresh ways of looking at the world was the rise, beginning in the eighteenth century, of a new type of observer for whom vision was active rather than passive.
The period’s optical and visual developments exemplified the ways in which Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy penetrated every area of the nation’s life. Newton’s insights into the physics of colour were revolutionary, and so were his laws of motion. Significantly, whereas his Principia Mathematica (1687) was published in Latin, his Opticks, seventeen years later, wa
s in English; Newton’s ideas were difficult, but while Latin allowed an immutable precision of argument, the use of English was an aid to wider public understanding. The popular grasp of the kind of knotty, important science Newton practised was enriched through lectures and demonstrations – often held in coffee houses which doubled as theatres. After all, people were eager to lap up theories which showed that time was without limit. ‘The most important achievement in natural philosophy in the eighteenth century was a burgeoning public interest,’ observes Larry Stewart. ‘Nature … had entered the realm of public property,’ and ‘The production of knowledge, of scientific facts, increasingly depended upon the victory of a market model of public competition and consumption.’25 The natural world existed to be used, and the advance of scientific knowledge was understood to run in parallel with the advance of trade. ‘A palpable spaciousness animates late-seventeenth – and eighteenth-century natural philosophy,’ writes George Steiner, ‘a confidence that there are worlds enough and time for even the most forward-vaulting of sensibilities to draw a deep breath.’ Instead of‘containment by the crystalline and concentric’ and Pascal’s ‘terror of the void’, the new thinkers are set free by ‘the largesse of an unbounded future’.26
John Ray’s The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation took frank pleasure in a world ‘too great for any Man, or Generation of Men … to discover and find out all its Store and Furniture, all its Riches and Treasures’. 27 Ray’s executor, William Derham, produced the popular Physico-Theology (1713), and pushed this idea further: it was a man’s duty to make the most of God’s Creation through experiment and exploration. As Newton’s legacy was popularized, a financial relationship grew between the pioneers and the public. Important new books were published by subscription, which allowed many ambitiously conceived works to reach quite substantial audiences. Natural philosophy was equated with the ‘public good’, and an appropriate public language emerged. The very word science was beginning to bend to new purposes. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century it began to acquire a new sense, defined by the OED as ‘a branch of study which is concerned either with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less colligated by being brought under general laws, and which includes trustworthy methods for the discovery of new truths within its own domain’. Isaac Watts, now chiefly known for his hymns, is cited as the first to use the word in this more modern sense, in 1725.
Side by side with this was a shocking proliferation of pseudo-science and quackery. The practices of the quack are as old as history itself, but in eighteenth-century Britain they enjoyed special success. Quack is an abbreviation of quacksalver, which comes from the Dutch Kwakzalver, a person who quacks (that is, boasts) about the special properties of salves and ointments he offers for sale. Mountebank can be traced to the Italian montar in banco, ‘to climb up on a bench’; it was used of practitioners whose work was heavily theatrical. The English quacks of the eighteenth century were aping the Italian ciarlatani, whose chicanery was mentioned by Ben Jonson in Volpone. Foreign quacks flocked to Britain, travelling from Italy, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland. Their wares were cordials, snuffs and lozenges. They promised dramatic results, and were apt to vanish when these results failed to materialize. To give a single example, an audacious woman called Joanna Stephens set herself up as an expert on how to relieve kidney stones; she was so persuasive that Parliament paid her the magnificent sum of £5,000 for the secret of her remedy, which turned out to consist largely of dried snails, carrot and burdock seeds, soap and honey. Her success encouraged imitators, many of whom prescribed soap as a cure for gallstones. No less a figure than Sir Robert Walpole was so smitten with this form of treatment that at the time of his death he was reckoned to have consumed about 80 kilograms of it.
The quacks were enthusiastic manipulators of language. They made extensive use of obscure words, energetically appropriating the terms of natural philosophy. Anything that smacked of Latin learning was especially good, and so was any ingredient that could claim to have been sourced abroad – the balsam of Gilead, Japanese powders, Egyptian pills.28 It is during this period of rampant quackery that bona fide, used adverbially since the sixteenth century, begins to be used as an adjective – a salesman’s suspiciously vigorous assurance of sincerity. It is an example of a term that starts out as an element of legal jargon and in time becomes a commercial or academic buzzword before being fully absorbed into the mainstream; caveat is another such example, as are ad hoc, in re, pro rata and verbatim. Such terms were often to be found in newspapers, along with more recondite Latin snippets: summum jus est summa injuria, for instance, or noli prosequi.29
At the same time as Britain’s consumer culture drew in foreign opportunists, it stimulated travel to their countries of origin. The period witnessed the second phase of heavy borrowing from Italian. Fashionable Britons spoke of venturing alfresco, or of harbouring private thoughts in petto. Hester Thrale could refer without explanation to villeggiatura, the habit of holidaying in the country. The old Puritan hostility to Italian culture was remedied by volumes such as William Huggins’s new translation of Ariosto and by the popular An Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy (1768), written by Dr Johnson’s friend Giuseppe Baretti. Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy was another eloquent stimulus. Travel in Italy was considered a desirable part of a young man’s education (the Grand Tour had first been mentioned in Richard Lascelles’s A Compleat Journey Through Italy in 1670), and, as the masterworks of Italian art and literature were fetishized, so words such as portfolio were borrowed. A less glamorous Italian word, influenza, cemented its position during an outbreak of the illness in 1743; in Italian, it had commonly been used of any epidemic, its name suggestive of the ‘influence’ of inexplicable occult forces.30 Malaria first appears in 1740, in a letter of Horace Walpole’s, complaining of the fevers suffered by summer visitors to Rome; early uses, including Walpole’s, tended to be spelt mal’aria, which signals the word’s origins in the Italian for ‘bad air’ – traceable at least as far back as a treatise published in 1560 by Francesco Sansovino.
There was also a cult of Italian musicians and singers, and the amounts earned in London by castrati such as Farinelli were the stuff of legend. Some of the castrati trafficked between the Protestant courts at Berlin, Braunschweig, Stuttgart and Bayreuth, periodically appearing at public operas, while others were active in Vienna, Munich, Hamburg and Mannheim. London was not among the most frequent ports of call, but it was a lucrative part of a complex international performance network.31 The mandolin made its first appearance in 1707, when a Signior Conti performed in London ‘upon his great Theorbo, and on the Mandoline, an instrument not known yet’.32 The specifically musical sense of maestro was adopted in 1724; concerto in 1730; impresario in 1746; bravura in 1788. The approving cries bravo and bravissimo also achieved currency at this time. Meanwhile, a mass invasion of Italian violinists was inspired by the success of the Neapolitan Nicola Matteis; the phenomenon was noted by Fanny Burney’s father, Charles, in his A General History of Music (1776-89), which introduced melodrama, polyphonic and choreography . London’s musical culture was entrepreneurial, yet patronage also played a part, and the success of the virtuoso – whose very name, though etymologically indicative of virtue, became during this period something of a slur – was dependent on his ability to flatter affluent and well-connected socialites.33 Hester Thrale appalled Dr Johnson by marrying her daughters’ music master, Gabriel Piozzi: men such as Piozzi were supposed to sing and play the violin or spinet, not marry rich widows.
The success of impresarios and of the artists whose talents they paraded was a symptom of a booming consumer culture. The eighteenth century is commonly considered to have witnessed a ‘shopping revolution’, in which traditional markets and fairs were superseded by fixed commercial outlets. While the reality is more complex – with different retail circuits coexisting happily – it
seems fair to say that increasing consumption and a burgeoning appetite for luxury goods are arresting features of the age, which has been dubbed the ‘century of the shopkeeper’.34 Dr Johnson could in 1755 trace luxury’s development, from ‘addictedness to pleasure’ via ‘lewdness’ and ‘exuberance’ to ‘delicious fare’. His occasional antagonist the philosopher David Hume was one of the most impressive apologists for the appetite for what he called ‘innocent luxury’: for consumer goods like Hepplewhite cabinets and Axminster carpets, and for imported articles such as calico from Gujarat (which as Johnson explains is ‘sometimes stained with gay and beautiful colours’) and Japanese lacquerware. Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a ‘little pig’, and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell’s resemblance either to a pig’s back or to a sow’s glisteningly crinkled vagina.35 Silks from Syria and Persia, Turkish mohair and West Indian coffee flowed into Britain’s ports, and in the opposite direction there travelled woollens and furnishings. One area of real British excellence was metalwork: in the handsome new shops of London’s Piccadilly and St James’s, glittering buttons and buckles, ladles, spoons and candelabra competed for attention, and shoppers travelled across Europe to buy British toys and metalware.36 Entrepreneurial craftsmen from Sheffield and Birmingham satisfied the desire for cheaper, more fashionable, designs. Novelty was vital to commercial success, and with it came slick jargon and a habit of grandiloquent puffery. Philosophically freighted words such as enthusiasm and ideal began to free themselves of their historical burdens and become part of the everyday language of sensory relish.