The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The advent of Chinese words in English began in earnest as a result of the East India Company’s trading in opium and tea. Opium had long been traded privately by the Company’s employees, who shipped chests of the drug from Calcutta to Canton and Macau. It had been introduced to China as early as the first century BC, but mass export into the region was initiated by the Dutch in the 1660s. Prohibited by imperial edict in 1729, it was nonetheless in high demand, and Indian opium was of a quality far superior to the Chinese opium grown mainly in Yunnan. In 1773 the Company took monopoly control of the production of opium, and between 1767 and 1790 the volume of exports to China quadrupled.34 Emperor Qian Long could write to George III that his celestial empire contained ‘all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its own borders’, but this was manifestly not the case.35 The Indian opium paid for Chinese tea; by 1833 about 35 million pounds of tea were being imported annually by the Company.36

  The noun tea seemed novel to Samuel Pepys in 1661 (he explains that it is ‘a Chinese drink’), but in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712-14) it needed no gloss. Where once the practice of drinking tea had been made popular by the spread of Buddhism, now it grew first through the influence of Charles II’s Portuguese wife and then through a very English affection for any pastime that involves a ludicrous mass of paraphernalia (summed up in the twee eighteenth-century coinage tea-things). More words were adopted thanks to the eighteenth-century spate of fascination, right across Europe, with all things Chinese. This chinoiserie was evident in Thomas Chippendale’s festive bedroom furniture, the architectural designs of Sir William Chambers and William Halfpenny, George Bickham’s wallpapers, and also Thomas Percy’s Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the Chinese (1762). While knowledge of China certainly improved at this time, its manifestations in art and literature rarely rose above a stylized, largely imaginary representation of the country and its culture.

  Subsequent borrowing from Chinese had much to do with the region’s infiltration by British and American missionaries, and in the nineteenth century with business dealings. In Hong Kong, doing business was easy; Britain’s occupation of this free port was confirmed by the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and companies such as Jardine Matheson and Butterfield & Swire profited. A vocabulary dating from as early as 1824, ‘intended as an Aid to Correspondence and Conversation’, suggests the nature of relations between British and Chinese, full as it is with glosses of words and expressions like dissolve partnership, fair price, monopoly and undersell.37

  Clearly, when Chinese words are borrowed into English they are spelt out in the English alphabet, and this can have implications for their pronunciation. For instance, the Chinese root of the word kaolin consists of two characters and two syllables, but the form adopted into English is pronounced with three syllables. Another pertinent example is the verb kowtow, which literally means ‘to knock the Head’ – as one does in prostrating oneself before a superior. Kowtow was adopted in the early nineteenth century as a noun; the first author to use it as a verb – and to use it figuratively – was Benjamin Disraeli, in 1826. In English it is treated as a single unit: we say, ‘He kowtowed repeatedly,’ not the more picturesque ‘He kowed his tow repeatedly.’ Moreover, the particularity of a word’s connotations can be lost. We tend to use taipan to signify the head of a large company, but it was formerly used of a dance-hall manager or the man in charge of a public convenience.38

  A few more examples of borrowings from Chinese will suggest the flavour of this debt. Thus there is the game mahjong, the first English account of which was written by the ethnographer Stewart Culin. Its name literally means ‘sparrows’: the clattering of the tiles with which the game is played has been likened to the sound of sparrows squabbling over crumbs. Cheongsam (literally ‘long garment’) is probably the best-known style of clothing to have been adopted, while a few Chinese breeds of dog have achieved popularity, such as the shih-tzu (literally ‘lion dog’). Feng shui is a direct import from Mandarin, where the two words signify ‘wind’ and ‘water’. We may be surprised by how long the expression has had a place in English: the OED’s first citation dates from 1797, and the term was quite casually used by Rudyard Kipling more than seventy years ago. Gung ho was adopted by Evans Carlson, a colonel in the US Marine Corps during the Second World War. It derives from kung, ‘work’, and ho, ‘together’, and Carlson’s marines, striving to present a united front, took gung ho as their motto. Kung fu made its first known appearance in Punch in September 1966. The skills it denoted were of great antiquity, but the term kung fu was quite a modern development; it burst into international view only with the rise of martial-arts films and the emergence of Bruce Lee as a bankable star in the late 1960s. Typhoon may well have been picked up from Chinese sailors, but it entered Chinese from Arabic, and the Arabic word tufan can in turn be traced to Greek, where it was used by Aristotle among others.39 The verb to shanghai is attributable to the once very brutal means by which sailors were recruited for voyages to the Far East.

  The source of these words will easily be identified by most speakers of English. We may also, I think, say that a large part of the history of the relationship between English and Chinese has been painted over. Tom McArthur writes, ‘English and Chinese constitute two of the most powerful language complexes on earth and it seems highly likely that their influence on one another in future will transcend anything that has so far transpired between them.’40 This sounds plausible. But when we reflect on English’s debt to Chinese, it is hard not to perceive a certain awkwardness, a lack of trust on both sides; and this persists.

  In his essay ‘Shooting an Elephant’, George Orwell recalls an episode from his time as an imperial policeman in Burma:

  It was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the ‘natives’, and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

  Orwell reimagines his experience of this puppetry in the novel Burmese Days. There he trowels on the local colour, with abundant use of words like pukka, pani-wallah, chokra (a young male servant), burra sahib, sampan, thugyi and mamoty (a tool that looks a bit like a hoe). The effect is cloying, and deliberately so. Orwell perfectly evokes the way the English grasp of the language of the ‘East’ seems not to bring it closer, but to keep it at arm’s length.

  12. Blizzard

  A sharp blow or knock; a blast of blinding snow

  The word is ‘more or less onomatopoeic’ (OED), and was apparently popularized by the American press during the hard winter of 1880-81, although it had been used perhaps as much as half a century earlier

  The colonists have put some distance between themselves and ‘alien’ usage, and so have the colonized. In my opening chapter I pictured Samuel Sewall breakfasting in 1690s Boston on venison and chocolate. Reading his diaries, which cover a period of more than half a century, we see him worrying about his children, eight of whom died before reaching adulthood, and fishing for cod beyond Massachusetts Bay, complaining about the wearing of wigs, and propagating the Gospel among the natives. Amid its frank records of social and spiritual life, Sewall’s diary is full of pleasing detail; on one occasion he calls for a chamber pot, the bottom of which falls out when he uses it, prompting the reflection, ‘How unexpectedly a man may be expos’d! There’s no security but in God.’1 Yet, even as Sewall emerges from the diary’s pages as a man loyal to his English roots, others’ murmurs
of discontent are audible. In less moderate circles they were loud. The distance was growing between the British idea of America and the American experience of America, and language registered this. Many words that were once seen as symptoms of the political and cultural gulf have been appropriated by users of English who have never set foot on American soil, but the Americanization of Standard English – abhorred by Samuel Johnson, almost unthinkable in the age of Samuel Sewall – has its origins in American resistance to British sovereignty.

  The organization of the land was one early area of tension. By 1700 there were as many as 140 towns in New England, and along the eastern seaboard there lay not just Boston, but a string of other well-planned communities: Philadelphia, Charles Town, Newport and New York. Even though British America was still predominantly rural, its landscape was regular, parcelled into convenient lots.2 And while for a large part of the eighteenth century most of the white inhabitants of the American colonies thought of themselves as free subjects of the British monarch, there gradually rose a resistance to this convenient parcelling-up of land, and there also rose an appetite for self-reliance.

  In 1705 Robert Beverley, writing anonymously in his The History and Present State of Virginia, pronounces himself an Indian. It seems a strange gesture for a man who had been educated in Yorkshire and was living at the time in London, but in doing this he is explicitly distancing himself from English habits and English rule. He did not call himself an American: that word was still somewhat ambiguous – a term habitually used of the indigenous peoples, and just beginning to be used by some colonists of themselves, although not with the pride that it would later connote. Beverley was unimpressed by English achievements in Virginia, yet he was smitten with Virginia itself. He was not alone in sensing an impending divorce. Aphra Behn’s play The Widdow Ranter, or, The History of Bacon in Virginia (first performed in 1689) identifies Virginia not as an extension of England, but rather as a fascinatingly distinct place, alive with new possibilities and possessed of its own potently bizarre language.3 While many settlers felt the need to advertise their English credentials, others identified with the land where they lived, not with the land of their ancestors. The drudgery of settlement had dampened individualism, but in the early eighteenth century British America began to develop its own culture. In 1721 Hugh Jones, a professor at William and Mary College in Williamsburg, Virginia, put together the first American guide to English grammar, and bolder statements of the distinctiveness of British America were to follow.

  Francis Moore, who travelled to Georgia in 1735, may well have been the first Englishman to snipe at ‘American English’, complaining that the barbarous Americans called the bank of a river a bluff, and around the same time Richard Owen Cambridge became the first to argue the need for a glossary of Americanisms. Many who ventured from Britain to America were taken aback by the good usage prevalent among Americans; one, an adventurous farmer’s son from Derbyshire called Nicholas Cresswell, recorded in his journal in July 1777 that American English was better than the standard version spoken in Britain.4 Yet most British writers and thinkers of the period were simply uninterested in American speech and American literature. When this began to change, around 1830, American English was routinely trashed by commentators such as Frances Trollope and Frederick Marryat. The reason? Probably it was a renewed flow of Americanisms into British English – at first through the works of writers such as Thomas Jefferson and James Fenimore Cooper, and then, more vividly, as slang. Marryat scorned the American habit of punctuating speech with uh and um, but picked it up all the same.

  As eighteenth-century Americans resisted British rule, so a distinctively American form of English became a badge of anti-British sentiment. At institutions such as Harvard and Yale, students aspired to the genteel manners of the British elite, as did many cosmopolitan capitalists in New York and Philadelphia, but, more commonly, Americans’ use of English telegraphed their distance from Britain and from Britons. The American Revolution brought a tidal wave of ‘visible and auditory terrorism’ – a tumult of slogans, bonfires, processions and topsy-turvydom.5 One word for it was hubbub, a Gaelic term associated either with the shrill wail of the bagpipes or with “ub! ub! ubub!” – an expression of contempt. By the 1770s the gulf between American and British Englishes was widening quickly, and it became more pronounced after the Declaration of Independence in 1776. This founding document promoted ‘liberty’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’, and Americans’ political independence galvanized a sense of linguistic independence. An American Philological Society was formed in 1788 – a response to the arguments put forward by, among others, John Adams, who had suggested an American Academy to the president of Congress in two letters dated September 1780.

  Adams played a key role in defining the political values of America, so it seems fitting that he was the first to employ the word caucus, in his diary in February 1763, although as the stertorous caw-cawwassoughe this word for a private meeting of political leaders had appeared in John Smith’s Generall Historie of Virginia.6 More than thirty years later, a group of federalists in Congress would be publicly excoriated for meeting in caucus to sponsor Adams’s candidacy to be the country’s second president. As for Adams’s goal of a national academy, that would be realized through the American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres, founded in 1820 with his son John Quincy Adams as its president. But by then the Americanness of American English had been trumpeted across the nation by a single reformist member of the Philological Society. This was the Connecticut schoolmaster Noah Webster, an energetic Calvinist and Federalist, whose strong ideas and shameless self-promotion made him the most influential architect of the divergence between British and American usage.

  Already when Webster began his work, America was more diverse – ethnically and linguistically – than any country in western Europe. Besides the remaining speakers of French, Spanish and Dutch, there were Germans in Pennsylvania and Maryland, Welsh in New England, Swedes in Delaware, and Sephardic Jews in Manhattan. The range of American experience was also stunning. As one commentator observed, ‘How tame will his language sound, who would describe Niagara in language fitted for the falls at London bridge, or attempt the majesty of the Mississippi in that which was made for the Thames?’7

  Webster’s dictionaries would reflect this sense of newness: new ideas and new ways of being and seeing, a novel and independent national character and destiny. His productions flaunted their distance from Britishness with patriotic titles – The American Spelling Book, An American Dictionary of the English Language – and a niggling disparagement of the quintessentially English authority of Dr Johnson. He also took note of American coinages such as lengthy and skunk. Webster was in favour of making spellings more straightforward – writing color instead of colour, for instance, music rather than musick, and check rather than cheque. There were etymological reasons for such preferences, as well as practical ones, although some of the other spellings he initially favoured – groop and tung, for instance – failed to impress even his keenest supporters. In any case, Webster’s persistent and patriotic lexicography was never hindered by anxieties about whether he was genuinely right. His approach was in many respects unsuccessful, but one aspect endures: tellingly, when American language mavens complain about what they perceive to be incorrectness, they proffer logical explanations and emphasize the need for simplicity and clarity, while their British counterparts tend to display a mixture of masochistic Victorianism and unreasoning bluster.

  Linguistically, the next 150 years in America were lush, as the works of Emerson, Melville and Whitman were to prove. In the short term, and simultaneous with the emergence of a distinctive and determinedly American form of English, there was a vast improvement in Americans’ knowledge of their land. Works including James Adair’s The History of the American Indians (1775) and Washington Irving’s Astoria (1836), as well as the westward expedition of Lewis and Clark, whose reports were published in 1814, marked the American
s’ conquest of their own country. These men’s stories fertilized dreams of a country united from sea to shining sea. Penetrating the extremities of their continent, driven forth by the power of industry and technology, and buoyed by improved schooling, the American people attained their ‘manifest destiny’. Their country was an experiment in hopefulness and self-assurance.