A personal favourite among borrowings from Yiddish is the suggestively onomatopoeic verb khrop, meaning ‘to snore’. Another favourite is kibitzer, a person who looks over the shoulder of someone playing cards or chess – and then, typically, needles and distracts him with comments on the quality of his hand. Katzenjammer, literally ‘cat’s wailing’, feels much more heady than hangover. What’s more, several popular expressions are translations of popular Yiddishisms: when we refer to the bottom line we are expressing, for the most part unwittingly, the Yiddish idiom di untershte shure, heard in the common phrase ‘Vos iz di untershte shure?’28
The Yiddish voice has been promoted by many American writers – Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick are just a few examples – and by a vast number of American comedians, including Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce and Larry David. Millions of English-speakers with no Jewish connections are familiar with lox, shtick and the exclamation oy vay, as well as with distinctively Yiddish expressions such as ‘I need it like a hole in the head’. The role of Yiddish in Jewish folk culture has enriched its poetic colour. I’ve heard it said that comics are to literature as Yiddish is to English – an analogy likely to meet with objections, yet pertinent in its emphasis on the capacity of Yiddish for graphic storytelling, and also intriguing when we think of how many of the great American comic book artists and cartoonists have been Jewish: Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Joe Shuster and Jerome Siegel, Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman.
The contributions of the languages just mentioned and of others are tangible in Merriam-Webster’s 12,000 Words (1986), which furnishes details of words and meanings that have become established in American English since Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1961. About a tenth of these are borrowed – all but a few of them nouns. We find après-ski, linguine and the Brazilian Portuguese favela (for a contemporary context, think of Fernando Meirelles’s seethingly brilliant film City of God). Here too are the Yoruba dashiki, the Hindi tabla, the Vietnamese outfit called an ao dai, and ikebana, the Japanese word for flower-arranging.
Unsurprisingly, however, in 12,000 Words the Spanish element is to the fore, and, in the more than two decades since, the number of borrowings from Spanish has escalated. It is now possible to imagine that at some point in the not too remote future the growing Spanish-speaking population of the US will demand that their language be accorded official status at a national level, though of course the Constitution at present grants no such status even to English.
For comparison, we may look at Canada. Canadian English has been touched by the influence of many immigrants, including those from Germany, Ukraine and China, and this influence has been cemented through political support for the teaching of ‘Heritage Languages’. But the main linguistic tension has been between English and French. In the closing decades of the seventeenth century, English adventurers began to penetrate the lucrative Canadian fur industry, which had up till then been dominated by the French, and the English language began to assert itself. In due course the French would surrender their claim to Newfoundland, and settlers moved north from New England to Nova Scotia. English-speaking loyalists fled to Canada in the aftermath of the War of Independence, and were followed by British and Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century. For a brief moment in the 1780s the Nova Scotian coastal town of Shelburne was the largest city in British North America.29 But French held on, in Quebec and also in communities dotted through the Atlantic provinces, Manitoba and northern Ontario. The confederation of Canada’s provinces in 1867 forged a political unity which was essentially anglophone but made some provision for bilingualism. Thereafter, as the use of French was curtailed, the relative statuses of the two languages became a blazing political issue. The Official Languages Act of 1969 formally recognized both English and French, and its revised version in 1988 consolidated bilingual policy.
There are numerous French words in Canadian English. Anglophones in Quebec, most of whom reside in Montreal, may refer unselfconsciously to a dépanneur (corner store) or a caisse populaire (credit union), to the widely spoken joual patois (its name a rural pronunciation of cheval), and to the knitted cap known as a tuque or the meat pie called a tourtière. Yet at present less than quarter of Canadians are francophone, and there is less seepage into English from French in Canada than there is from Spanish in the most Hispanic parts of the US.
Today there are more Hispanics in the US than in Spain, and their median age is well below thirty. They promise to write important chapters in the histories of not just one language, but two.
13. Ethos
The characteristic spirit of a people or community; the ‘genius’ of an institution or system
From Greek thos, meaning ‘character’ or ‘disposition’. Initially it was used in English with particular reference to Aristotle’s definition of the term in his Rhetoric, where it denoted the moral and intellectual qualities that enabled a speaker to appeal to his audience.
Ethnic and regional tensions are a motif of American history. In 1860, when Abraham Lincoln became the first Republican president, he did so without the support of a single Southern state. Lincoln’s election prompted disgruntled Southerners to secede from the Union, laying the ground for the Civil War. That same year New Zealand Maoris revolted against British control of their land, and the Second Opium War, which had pitted the British against China’s Qing Dynasty, ended with the Convention of Peking, under which the opium trade was legalized and the British established a permanent diplomatic presence in the Chinese capital. At this time, too, Italy was in the process of unification, Japan was emerging from the shadows of feudalism, and the Russian Empire was being overhauled (serfdom was abolished in 1861), while, in the wake of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the dissolution of the East India Company, the British role in India was also in the throes of reform. Nevertheless, against this background of upheaval, the real stories of the nineteenth century played on, uninterrupted: a great swell of invention and technology, together with urbanization, the reign of coal and steam power, the growth of religious doubt, the proliferation of ideologies, and the contest between progressives and reactionaries, as well as new ideas about social responsibility, the class system, education and manners.
In a letter dating from October 1860, Queen Victoria writes to her eldest daughter requesting ‘a photo’. We may be tickled by her doing so, but we shouldn’t be surprised. The word, which was of course an abbreviation of photograph, was becoming common. Photograph was itself a new coinage, built from Greek components, but photo signalled the wide acceptance of this little bit of mechanical magic – invented by William Fox Talbot, and independently accomplished (with greater fanfare) by Louis Daguerre, a one-time taxman whose name is preserved in the noun daguerreotype. Talbot preferred to speak of photogenic drawing; it was Sir John Herschel who pressed for the adoption of photography, and the greater pliability of that word meant that it caught on, along with photograph and photographic. The popularity of the practice and of the word would rocket during the First World War, when photos helped construct the shared experience of being caught up in conflict.
The abbreviated form photo chimes with the immediate appeal of amateur photography and also with the medium’s brisk documentary usefulness, first experienced in Britain through Samuel Bourne’s pictures of 1860s India and Roger Fenton’s of the landscapes of the Crimean War. The photo’s quick (and by the end of the century affordable) combination of the artistic and the mechanical symbolized the way technology could redraw the boundaries of aesthetics. Yet photography met with hostility – as indeed did the word itself. John Ruskin, writing in 1872, could argue that photos, though ‘worth anything’ in the fields of geology and geography, ‘for art purposes’ had a value ‘a good deal less than zero’.1
A related word is cliché. At the start of the nineteenth century it was a term among printers for a plate or cast used in type foundries. Charles Babbage could employ it with a sense of wonder in 1
832; a generation later it was used quite casually by Darwin. But by the end of the century it had acquired a new figurative sense – one with which we are all now familiar. An expression repeated too often bears the shallow mechanical imprint of the printing plate: you can hear in the word the wet click of a machine and then a metallic emptiness. The semantically related word stereotype derives from an eighteenth-century printing technique; around the middle of the nineteenth century it began to signify something endlessly and tediously repeated, and its application to simplistic, preconceived ideas (of people, places, situations) grew out of this.
These two words, cliché and photo, can be seen as tokens of the age. One signifies both the trend for specific, professional vocabulary to be slipped into everyday talk and the way polite or popular usage tends to become mechanical: the other suggests the passionate striving after new ideas, embodied in language, and its mixed reception hints at the resistance that can greet it. Photograph is a symptom of the period’s appetite for the technical majesty of Greek. Photo typifies the way the technical gets stripped down, softened and even bastardized – a perennial concern among nineteenth-century commentators. Cliché is, for its part, another fine example of a French word that, with time, has drifted further and further from its birthplace; for, while both common pronunciations of the word preserve its Gallic bouquet, the term is used without a trace of the self-consciousness with which we might utter santé or touché – and its Frenchness may strike those who hear it less forcibly even than that of café.
Right at the end of the eighteenth century, and in the early part of the nineteenth, French imports asserted themselves, and so did numerous words directly connected with French affairs. Many of these have long since become detached from their original context: the French Revolution, which convulsed Paris in the summer of 1789, taming the monarchy and ushering in a programme of ‘rational reform’. The events of that summer bequeathed to English emigré, civism, terrorist and democrat – the last two of which, especially, have been freed from their historical moorings. Edmund Burke could write in 1795 of ‘those Hell-hounds called Terrorists’, enjoying the newness of the term; by then, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had established their status as democrats opposed to the Federalist politics of Alexander Hamilton. It was a Frenchman intimate with the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, who proved instrumental in popularizing ancien régime, a formula not current before 1789.
The republican spirit of the Revolution was rapturously embraced. Percy Bysshe Shelley could write in Prometheus Unbound (1820) that ‘The loathesome mask has fallen’ and that man was now ‘Exempt from awe, worship, degree’. Seizing on the implications of a society free from hereditary distinctions, he claimed in A Defence of Poetry that poets were ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The classic image of the Romantic poet is of a figure at once solitary and political, contemplative and energetic. Shelley was all these things and more: a visionary moralist, he crusaded against his fellow men’s instinctive desire to impose their will on others, even embracing a vegetarian diet as a sign of idealism. Yet, with his famously sweet tooth, he was also an enthusiastic consumer of the unctuous rewards of empire, even as he reviled the means by which they were harvested. Strikingly, his oriental poems are full of decorative fauna and flora, the ‘shimmering’ materials of a ‘fabricated East’. It is a paradox of his poetry that its progressive understanding of gender and national identity was grounded in classics of colonialism like Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (1810) and Sydney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811).2
The poets we group together as Romantics rebelled against the orderliness of their predecessors. Their writing celebrated spontaneity, and illuminated the natural world. To see the world was to create it anew, to sharpen what Shelley called our ‘blunted’ senses. Romantic poetry reclaimed the basic act of feeling, and its lyricism was ecstatically personal – exclamation marks are frequent; sincerity is more important than craft. The individual was glorified, and there was beauty in his or her melancholy. Yet, to look forward, the Romantics felt they had to look back. ‘We are all Greeks,’ Shelley could write in the preface to his Hellas, and ‘our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their root in Greece.’ His creative contemporaries shared this sense of the past as a hive of honeyed detail, into which they could reach for inspiration. They were passionate in reviving time-worn diction, especially where it seemed to connect them with a lost naturalness. They had grown up at a time when traditional ballads were being recuperated – and when the atmospheric medievalism of the Gothic (a word on the whole used as a slight) was in vogue. The literature they created was much closer to the norms of speech than the elaborate ‘correctness’ of the previous century. To be Romantic was to claim back imagination, emotion and freedom.
Quarrying the past could be profitable in more ways than one. The ‘plainer and emphatic language’ acclaimed by Wordsworth was a national treasure, a ‘simple and unelaborated’ expression of an intrinsic Britishness, but others cast about for a more commercial kind of treasure. A huge inspiration was Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), which presented in detail the illustrious history of English folklore. Scottish anthologists also profited from the fresh interest in folklore, and so did Scottish poets. When Robert Burns reclaimed Scottish dialect in his poems and songs, the ensuing success enabled him to shelve his desperate plan of emigrating to Jamaica. In Bristol, the teenage poet Thomas Chatterton plundered an early-eighteenth-century dictionary by John Kersey for the antique lexis he needed to stamp authenticity on his medieval forgeries. The very titles and openings of his poems signal his archaic inclinations: ‘Ynn auntient Dayes, when Kenewalchyn Kynge’, ‘Knightes Templaries Chyrche’, ‘Ethelgar. A Saxon Poem’. Here there was an appetite for a rather morbid, ancient Englishness. In much the same vein John Keats, who was capable of imagining himself bellowing in the trenches alongside Achilles or wafting along the banks of the river Styx, slaked his craving for beauty and ‘fine excess’ with quaint Spenserian coinages like upfurled, bosomer and tittlebat.
Romantic art was, according to Thomas Carlyle, a replacement for the decayed functions of the Church, and was indeed a new and ‘proper’ Church. Its liturgy was bold. In the itinerant and peasant folk of Dorset, whom he initially dismissed as an assortment of cheats and thieves, Wordsworth came to see what he would later call ‘the depth of human souls’ – souls, he added, ‘that appear to have no depth at all / To vulgar eyes’. His sympathy for rural living led him to employ what he considered to be true rustic speech. He revived the Norse ghyll as a word for a wooded ravine, albeit deeming it necessary to supply an explanatory note – Sir Walter Scott felt able to use it without any such explanation. And both Wordsworth and Coleridge fetched up the Norse tarn to signify a small mountain lake. They could have found it in John Ray’s A Collection of English Words Not Generally Used (1674), but not among their contemporaries.
Wordsworth and Coleridge are often paired. They met in 1795, became firm friends two years later, and in 1798 jointly produced Lyrical Ballads, a venture that was at first published anonymously but later, when their authorship was disclosed, ensured that their names would for ever be entwined. Yet Wordsworth’s style was always distinct from that of Coleridge, and after their friendship collapsed in 1810 they moved in markedly different directions – reflected in Coleridge’s criticism of Wordsworth in Biographia Literaria (1817). At the risk of generalization, one might suggest that Coleridge’s language is more exotic and highly coloured than Wordsworth’s, especially in his choice of adjectives, and that Wordsworth’s metaphors are more deeply embedded in his poetry.3 Wordsworth borrows less because his language is more organic: Coleridge reaches for the magical properties of others’ achievements in science and literature, hoping to transcend what seems to him a rather dank sort of English empiricism.
Like many of his contemporaries, Coleridge was emboldened by reading Captain Cook’s accounts of his voyages. What another p
oet, William Cowper, called ‘the honey of … deep research’ was a delicious source of nourishment. Coleridge’s exoticism is perfectly illustrated in the well-known ‘Kubla Khan’. He combines vocabulary typical of the Gothic – cavern, chasm, tumult – with lusciously foreign touches like honeydew, the brilliantly made-up pleasuredome, and the dulcimer belonging to an Abyssinian maid. His Xanadu brings to mind the imagery of paradise that had invigorated Mediterranean adventurers half a millennium before. Yet its details cannot be mapped: Coleridge suggests that the British appetite for the Orient originates in fantasy, and that its destiny is also fantasy, a projection of the traveller’s own psyche and desires. In ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ his archaism authenticates his supernatural subject matter. In its imagery there is a connection with the deep past of English verse – audible in lines such as ‘And now the Storm-blast came, and he / Was tyrannous and strong’ or ‘And every tongue, through utter drought, / Was withered at the root.’ There is, moreover, a strong Anglo-Saxon element, including the marvellously mildewed adverb eftsoons.
There were other influences saturating Coleridge’s mind. In Biographia Literaria he can employ the seemingly archaic aglow and homelike, yet also the German term pasquillant (a composer of lampoons) and the fiendishly technical incorrespondency. His challenging register prompted Byron to write, in the dedication to Don Juan (18 1 9-24):
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