And Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumber’d with his hood –
Explaining metaphysics to the nation –
I wish he would explain his Explanation.
Byron was understandably confused, for Coleridge’s language was strikingly stylized. His reading in German – and above all of Immanuel Kant – endowed him with a vocabulary of abstract thought, of hypothesis and metaphysics and the imagination. He adopts the word clerisy as a collective term for men of learning, and writes of the esemplastic power of the imagination, to suggest its unifying force, taking his lead from the German Ineinsbildung. He borrows the adjective derb, meaning ‘solid’ or ‘rough’, and also, on the model of the German, speaks of humanism. He is an early user of the adjective aesthetic – adopted into German by Alexander Baumgarten, popularized by Kant, and seen by Coleridge as a highly esoteric term, although to us it looks quite normal. Baumgarten and those who followed stressed the importance of the senses: Coleridge wished he could find an easier word to do the job, especially as others found this one so pedantic.4 But for Coleridge it was necessary to have the right words with which to mark what he considered important conceptual distinctions, and he coined and imported terms to satisfy this need.
The ten months Coleridge spent in Germany in 1798-9 were a revelation. They ensured his esteem not just for that country’s wines, brass doorbells and variety of soups, but also for German prowess in natural history, theology and philosophy – and for the whole broad sweep of European intellectual life. His subsequent borrowings from German were inspired by the studies in which he engrossed himself while at Göttingen. A few examples are Messianic, misology (a word for hatred of discussion, from Immanuel Kant’s Misologie) and Naturphilosophie. Although not many such terms caught on, Coleridge can be recognized as an early disciple of a Teutonic intellectualism that would have longer-lived consequences.
Coleridge was excited by the white heat of the intellectual present. By contrast, the prolific and internationally successful Walter Scott, though he shared with Coleridge the distinction of being much admired in Russia, was inspired by the past. Scott’s desire to ‘contribute somewhat to the history of my native country’ led him to collect old songs and ballads, and he was influential in bolstering the position of Scottish words in English: blackmail, for instance, which Nicol Jarvie in Rob Roy (1817) finds it necessary to explain to the Englishman Frank Osbaldistone, and cosy, which may derive from the Gaelic cosagach; the ghostly eldritch and the daunting awesome and gruesome; the softer winsome and crackling guffaw; faraway, uncanny and wizened, which in dialogue became ‘wuzzent’; the expression kith and kin; and many more.5 One scholar has gone so far as to suggest that ‘He gave to the English language possibly more English words than any author since Shakespeare.’6 He popularized glamour, a word which at that time conveyed the idea of magical enchantment ; only in the last hundred years has it calcified and come to suggest a hard-edged and rather less mysterious kind of attractiveness. These words now seem far removed from their Scots Gaelic origins, but in using them Scott was either introducing something new into English vocabulary or reviving a word that had long since fallen into disuse. Scottish words we now take for granted have baffled previous generations. Kipper, when encountered by Daniel Defoe during his tour of Great Britain in the 1720s, seemed odd enough to warrant explanation. Glen was adopted as early as the sixteenth century by Spenser, but when Samuel Johnson used it in a letter in 1773 he still felt he had to provide a gloss.
Scott also popularized a few words of ‘Eastern’ hue, including dervish, but the main influence in this area was Byron, who spent almost a third of his life abroad, as if to compensate for missing out on the Grand Tour. His ‘Oriental’ poetry was coloured by both wide reading and his experiences in Greece, Albania and Turkey. ‘With those countries, and events connected with them, all my really poetical feelings begin and end,’ he could write to his friend Thomas Moore in 1816 .7 Fidelity to the true local colour is deemed essential, although Byron, like contemporaries such as Goethe, seems more provoked by the idea of the East than absorbed in actually understanding it. He subscribes to a collective fantasy of Eastern promise. In The Giaour (1813) we hear ‘the browsing camels’ bells … tinkling’; altogether more exotic are the sharp ataghan sheathed in silver and the euphoric cries of Bismillah. In The Bride of Abydos, published in the same year, we are presented with a comboloio (a Muslim rosary made up of ninety-nine beads), while in the following year’s The Corsair the strongest reek of the exotic is the ‘dissolving cloud’ that rises from the Turkish pipe called a chibouque. He employs words such as bulbul, camise, alma and tambourgi, and is comfortable enough with kiosk, gazelle and minaret to use them as rhyme words.8 His use of Stamboul rather than Istanbul was also much copied.
Byron was forever snuffing up the flavours of the places he visited, all so different from the ‘Babylon’ of London, and acquiring exotic language was an activity to be savoured. In Athens, for instance, he learnt Italian from a polyglot teenage boy, Nicolo Giraud, and took particular pleasure in conjugating both the ancient and modern Greek equivalents of the verb to embrace.9 Later, he found the ‘bastard Latin’ of the Venetians ‘sweet’, and one of his projects during his time in their city was to learn Armenian – an Indo-European language with its own 38-letter alphabet – from a group of exiled Mechitarist monks. Byron’s Marino Faliero (1820), about an ambitious fourteenth-century doge, was a flawed attempt at Italianate drama, as was his friend Shelley’s tragedy The Cenci (1819). Shelley’s writing is coloured by his taste for Italian opera, and by imagery absorbed from Hindustani lyrics and airs. 10 Yet such pleasures could be wearing, and it barely seems a coincidence that Byron is the first to write of someone being blasé – Don Juan, to be precise.
While the French Revolution had inspired both artistic and political reform on a grand scale, as the rise of the middle classes fostered new styles of liberal democracy, a second upheaval, very different and less abrupt, brought more tangible changes. The Industrial Revolution – the coinage is Arnold Toynbee’s – created wealth, a new working class and a whole new culture of work, a new urban landscape, and a modern economy, yet it also exacerbated social schisms and imperilled the environment. (It is doing so still, especially outside Europe.) The rural workers idealized by Wordsworth were migrating to the crowded cities. By the time of the 1851 census, half the AUK’s populations lived in cities or in towns. ‘First came steam and steel,’ wrote H. G. Wells in his brisk, novelistic A Short History of World, ‘the railway, the great liner, vast bridges and buildings, machinery of almost limitless power, the possibility of a bountiful satisfaction of every material human need, and then … the hidden treasures of electrical science were opened.’11 Philosophically, the transition was from man using tools to man being a tool: new technologies revised the very idea of ‘work’, and laid fresh emphasis on labour as power.
Britain was the world’s richest country. In the middle of the century it accounted for about a fifth of the world’s manufacturing. It was, as historians have since repeatedly intoned, ‘the workshop of the world’. And while its population was growing at a rate of more than 1 per cent a year, its annual gross national product was rising at more than 2 per cent.12 In The Coal Question (1865) the economist William Stanley Jevons, who pioneered the theory of marginal utility, could write triumphally:
The plains of North America and Russia are our corn fields; Chicago and Odessa our granaries; Canada and the Baltic our timber-forests; Australasia contains our sheepfarms, and in Argentina and on the western prairies of North America are our herds of oxen; Peru sends her silver, and the gold of South Africa and Australia flows to London; the Hindus and the Chinese grow tea for us, and our coffee, sugar and spice plantations are in all the Indies.13
Jevons spoke for an age that demanded ‘progress’, expected it to continue indefinitely, and saw empire as the key instrument for achieving this. Part of Britain’s success,
as he saw it, was the export of ideas. He was the first British author to refer to the Japanese yen and the Swedish krona, and did so in a discussion of the international development of a gold standard – established in Britain in 1844, and adopted by many of the world’s major powers in the 1870s. The Victorian embrace of corporate activity – energized by new legislation in the 1840s and ‘50s – was signalled by the borrowing of entrepreneur and laissez-faire, as well as by the emergence of capitalist and stakeholder.
Even learning was mechanized and commodified. Visiting Britain in 1848, Ralph Waldo Emerson informed American readers that ‘The logical English train a scholar as they train an engineer. Oxford is a Greek factory, as Wilton mills weave carpet, and Sheffield grinds steel.’ ‘The atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning,’ he went on, and ‘The English nature takes culture kindly.’14 The nineteenth century proved generous in its rehabilitation of Greek words as terms of English-language science and scholarship. It is to this period that we owe such Grecian coinages as colostomy and brachycephalous, the more palatable ethos and neuron, and markers of technological development like gramophone and telegram. In 1878 the world’s first telephone network, in the Connecticut town of New Haven, had 21 subscribers; seven years later, 150,000 Americans owned a phone. 15 The pioneering electrical work of Thomas Edison and those who followed him gave rise to what was humorously dubbed ‘Schenectady Greek’.16 Besides inventing the light bulb, Edison seems to have initiated the habit of answering the phone with the exclamation hello – once a ferryman’s call, yet touched with just a hint of Grecian colour.
Greek prefixes were also lavishly productive: meta-, epi- and hypo- are notable examples. Their temper is academic and assertively technical. The period’s classic discussion of human achievement and excellence, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), is a paean to technical genius. Smiles, whose work was translated into more than fifty languages, was not the first to write of self-help , but the concept as we now understand it was a new one. In a memorable episode, he describes the mathematician Edmund Stone being asked how, despite his humble origins as the son of a gardener, he had got to grips with Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Stone had replied, ‘One needs only to know the twenty-four letters of the alphabet in order to learn everything that one wishes’ – a distinctly mechanical view of what it means to read.
Mention of Smiles and South African gold, and of Darwin and Ruskin, will conjure for many of us a single potently emotive word: Victorian. We tend to feel we know what the Victorians were like. Perhaps this is because, in Britain, the spirit of Victorianism seems never quite to have faded. In a recent history of the British middle class, Lawrence James writes that ‘We are the inheritors of Victorian civic and private benevolence. It has provided us with parks, libraries, museums, town halls, hospitals, universities, schools, churches, swimming baths, public lavatories, horse troughs and those now derelict drinking fountains with brass scoops. These conveniences perfectly reflected that Victorian blend of compassion and practicality.’ 17
We may think also of the Victorian music halls, which were home to volcanic displays of patriotic zeal, or of humanitarians as disparate as the Bradford mill-owner Sir Titus Salt and Dickens’s terrifyingly feckless Mrs Jellyby. We may think of an age in which the waning of religion was answered by a faith in culture. More than anything, we think of orderliness and propriety – and sometimes, too, of prudery, even as we are aware that the once-popular image of Victorian primness has been made more ambiguous and complex by modern scholarship.
In science and technology, the Victorian period produced a succession of visionaries. Increasingly specialized, science was also increasingly apt to excite the public, and Victorian achievements in the field were interleaved with controversies. Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33) advanced the contentious idea that the Earth had been shaped by forces that operated slowly and over long periods of time. This was dubbed uniformitarianism. The view which it supplanted, more consistent with the Bible’s teachings, was that over a comparatively short period the planet had been shaken by a succession of sudden, brief and extreme events. In a review of the Principles’ second volume, William Whewell coined the word catastrophist to denote the traditional belief against which Lyell was arguing. Lyell’s influence was profound. Darwin devoured the Principles of Geology while aboard the Beagle, and his own radical theories began as an expansion of Lyell’s. Moreover, the dissension surrounding the Principles sparked huge public interest in earth sciences.
Mineralogy, like philosophy and the social sciences, was an area in which German expertise was fabled. (Incidentally, the use of expert as a noun is a nineteenth-century development, though the adjective had been around for half a millennium.) As long ago as the 1570s the German assayer Jonas Schutz had been brought in to supervise the smelting works on the royal manor at Dartford, while Somerset miners in the seventeenth century used a kind of German dowsing rod known as a Wunschelrute. It is from contact with German expertise that we get cobalt, quartz, shale, gneiss and zinc. From the same source we derive a great many specialist terms in the field, like bergschrund, thalweg and geest. In German folklore, cobalt’s reputation for enfeebling the miners who brought it up from the ground was linked to the presence in the mines of a malign spirit known as a Kobold. The association between digging underground and coming across wicked sprites was popular: the English nickel comes from Swedish, but can be traced back to the German Kupfernickel – the half of this word that the English preserves is another German term for a mischievous, mine-dwelling imp.
Geology sabotaged the credibility of the Bible’s account of time, and the fashion for the subject – evident in Harriet Martineau’s claim that in the 1830s the middle classes were buying five times more geology books than novels – created an imposingly difficult vocabulary.18 By contrast, the linguistic effects of Darwinism were subtle. Words were repositioned. Thus development became associated, almost impalpably, with evolution and natural selection.
As for the wider scientific language, a large portion of its novelties were classical and decidedly obscure. Among those to have found currency are palaeontology, bacteria, altimeter and jurassic. Dinosaur was coined by Richard Owen in 1842. The word meant ‘terrible lizard’; Owen had scrupulously examined the fossils discovered by collectors such as William Buckland, and the noun testifies to the astonishing taxonomic moment inspired by the realization that such fearsome reptiles once roamed the planet. Other coinages were more insidious. Darwin’s polymathic cousin Francis Galton came up with eugenic in 1883; the politics of Social Darwinism were made respectable by means of a handsome Greek name. In the same vein there was the neo-Greek moron, coined in 1910 by H. H. Goddard, the pioneer of the IQ test and director of New Jersey’s Vineland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys. (The word had previously existed, but only to denote a particular kind of dark-skinned salamander – something Goddard probably didn’t know.) It rapidly became a term of abuse or disdain, and its usefulness as a technical term for people with mental retardation diminished as it did so. But it was minted in a spirit of eugenic elitism. At the same time there emerged a new vocabulary of terms to denigrate religion. Pietistic is one. Pious, which had been acquiring connotations of self-righteousness since the seventeenth century, became more obviously pejorative. Meanwhile, agnostic was coined by ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, T. H. Huxley, who was the period’s leading commentator not just on science, but on the implications of science for humanity.
The increasing sense of the world and indeed the universe as essentially mechanical places found expression in a distaste for ‘spiritual’ explanations of existence. This was an age of -isms, self-conscious intellectual and moral positions, typically outside the purview of religion. Owen Barfield sums it up shrewdly: ‘We are hardly conscious at all of being human, more so of being humane, more still of being humanitarian, and very conscious … of humanitarianism .’19 A more self-inspecting attitude tends to call for, or give rise to, a vocabu
lary more clearly touched by science – or by the illusion of scientific nicety.
In the nineteenth century -isms not only came increasingly to be identified by that name, but also began to be stigmatized. Classicism was cherished, then impugned, then cherished afresh – a return to the altercations of the Inkhorn controversy. At this time the rather scientific prefix non- became vastly popular, and we find authors using words like non-native, non-paying, non-white and non-sectarian , as well as George Washington’s coinage non-discrimination. A more scientific spin was even imparted to the approximate, with the increased use of the pretentiously classical circa. The habit of dignifying the ordinary with Latin tags was long established. Victorians who labelled their books ex libris or adopted such novel terms as in absentia, genius loci or status quo were simply adding to a tradition of advertising their education (or their aspirations) by means of highly polished insignia. They did so in the face of a process, begun in the previous century, which involved converting Latin tags and Latin borrowings into more congenial English forms.
An eloquent few craved a return to the supposed purity of Anglo-Saxon diction. Dickens and Thomas Hardy pushed for it, and so did Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had a particular taste for odd coinages such as spendsavour and lovescape, akin to Willam Barnes’s wheelsaddle and nipperlings. Thomas Carlyle dreamt up anywhen on the model of anywhere, coined adjectives such as hawkish and wrongish, had a taste for forming his own peculiar negatives (ungorgeous, unlucid, unphilosopher), and favoured words ending -dom, following the model of a whole range of German words that ended in -tum. Tellingly, when he wrote of bureaucracy he fastened it between inverted commas and deemed it a ‘Continental nuisance’. The second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a surge of enthusiasm for Norse literature. William Morris took refuge from modernity (and, naturally, from Frenchness) in an imaginary medieval past, and his Nordic enthusiasms were palpable in a string of almost Viking coinages: manfolk, unangry, unwrongful, eastering, wind-drift, hillward and, his special verb for a heron’s guttural croak, to squark. One of his inheritors was J. R. R.Tolkien, who shared his philological appetites and developed for his Middle Earth a raft of imaginary languages. In grasping for the Germanic roots of English, Tolkien created fantasy out of what was in fact a lost reality. The affection for what were seen as Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic qualities was encouraged, in the 1850s and ‘60s, by a wave of revulsion for the French. According to this view, the Norman Conquest had been an aberration, and it was vital to assert the role of the Anglo-Saxons as England’s founding fathers. Thomas Nicholas, in The Pedigree of the English People (1868), drew up a table which demonstrated – to him, at least – that the English were a compound only of Celtic and Teutonic influences.20
The Secret Life of Words Page 33
