The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Among other conventions, such as never referring to consumers as ‘old’, advertising borrows exotic words to make ordinary products sound resplendent. More than half of the world’s leading advertising agencies are American; in countries where English is not a major language, English words are dropped into advertisements to connote glamour or the benefits of pedigree, and in countries where English predominates a quick dash of a foreign language can pep up even the most humdrum offering. Audi’s Vorsprung durch Technik may be the best-known German phrase in the English-speaking world; the foreign words lend an extra air of technical exactness to what is in fact a completely banal promise.

  The rise of commercial advertising was central to an era hungry for pleasure and blessed with real purchasing power. Its products included hula hoops, Brylcreem, drive-in movies, moralistic TV shows like Leave It to Beaver, and jukeboxes playing Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, but also, as traditional moral values appeared to slip, a rash of juvenile delinquency (a buzzword of the later 1950s, though of sufficiently old standing to have been used by Dickens in Oliver Twist). At the same time – and some observers made a connection here – many English-speaking countries were becoming much more ethnically diverse. Pockets of Britain, for instance, had been multiracial in the 1920s, and before the war there were sizeable communities of Arabs and Jews. But the arrival in Tilbury on 22 June 1948 of the SS Empire Windrush, with its 492 Jamaican passengers, appeared to open a new chapter in Britain’s multiracialism. The numbers increased: there were 3,000 immigrants from the Caribbean in 1953, twenty times as many in 1961. Indians and Pakistanis also began to arrive in significant numbers during the 1960s, and there were visibly busy communities of Chinese, Poles, Cypriots and Maltese.

  We can draw from the dictionary an impression of changing pleasures and passions. Among the newly borrowed words of 1950 are passegiatta and Vespa, chipotle and filo, ayatollah and maven, Mau Mau and dianetics, mano a mano and appellation contrôlée. Move on a decade and the list includes bricolage, arugula, crudités, Hezbollah, meritocrat , shura, yé-yé and New Wave – the last of these calqued on nouvelle vague. The latest styles of music and dance often had foreign inspirations: hence bossa nova (Brazilian Portuguese), ska (Jamaican patois) and mambo (Cuban Spanish). Increasingly, borrowings dealt less with fundamental concepts and more with the edges of day-to-day existence: with things to eat and fads to follow, and with the forces that put them under threat or merely grazed the margin of most people’s consciousness.

  Submerged beneath all of this is a story of desire. It is by no means trivial: the politics of the world’s most economically developed countries have in the last few generations been increasingly bent towards satisfying appetites rather than putting into effect real principles. The use of the Latin word status has grown and grown over this period – and the thing itself, a modern religion, has often been confused with love. To paraphrase the historian Daniel Boorstin, image has taken the place of ideals.

  When was the first time you drank a cappuccino? In Italy it is consumed with a spoon, standing up, before eleven o’clock in the morning: ordering a cappuccino after one’s evening meal is a gastronomic crime and may sometimes be treated as if it were a moral one to boot. But in Britain and America cappuccino is everywhere. To anyone under the age of twenty, the years ‘B. C.’ (Before Cappuccino) may sound like the time of myth. And for many younger consumers the drink is inextricably associated with Starbucks. The giant coffee chain was founded in 1971, but originally it sold coffee beans and equipment for making coffee, and it was only in the late 1980s, steered by Howard Schultz, that the firm began to expand. Its first branch outside North America opened in Tokyo, as recently as 1996. The drink and its purveyors haven’t been around all that long.

  The now-common word cappuccino derives from the name of the Capuchin order of monks. In Robert O’Brien’s This is San Francisco (1948), the link is made explicit. O’Brien takes us inside ‘a world of Neapolitans and Tuscans, Romans and Venetians and assorted paisani from the toe to the knee of the Italian boot’: there ‘you leave behind the kingdom of chow mein and jow won ton and jasmine tea, and enter the realm of ravioli.’ Immersing yourself in this little Italy, where Caruso records play endlessly, ‘you drink a cappuccino, gray, like the robe of a capuchin monk … and heated by steam forced through coffee.’18

  The cappuccino is a typically modern appropriation: it’s been taken from somewhere else, reinvented, glamorized, cheapened (yet made more expensive), and sent out, repackaged, into the rest of the world. It is a convenient emblem for a large part of modern living: indulgent, ephemeral, frothy. The takeaway cup of coffee is a fashion accessory, a romantic object of connoisseurship, and our addiction to its contents is as much social as somatic. Ever since Achille Gaggia patented his first espresso machine in the late 1930s, the paraphernalia of coffee-making and coffee-drinking has possessed an air of considered urbanity.

  It is easy to forget how recently some of our pleasures and necessities were born. In his fine history of Britain in the 1960s, Dominic Sandbrook points out that ‘At the beginning of the sixties, lager accounted for a mere 3 per cent of the British beer market, and some brewers’ predictions that it would one day eclipse bitter seemed very far-fetched.’ Yet within just a few years it exerted an iron grip on the market, and, as Sandbrook points out, ‘While the sale of wine and lager seemed to mark a convergence of British and European tastes, there was an even more pronounced transformation in what people ate … Avocadoes, aubergines and courgettes were becoming increasingly familiar … More and more people drove German cars, took their holidays on the Spanish coast, drank French wine and copied the latest Italian fashions.’19 Since then, the popularization of foreign commodities has widened its reach: the cars may well be Korean, the holidays in Turkey or Thailand (complete with the obligatory dervish show or hit from a bong), the wine Chilean, the fashions Japanese or Scandinavian. Xenophobia persists, but even the most impassioned nationalists will eat foreign food and vacation in foreign resorts.

  Against this background, the equation of linguistic nicety with moral or social rectitude has managed to hold on. Talk of ‘U’ and ‘non-U’ may now be infrequent, but the spirit of the distinction between upper-class usage and usage that is not upper class abides. It brings to mind Nancy Mitford, though the terms were coined in the 1950s by Alan Ross, a scholar of Old English who had worked as a government code-breaker at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. The idea was not new: in the sixteenth century, Pietro Aretino had somewhat flippantly made the same kind of distinction, suggesting for instance that a window was not to be called a finestra, but should properly be known as a balcone. Ross, whose paper on the subject was published in the intimidatingly titled Finnish journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, began from the position that the British aristocracy was separated by its use of language from the middle and lower classes. Pronuncation was part of this, and we may well still make inferences about a person’s background from his or her pronunciation of particular words; borrowings – conduit, turquoise, loggia – being prominent among these. But also ‘proper’ language substantiated seemingly important principles: a respect for public property, purity of mind, moderation, a distrust of redundancy and fanciness. In Nancy Mitford’s view, the last of these was paramount, and it is noticeable that she abhors cruet, pardon, serviette, dentures and perfume, all of which are from French.

  We are back again with the purists, who believe all change is for the worse and pretend that the English word-stock can be set in aspic. Recent loanwords are, understandably, the ones that look and feel most alien, and now as then they elicit the loudest protests. Yet their alien status is quickly lost, and indeed, as we have seen, it can be part of their appeal – a badge of status, of being informed, educated, modish. We think of such terms as buzzwords, tokens of the hum of commerce and vogue. Buzzword itself can be dated back to the 1940s; the OED cites a 1946 article in the journal American Speech, which explains that ‘Students at
the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University use a specialized vocabulary known as “buzz words” to describe the key to any particular course or situation.’ It can hardly come as a surprise that the word was popularized among MBA students at Harvard, for there are certain areas where new words, be they borrowed or confected, prove especially abundant, and in the world of business they multiply feverishly, often without any logic or grammar.

  The modern world of finance is encrusted with these verbal trinkets, many of them repugnant. This, after all, is an environment in which the word aggressive marks approval. The term dead cat bounce has been around since the mid-1980s; it signifies a temporary and illusory improvement in the price of a stock – little imagination is needed to feel the force of the image. A declining stock is a falling knife; someone will eventually get skewered. When investors dump stocks that appear to be underperforming, they shoot the wounded. A corporate meltdown results in blood on the floor or, worse, blood on the walls. A broker who encourages clients to buy into a stock he holds, then offloads his holding at the newly inflated price, is said to have pumped and dumped.

  Furthermore, capitalism and free enterprise have ‘liberated’ words from their less euphoric past. Purchase, pay and fee were long ago relieved of their dominant connotations of, respectively, hunting, appeasement and the requirement to settle a debt.20 It is not hard to see that finance contains some idea of finality (think of the French word fin or the Latin finis, meaning ‘end’ or ‘limit’), and at first the word denoted specifically the idea of ‘ending’ or ‘settlement’. We still come up against this when we’re hit with a fine. It is only in the seventeenth century that we come across financiers, and that finance begins to mean ‘money management’. In business, the official terminology tends to be Latinate, but there is an undercurrent of irreverent slang, much of it self-consciously brash and crude. There is also a persistent element of facetiousness. A City of London trader will gamely refer to money as moolah – the word is probably Romani – or to £5 as a ching, perhaps after the Italian cinque. The once popular but at the moment unfashionable dosh comes from a word in an African language (no one seems clear which) for a bribe or backhander.

  Businesspeople are forever finding new ways of vilifying the very culture within which they operate: new ways of referring to the levels of boredom they feel during meetings and presentations, new ways of trashing not just underachievers, but also colleagues who are pedantic, gung ho, overzealous. Meanwhile, the jargon of sport is often transplanted into business talk for the purpose of asserting a sort of manly excellence. Referring to a colleague or a rival as a heavy-hitter or claiming that your team has bench betrays the machismo that prevails in the modern workplace, yet this imagery is used playfully, as if to say ‘It’s all a game.’

  In the accelerated world of commerce, new words are legion, coming at us daily and from every angle. Seen as a whole, the twentieth century was a period of ebullient growth in English vocabulary, and this continues apace in the twenty-first. Borrowings are no longer dominant among the novelties: most new words are formed creatively from the language’s existing resources. Thus, while loans remain plentiful in popular culture, politics, sport and science, as well as among drug-users and backpackers, today the alien languages from which we borrow most freely are outposts of our own language: office jargon, the savvy talk of music fans, the language of chatrooms, newsgroups and blogs. Online communities, which are nothing if not eclectic, prove an especially rich breeding ground for new words. At its extremes – and the online world tends to look as though it consists in large measure of extremes, many of them in fact densely populated – the language is deliriously ludic. As technology grows ever more interactive and personalized, the reign of subjectivity will manifest itself in an array of communications at once massively numerous and determinedly localized.

  Interactivity is nicely embodied in the concept of a Wiki, a type of website which can be modified by anyone. Its name was coined by a computer programmer, Ward Cunningham, who was told by a worker at Honolulu International Airport to take a ‘Wiki Wiki’ shuttle bus between the airport’s terminals. The name played on the Hawaiian wiki-wiki, meaning ‘quick’, and it stuck in Cunningham’s mind. He went on to develop software that enabled online collaboration – the most famous result of which is Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia created by Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales.

  The Internet constantly begets new words of this kind: David Crystal describes it as a ‘lexical goldmine’. It is a medium where everything is logged, complete with date and time; coinages can be traced back to their origins – and to their originators. Moreover, Internet terms are rapidly adapted to purposes far removed from computing. The use of spam in an IT context is fifteen years old; now its original meaning, dating from the 1930s, feels secondary, despite its celebration by Monty Python. But this is not all: today spam denotes not just the unwanted communications clogging your email inbox, but also other kinds of ‘unwanted utterance’ or evasion – an unwelcome break for advertisements on TV, or the patter of a pushy shop assistant.21

  This is the inward borrowing I described a few pages ago. The process remains the same as before, even if the sources have changed. The words are transplanted from the margin to the heart of our public and private language – or shift there, perhaps sweetly, perhaps insidiously – because they are needed to denote new or newly important experiences, or for reasons of chic, or simply to inject fresh life into our discourse. Fundamentally, the model is this: you know something I don’t, or you appear to, and I want to know it too and possess it and use it to enhance by the very slightest fraction my perceived worth (the perception may be others’, or it may be my own). The pattern is exemplified by the case of epicentre, a specialized term in seismology which has come to be used as an alternative to centre. Epicentre is considered better because it sounds more technical, more in-the-know. The term, when first adopted, seemed less debased by ordinary usage than poor centre: now we may be nostalgic for the older, simpler word.

  Professionalism thrives on stripping the meaning out of words, or at least on impoverishing them and dulling their subtleties. Every profession has its characteristic verbal tics and postures. Rudyard Kipling could describe the language of trade as ‘a toothsome amalgam of Americanisms and epigrams’; Frank Zappa characterized rock reporters as ‘people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read’; John Galsworthy noted, with careful irony, that the heyday of journalese coincided with the setting up of Britain’s Ministry of Health. As I observed some time ago, we often hear the cliché that ‘language is power,’ but the power does not necessarily lie with those who utter it. Language betrays frailties, anxieties and the precariousness of self-image. We can see past the bogus superlatives of advertising or what George Steiner has called the ‘vehement obscurity’ of sociology. We know, too, what lies behind the opaque utterances of academics and management gurus with their talk of discourse or hermeneutics, of adding value or operationalizing a brand. There seems to be a language of science (complex, metaphorical), of religion (poetic, oracular), and of sport (hyperbolic, platitudinous). Then, too, we have the ‘over-manicured’ and ‘turgid’ style of lawyers.22 These occupational dialects build affiliations, and can betray them.

  As Tony Thorne observes in his amusing look at contemporary jargon, Shoot the Puppy (2006), ‘One reason why fewer foreign terms make it into English in the twenty-first century may be that these days a different sort of person is coining new language. A hundred years ago it was poets, ambassadors and international sophisticates … Today it’s IT specialists, management consultants and financiers.’Yet now and then these people do reach for foreign terms. Thorne cites the example of chasse gardée, a recently adopted way of designating private property or a no-go area, which might be used in a sentence like ‘Central America has traditionally been the USA’s chasse gardée.’ He mentions a handful of other imported words and phrases use
d in business: gaijin, the Japanese term for a foreigner, the Spanish mano a mano, beloved of corporate tough guys, and the more obscure Fingerspitzengefühl, a charming if offputtingly long word for a ‘feeling in the tips of one’s fingers’, which is to say an instinctive grasp – presumably for one of the more complex areas of business. With more than a touch of irony, Thorne points out that ‘it’s a sine qua non that English, or rather American, is the lingua franca – par excellence – of world business.’23

  One of the less appealing forms this takes is the widespread adoption of ‘management-speak’, which starts as bureaucratic flummery and mutates into a kind of mandatory tag of professional knowhow. Management-speak is an essentially male institution – a means of institutionalizing self-importance. Dickens sends it up in Little Dorrit, where the Circumlocution Office is deemed to be the most important government department; its chief talents are for addling business and churning out hopelessly ungrammatical correspondence. Readers will have their own experience of this wearisome argot, which makes people sound like machines. It is probably fair to say that the young and the old treat such language with suspicion ; its originators and protectors are those in between, caught between the urge to seem professional and the urge to be modish. Writing in 1978, Kenneth Hudson stated that ‘the most notorious jargon-producers’ were ‘politicians and political propagandists, East and West; those engaged in the social sciences, particularly in psychology; spokesmen for the armed forces; people writing about or publicising hotels, restaurants and the entertainment industry; economists and management consultants; writers on education; bureaucrats; and critics of literature and the arts’. The reasons for their succumbing to this infectious lingo were diagnosed as insecurity about the value of their services, feelings of shame about their work (resulting in the need ‘to find suitable language with which to gild their activities’), the desire for ‘an extra ration of size’ and an awareness that they ‘have nothing really to sell’.24 As we read this, we may be reminded of the Inkhorn disputants of the sixteenth century and the notion that polysyllabic excesses ‘make all things darke and harde’.