The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Most of us will cringe on hearing certain words used in a political or official context: terms such as efficiency and initiative seem invariably to be deployed only in situations where neither is in evidence. Very little of this type of language is borrowed from abroad. Instead, it thrives on clumsy compounding – sometimes imagined to be pithy or humorous, yet often just grotesque. But some foreign words do play a role: formerly dignified, they now become laughable. The Hindi guru, deriving ultimately from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘weighty’ or ‘dignified’, has come to signify in many cases an opportunistic celebrant of capitalism. The psychologist Adrian Furnham comments, ‘It has been said that journalists first used the term “guru” to describe management theorists because they could not spell the word “charlatan”.’25 The word’s freight of sacred significance has been lost amid the antagonism of puffery and irony.

  Gurus are the bad poets of our connected world, vying for the laurel with those who satirize them. The growth of the Internet and of businesses that trade online has incubated a wealth of new terms. Some, such as dot.com and e-commerce, are ubiquitous and widely understood. Others are more obscure. Much of this new terminology has been coined by disaffected observers, who dismiss the get-rich-click schemes of blithe young technophiles and belittle the technophiles themselves as dot snots or entreprenerds or sneaker millionaires. Among the practitioners rather than the observers, the general tone is snappy, witty and a little smug; after all, ‘the future just happened.’ The hallmark of this language is a brisk way of dealing with complex ideas. First-mover advantage is a concept that can hardly be conveyed more succinctly. All the same, the economy of the expression suggests a rather testy cast of mind. Email and instant messaging have accelerated the urge towards brevity: everything must happen faster and more compactly.

  As long ago as the 1960s the Canadian theorist Marshall McLuhan announced that changing modes of communication had created a Global Village: all of us were plumbed into a single giant nervous system, a cognitively stifling electronic brain. ‘For most people in the industrialized countries,’ wrote Richard Maltby two decades later, ‘the consumption of media has come to occupy more time than any other activity except sleeping and working.’26 A sceptical reader might wonder if the last four words are still needed. In particular, the obsession with celebrities – with reading about their exploits, peeking inside their homes, learning how to imitate their looks, hearing their opinions about global warming or diet crazes or other celebrities – has become frantic. Federico Fellini’s film La Dolce Vita (1960) highlighted the intrusions of press photographers; one character, Paparazzo, is a hovering, buzzing snapper who finds he can earn princely sums for pictures of celebrities behaving badly. Fellini believed the character’s name called to mind a darting insect: others have pointed out that in the Abruzzi dialect paparazzo is a name for a clam, the opening and closing of which may suggest a camera lens. Whatever the real inspiration, it was La Dolce Vita that immortalized paparazzo. It is now more commonly found as the plural paparazzi – after all, snappers tend to hunt in packs. The modern media, driven by faster technologies and the energies of global business, ape the paparazzo’s lust for the latest image, the ‘exclusive’ and the most extreme.

  Amid the resulting flurries of communication, insecurity is rife. Our relationship with technology is neurotic. For instance, mobile phones have become like pets: we take them for walks, fit them with little outfits, use them as displays of our status, and expect them to provide emotional solace. Devices created as aids to communication often lead to superfluous exchanges, but can also be isolating. Like the characters in E. M. Forster’s prescient story ‘The Machine Stops’, we shun face-to-face talk, preferring to exchange our deodorized thoughts remotely. Forster’s narrator remarks that in the Age of the Machine, ‘Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul.’ I have alluded already to the solipsistic self-pities of our atomized society, and social fragmentation results in linguistic separatism. It also results in language that evokes our dividedness – from each other, and from ourselves. We possess today a prolific language of self-inspection and self-description. Much of this can be traced back to the writings of Sigmund Freud, which gave new significance to the word repression and, as I have already mentioned, boosted libido and angst. These words are now common outside the realm of professional psychology, and among the other terms in this field that have been gained by everyday speech are inhibition, psychotic and wishful thinking. Freud’s one-time colleague Carl Gustav Jung promoted persona and psyche, along with extrovert and introvert. Even Henry Havelock Ellis’s coitus interruptus has found popularity, often in a non-literal sense. Paranoia, originally a precise medical term, has become a flailingly general one; appropriately, the first quotation given in the OED as evidence of this development is from Nabokov’s Pnin (1957) – ‘There is nothing more banal and more bourgeois than paranoia.’

  One of the consequences is a relentless quest for new wellsprings of meaning. As concerns rise about poverty and overpopulation, climate change and the depletion of natural resources, terrorism and a fresh wave of nuclear proliferation – all of which are subjects that are negotiated in terms either evasive or polemical – we are also witnessing a rabid pursuit of new paths to enlightenment. Kabbalah I have briefly mentioned, but other new sites of spiritual excitement and superstition are vastly numerous, typically centred on charismatic preachers and teachers. The rise of Western enthusiasm for Buddhism and yoga has enlarged familiarity with once-obscure terms such as mandala, chakra, mantra and sutra. Faiths and cults lacking Buddhism’s integrity have fostered other new shibboleths, such as the now widely known and widely satirized language of Scientology, with its thetans, auditing and isness (defined by founder L. Ron Hubbard as ‘an apparency of existence’). The unifying feature of all words in this field is that they are hugely impressive to initiates yet in the eyes of everyone else appear laughable.

  In 1997 Collins, the publishers of a popular dictionary, produced a list of words – each new in its day – that could be said to have defined the twentieth century. It ranged from radioactivity (1896) to Blairite (1997), and included allergy (1907), television (1926), psychedelic (1957), workaholic (1971), AIDS (1983) and road rage (1995). If we divide the century into decades we can identify areas of particular lexical growth. Thus the 1930s brought in many new words to do with transport, while with the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s we can associate significant rises in language to do with, respectively, youth culture, drugs and computing.

  The language of politics has been a steady force throughout. Political language has long been stereotyped as revolving around the avoidance of truth. Its manners are anaesthetic; politicians evade simple, unpleasant statements of reality. We still know what they mean, but somehow their euphemisms indemnify them against resentment. We avoid talking about death, grave sickness, excretion, sex, menstruation and people’s age: they avoid talking about anything that threatens to be ‘divisive’. Euphemisms are essentially dishonest, but their evasiveness insulates the user from the charge of insensitivity. Social creatures need to be diplomats, and diplomacy is, as humorists like to say, the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward to the trip.

  This kind of talk extends into other domains. Life insurance is really death insurance, after all. Attempts to proscribe biased or insensitive language are often classified as political correctness, and involve replacing terms that are perceived as denigratory with artificial alternatives. The thinking here is clear enough: the ways in which we refer to ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender and disability can convey deep hostility or bias, and a more sensitive approach can eradicate not only disparaging language but also the very attitudes and prejudices that underpin such disparagement. Yet, to quote the British journalist Melanie Phillips, the purpose of such acts of verbal hygiene is ‘less to protect the ostensible targets of prejudice … than to demonstrate the moral purity of the expurgators’.27 Thi
s cultural sensitivity, which tends to be most visible in academia and social work, can mutate into patronizing tokenism, a licence for political ineptitude or inertia, and a grotesque repression of personal freedoms. At its most extreme, political correctness is capable of destroying family life and rewriting history.

  We all know that words are ideologically charged. Disputes over language can be bloody: witness the reaction to Franco’s exclusion of Catalan from Spain’s public life, or, more recently, to repression of Romanian in the Trans-Dniester region of Moldova. The word politician was initially depreciative, used of schemers and masters of intrigue. When in the first part of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Hotspur refers to ‘this vile politician, Bolingbroke’ his insult is two-pronged. He goes on to characterize Bolingbroke as ‘this king of smiles’ – a description that will pique anyone tired of the white-toothed blandishments of contemporary politicos. (Politico, although it may feel like a recent coinage, can be dated back at least as far as 1630.) Contemporary political language, so assiduously manipulated, often has religious overtones. For powerful examples one need only think of George W. Bush’s rhetoric about the ‘axis of evil’ and a ‘just war’. The former was coined by speechwriter David Frum; it is worth noting that he originally and less emotively called it the ‘axis of hatred’.

  In politics, religiosity goes hand in hand with pomposity – an inflation of language, a bombastic puffing-up of terms. George Orwell observed in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ that ‘Bad writers, and especially scientific, political and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.’ Good writing, he felt, had to be purged of gratuitous classicism. Orwell’s purism may be a form of nostalgia, but his diagnosis is sound. We’ve all baulked at the inadequacy of politicians’ favoured euphemisms: explosive device, industrial action, incident . The classical tendency in political language reflects a wider perception, which I have touched on several times, that foreignness is sophisticated, abstract and often usefully fuzzy. A couple of borrowings that seem irretrievably associated with political evasiveness are scenario and personnel, which tend to be used, respectively, of sinister military plans and of people regarded as being not much better than mere office furniture. If we open out beyond the political sphere, we can quickly assemble a quaint cabinet of borrowings whose chief purpose is evasion: erotica, lingerie, poppycock, pudenda, facetiae, derrière. It is quite widely known that poppycock comes from the Dutch for ‘doll’s shit’, and as recently as the 1980s was ruled ‘unparliamentary’ by the Speaker of the House of Commons, but for most people it probably calls to mind the delicately textured scarlet poppy.

  I have recently come across than, a euphemism for ‘bed’ that is used by speakers of Vlax Romani and seems to have crept into the English of immigrants from parts of south-eastern Europe. It is certainly not an established borrowing, but it’s a striking one. After all, Romani, the language of the group commonly though controversially known as Gypsies, whom we associate with Transylvania and the Balkans, is usually thought of as being concerned not with delicacy, but with secrecy.

  There is a submerged history of English borrowings – persistent, even if modest – from Romani. Speakers of English and Romani are reckoned to have been in contact for more than 500 years, and it is estimated that there were 10,000 Gypsies in England in the reign of Elizabeth I.28 Over time, Gypsy communities in Britain have largely taken to speaking English, but with a distinctive smattering of Romani elements – comprising a vocabulary of up to about 1,000 items. Romani words in common use include minge, kushti (often spelt cushty), wonga and lolly (both meaning ‘money’), gaff as slang for the place where one lives, and the briefly ubiquitous chav. Another word of Romani origin, nark, can be used of a police informer or a policeman, as well as of anyone or anything that proves a source of irritation. Moniker, meanwhile, may come from Shelta, the language of the Irish Travellers. In an essay on the subject, Anthony Grant cites also drum, a slang word for any place of residence, and pal, together with the words rum as a synonym for strange and conk meaning the nose.29 Peripatetic workers have spread this language, and it has enjoyed periods of popularity as a form of secret code among beggars, journeymen and petty criminals. Lately, some of these words – notably drum – have become common terms in the speech of Britain’s urban youth. For them Romani has the scope to serve as a cryptolect, an arcane jargon which can usefully baffle their families, the authorities and their less street-smart peers.

  Frequently, as a group or community appears to grow, so does a vocabulary used of that community by those outside it. This vocabulary may well be appropriated from the language of the community itself. Thus in Britain apprehensiveness and snobbery about Travellers has made chav one of the defining English words of the past decade, and from there the word’s use has been liberalized to the point where it seems it can be attached to anyone who lacks education or some blurry notion of ‘class’. Similarly, the changing use of the word mafia suggests a tendency to see certain types of community as threats – be those threats to moral standards or, perhaps, aesthetic ones. Mafia is still used of the secret society that originated in Sicily (where the word has connotations of bragging or chicanery, and is probably formed on the model of an Arabic term for an outcast), but its use has become much broader, to include pretty much any group felt to be at once secret and toxic. Thus we can have a mafia of opera singers, publishers, bloggers or art collectors, whose interactions are felt to be in some way deplorable.

  In passing judgement on these groups, we say more about our own affiliations. Some of these are deeply ingrained in our language. Common English expressions quietly voice the norms of our culture and world view. For example, compared with other languages, English has an unusually large number of ‘downtoners’ – words used for purposes of understatement, such as relatively, somewhat, hardly and almost. There is, moreover, a subtle tendency for colloquial English to express ‘the values and standards of scientific discourse’ – manifest in our saying ‘to be precise’ or ‘Exactly!’ – and for facts to be assiduously distinguished from opinions in a way apparently striking and bizarre to a speaker of, say, Arabic, Swedish or Polish. ‘I think’, ‘to the best of my knowledge’, ‘as far as I can tell’: such formulae are apt to bemuse speakers of these and many other languages. The notion of ‘hard facts’ is peculiar to English, and so, it seems, are many of our elaborate linguistic mechanisms for avoiding telling people what to do – our modes of inviting and offering and suggesting, which so strenuously avoid impinging on the autonomy of those we are addressing, and which can seem archaic or just plain weird to foreigners.30 Many everyday metaphors subtly convey ideology: the imagery of flow and liquidity, when we talk about finance, equates money with blood; systems are represented as machines; ethnic classifications suggest links between race and morality (just think of the typical associations of the words white and black); and the language we use of sex expresses male sexuality in terms of violence.31 Some of these metaphors may have biological origins, and are thus universal, but others are rooted in our history. This is all ‘cultural baggage’ – a collection of concepts by which we live, and which on the whole we do not notice: secrets woven into the fabric of our words. It is this contexture that borrowed language reputedly threatens to rend.

  16. Shabash

  An exclamation conveying the sense ‘Well done!’; a modern counterpart to ‘Bravo!’

  Of Hindi or Urdu origin, the word was known among soldiers serving in India by the middle of the nineteenth century. It has become increasingly familiar in the last couple of decades, especially to devotees of cricket.

  ‘Shabash! Shabash! Oh, well done, little one! … Now, slowly, let us hear what befell afterwards – step by step’

  – Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901)

  ‘The tongue of Eden was like a flawless glass,’ George Steiner has written. ‘A light of total understanding streamed through it.’1 But for as
long as history has been recorded we have lacked this total understanding, because we have spoken different tongues.

  One consequence of English’s wealth of borrowings is that we can be presented with a sentence in a foreign language and manage to work out what it means. This is obviously not going to work with Korean or Yoruba, but other European languages, with which English has more in common, can be at least partly deciphered. Take the following: ‘Giv os i Dag vort daglige Brød.’ Or another version of the same request: ‘Geef ons heden ons dagelijksch brood.’ Once we have spotted what this means – without consciously knowing a word of the languages in which they written, namely Danish and Dutch – we are likely to be struck by the very different look of the Spanish, which is ‘Danos hoy nuestro pan cotidiano,’ yet we shall probably also feel that this would have made sense to us even outside the context just provided. In these three versions of a sentence that will be familiar to most English-speaking readers, we achieve a very quick impression of what English shares with three other languages, as well as of where it differs from them. Sometimes we are arrested by basic similarities, and sometimes we are startled by divergence: an arm is called an arm in English, German, Dutch, Swedish and Danish, but a pencil is a Bleistift in German, a potlood in Dutch, a blyertspenna in Swedish, and in Danish a Blyant.2

  Pleasant connections notwithstanding, incomprehension is the norm. Today there are around 6,900 different, mutually unintelligible natural languages. A mere eleven of these account for the speech of more than half the world’s population. These are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian, German, Japanese and English; the origins of all bar Arabic are in Europe or the southern and eastern parts of Asia. Realistically, fifty years from now the world’s ‘big’ languages may be just six: Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, Bengali, Arabic and English.3 The last two of these, and the final one especially, are distinguished by having significant numbers of non-native speakers.