The Word Detective

by John Simpson

  There is something impenetrable today about the word launch. It is not one of those words you can look at and say, “I know where that comes from.” Fortunately, the sage old editors of the OED knew better back in 1902, when they first published their entry. It’s a word that doesn’t come from the ancient Anglo-Saxon word-hoard, but from post-Conquest French. It’s of interest to dictionary types, though, because it derives from a historically important variety of regional French. The knowledgeable editors tell us that launch entered English in the Middle Ages as another of the mass of French words to arrive after the Norman Conquest. The verb derives from Old Northern French lancher, “to lance.”

  It’s important for us that we record that launch derives from the Northern French form with a -ch-, and not the Central French form lancier. These varieties of French were distinguished by aspects of pronunciation as well as of vocabulary. Old Northern French was the language of Normandy and incorporated features of the Norse (Scandinavian) language of the Norman settlers in Normandy in the Middle Ages. Since William of Normandy came, you might guess, from northern France, his troops brought over many northern forms. We have the regional poke—a bag or sack, as in buying a pig in a poke (i.e., unseen)—in parallel with the standard pouch (Northern French poque, Central French poche), and warranty, not guarantee (ultimately from Northern warrant, not Central guarant and garant).

  To launch meant “to hurl (a missile)” or “to pierce (as with a lance: NB lance/launch).” When it was applied in the Middle Ages to people, it meant “to rush, plunge, dart forward.” Launch developed metaphorical uses, and from the seventeenth century we launched ships, or careers. By the time the publishing world had got its act together around 1870, we developed the concept of launching books (and later, other products). In the West of England in the nineteenth century we launched leeks, meaning “to plant them like celery in trenches,” though I cannot see any evidence that that sense has clung on.

  A short note on pronunciation: even into the twentieth century in Britain it was standard to rhyme launch with branch. It doesn’t seem possible now, but there you are.

  In the weeks following the launch, Ed and I had to enter a smiling publicity mode, something with which we were not entirely comfortable. We flew over to North America to introduce the populace there to the importance of the digital dictionary. Our North American publicity was always managed by the indefatigable Royalynn O’Connor, who, against all odds, thought that we were newsworthy and were at least promising communicators. Before she had time to be disabused of that notion, she set us up an exhausting media schedule. Ed had the unfortunate experience of being woken by a phone call in his hotel room one morning to find that in his bleary-eyed state he was broadcasting live to regional America. We were both annoyed by a journalist who insisted on publishing a warts-and-all verbatim transcription of precisely what we said in response to his questions in a face-to-face interview: all of the ums and ahs and false starts, as well as the regular stream of connected discourse.

  More demanding for us still was our publicity tour of Japan. In those days, Japan was the second-largest market for the printed OED, after the United States and before Britain. That might stop you in your tracks. It’s obvious why North America was our top market: the American university and college system has always been fascinated by the English language—the language of the old country, and the language they had pioneered themselves in post-colonial times. And they recognised British scholarship at its best, as we liked to think. But Japan?

  The secret was that the Japanese also love detailed information, and apparently especially when it relates to the English language: Japanese professors are held in high respect in their educational system, and Japanese English professors seem to be at the top of the tree. The Japanese admired the close work that had created the OED—and they were a little sorry and down-in-the-mouth that they didn’t have their own historical dictionary of Japanese, to demonstrate the strengths of their own culture to the world. They also had ample money within their corporation budgets, and so their love and respect for the English language was matched by an ability to acquire it. Britons, on the other hand, have never been quite sure whether the OED is a work of monumental scholarship or simply opens up to the world the British at their most obsessive.

  The tour in Japan got off to a bad start, when we were introduced to the Japanese gentleman who ran OUP’s branch in Tokyo. We soon discovered that we were far too young for him, and (in his view) for the Japanese public, who thought that the best things came in old and dignified packages. Nevertheless, it was too late to send for replacements, and he was stuck with us for two weeks. He proceeded to entertain us royally with saki, seaweed, and barnacles—or at least that was the impression we had of some of our evening fare, as he played his own game of trying to establish at just what point an Englishman would refuse to taste “traditional food” of the sort that would not be eaten by any self-respecting Japanese.

  Despite official misgivings, the Japanese remained—as we had expected—extraordinarily polite, and those who came to hear us speak were willing to listen in silence for long periods of time while we explained the methodology and content of the new dictionary. But there was a problem. Our speeches were simultaneously translated. That doesn’t mean that Ed and I were speaking at the same time, but that in my section of the lecture I would say a sentence, and it would be immediately translated into Japanese for the benefit of the audience. We gave the same talk (I have to confess) in several places. In Tokyo the translator regarded us with regal respect, and so used a form of Japanese—with all sorts of ingratiating circumlocutions—that made each Japanese sentence take three times as long as the equivalent English one. With all of this gross politeness, the talk overran by about half an hour. In advance of a repeat performance in Kyoto, we drastically pruned the text so that the same disaster could not recur. But this time the translator turned out to regard us as colleagues and equals, and used a less verbose and possibly more racy form of Japanese when translating our text. As a result, the talk was wrapped up early, and our host found it necessary to hold sway over the longest question-and-answer session in recorded history.

  If you look closely enough, you will find that the OED has plenty to say about Japanese loanwords in English, and this was one of the subjects of my talk. We saw earlier that the dictionary plots the course of around 500 Hindi words in English, especially from the period of British expansionism and consolidation in the Subcontinent. The history of Japanese loanwords has its own peculiarities, due to the particular course of Western exposure to that country. Historically, Japan’s isolationalist policy of sakoku, in effect between the early seventeenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, meant that the country was to all intents and purposes closed to Western traders and other visitors. By the same token, Japanese were forbidden to leave Japan in this “Edo” period. Word borrowing occurs through contact, and at that time, especially through geographical proximity or physical contact. If Japan was effectively closed for business to the West, then we wouldn’t expect any words to seep from Japanese into English.

  And so we have one Japanese loanword in English in 1557 (Kuge, the nobility attached to the royal court at Kyoto) and, as with early Hindi borrowings, this occurs in a translation from an intermediate language—in this case Italian. Then there is a micro-boom of other Japanese terms (21 in all) from 1600 until 1650: inro, an ornamental set of boxes; miso, soybean paste; shogun, a hereditary commander in the Japanese Army; and tatami, the rush-covered straw mat used endemically on Japanese floors of the day, and indeed a standard unit of measurement. The OED records 508 words from Japanese in English from 1557 to the present day. But precious few of them entered English between 1650 and 1800, when there was no official travel to Japan.

  A trickle of new words starts to enter English again from Japan in the early nineteenth century, but the real rush starts around the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially after 1870. Between 1870 and 1910, we
find over 200 words arriving from Japan. And how has this happened? Yet again, the language follows culture. Japan had lifted its sakoku policy in 1868, and the West had been gradually developing an interest in the arts of the Orient: the OED has the style nouns chinoiserie from 1883, Japanesery from 1885, and japonaiserie from 1896, for example. Now these new Japanese words were acquired in English not only directly from travellers who experienced the culture and preoccupations of the Japanese at first hand, but also—at home—through the influence of Japanese art, literature, and costume (prominent for Western art-lovers through books and exhibitions): haiku, judo, ju-jitsu, Kabuki, netsuke, and Noh on the art front, and futon, hahama (loose-fitting trousers), haori (a short, loose coat), happi (a loose outer coat), and the flowing kimono. The influx of Japanese words into English continued throughout the twentieth century, with new foodstuffs (edamame, or soybeans), martial art terms (ippon, from judo), and a slight shift towards technological innovation: emoji, karaoke.

  Why have some of these words stood the test of time in English? Not because we intuitively understand their etymology, which, in almost all cases, is a mystery to Western speakers (few people know that emoji—literally, a pictogram—comes from the Japanese word e, “a picture,” and moji, “a letter, a character”), but because westerners have become very interested—if not obsessed—with the material manifestations of Japanese culture, and we need the words to describe these. And the easiest words to use are those that the Japanese already use.

  Once the hype surrounding the Second Edition died down, we began to realise that the OED was no longer the University Press’s top priority. When you are absorbed, as we were, in an all-engrossing project which has international ramifications and treats the language from its earliest days up to the present, it’s easy to imagine that everyone else thinks it is as important as you do. Well, we were wrong there. Gradually I appreciated, probably a bit later than everyone around me, that what I had been itching to start on—the next phase of updating the old Victorian OED comprehensively, in all its nooks and crannies, turning it into a modern, dynamic reference resource—was going to be put on hold until the University Press had cleared up several other projects that had been awaiting funds which we had been gobbling. After five years of being in the international spotlights, we found ourselves parked in the back streets for several years, with editorial staff drawn away to other projects.

  It’s not that the language was quietening down, so the New Words editors just carried on recording the language we saw flashing past us. That’s something I always told editors: if there are problems around the project—financial, personal, whatever—just concentrate on the text. Nothing else really matters in the long term. Concentrate on getting the text right, and the other things will, at some point, fall into place. I used to find that thought reassuring around this time. But nevertheless I found OUP’s reasoned delay almost a betrayal, and I was not happy. We made representations to all and sundry for new staff, for new software, just for support—but in large measure it was not forthcoming. All we could do was carry on editing more new words, knowing they might not ever find their way into an updated OED.

  And the new words kept on coming. We were moving out of the Thatcher years and the language was beginning to experience (I almost said “suffer,” but we don’t like value judgements) its social after-effects. Pubs were changing—from the old spit-and-sawdust locals to gastropubs (1996). The gastropub could perhaps be peopled by new lads (1991 onwards), redolent of the brash self-centredness of the post-Thatcherite early 1990s. By 1995 we had ladettes, showing that once a word like lad creeps into the limelight, it develops in ways we might not have expected. We were on message (1992) thanks to President Clinton’s policy wonks (1984; origin unconfirmed), and this Americanism soon became part of the vocabulary of Blairism (1994–). We heard babelicious for the first—and sadly not the last—time in 1991; we could text-message by 1994, though we apparently had to wait till 1998 before we could just text. Who can deny that these were days to be proud of? (Not!—popularised particularly by the film Wayne’s World in 1992.)

  Although dictionaries were preoccupying most of my time in the wake of the 1989 launch of the Second Edition of the OED, Hilary and I now found that we were expecting another baby. Kate was seven and doing well at school, as the teachers told us at our regular meetings. We were all set for Baby No. 2 around New Year 1990, to cap a triumphant year. There were no problems when Eleanor (Ellie) was born on the morning of 10 January 1990. And since Hilary and I had already had one child, we felt fully equipped to handle anything that the new baby would throw at us: early mornings, late nights, midnights, screams, colic, rashes, nappies, more nappies—all the usual stuff.

  For the first six months, everything seemed to be going along just fine, until my mother came to visit in the summer of 1990. We didn’t see very much of our parents at this point. Hilary’s were away in Norfolk, where they’d retired several years earlier; and my parents (also retired) were deep in Surrey, where my father was futilely dreaming about establishing a vineyard on the south coast. But one day, when Ellie was about six months old, my parents came over for one of their lightning visits on the way to somewhere else, and Mum took her out for a stroll in her buggy. When she returned, she said she thought there was something different about Ellie; something she hadn’t been expecting. For a six-month-old baby, her eyes weren’t responding as sharply as you might expect to the various stimuli around her—trees mostly, clouds, birds, things that hove into and out of view from the perspective of a baby in a buggy. That was the first inkling we had that something might be wrong. It was only later, though, that the full extent of Ellie’s disability became clear.

  Ability is another of those words that entered English in the Middle Ages from French. But the French didn’t give us disability. We had to work that one out for ourselves. Our first record of the term dates from 1545, in the general sense “lack of ability (to do something).” But the specific application of the word to a person’s mental or physical incapacity also comes from around the same period: it was first noted in 1561, and contrasts strongly with many of the other words used at that time (such as imbecility, dumbness, etc.) for personal-disability terms which are now no longer regarded as acceptable. We might be surprised that a “neutral” word was so prevalent in the sixteenth century.

  The vocabulary of disability changes with the generations, as one term rises to acceptable prominence, displacing those employed earlier. When Ellie was diagnosed, disability had become the preferred term amongst professionals, superseding handicap. There were times when we wanted to use handicap, almost to shock people out of the complacency that a neutral term like disability can engender (“We have the right term now; that shows how caring we are”).

  Why did disability become the more acceptable term? The word handicap dates from the seventeenth century, over a century after disability. It comes from a time when the English enjoyed experimenting with new vocabulary. But at first the term had nothing to do with disability. In the beginning, handicap was a game. As the OED says, it was “a game in which one person claims an article belonging to another and offers something in exchange, an umpire being chosen to decide the difference of value between the two articles, to be made up in money by the owner of the less valuable one.” The handicap, then, is the difference between the value of two items, or the value you have to add to one to make it equivalent to the other.

  The main definition doesn’t explain why the game was called a “handicap,” but if we read on we find that the contestants put equal wagers into a hat or cap. The umpire and the two players put their hands into the cap (if you are very astute, you can see handicap taking shape here). The umpire declares the value of the less valuable item. The two contestants take their hands out of the shelter of the cap. And they take out their hands either full or empty, to signify agreement or not with the valuation. If both agree, then the umpire takes the money. If not, the pot is taken by the contesta
nt who agrees with the valuation.

  I didn’t follow that, but I’ve seen a TV quiz show based along similar lines. The general idea is that the handicap is the difference between the value of two items, or the value you have to add to one to make it equivalent to the other.

  By the eighteenth century, the word handicap attached itself to horse-racing, on the same logic. An official decided the extra weight to be carried by a horse to equalise its chances of winning. Originally the agreement was conducted between two principals with a cap, as in the game, but later bureaucracy took over. The meaning seeped into various sports in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  It wasn’t until around 1888 that the handicap was first applied to physical or mental disability. The earliest records for this come from the United States. At first it was regarded as a perfectly normal expression—an acknowledgement of the difference in ability between two people. But, by the later twentieth century, handicap had come to be considered generally unacceptable: an unfamiliar-looking word implying too marked and dismissive a distinction between the able and the disabled. Maybe the expression also seemed to imply going “cap in hand” to beg for public assistance.

  Soon enough, people stumbled over phrases like “differently abled,” as they tried to develop a new vocabulary for disability. The history of handicap doesn’t lend itself to the sensitive description of disability, so it’s probably for the best that we don’t hear it all that often nowadays. It appears to offer a crushing value judgement on someone “different” from the average. But it would be wrong to forget what it tells us about how we responded to disability in the past. Disability has a negative prefix, so maybe it, too, will have a relatively short shelf-life. However the vocabulary changes, we need to remember words as tinder-boxes of their time.