Dame
a form of address (13th century)
People are very sensitive about how others address them. The reason is that there are several choices, and each choice carries a nuance. We could guess a great deal about the relationship between the parties if we heard:
Hello, Mrs Jones
Hello, Jane
Hello, Janey
Hello, Mrs J
Hello, chick
Hello, Didi
Very few people know that Jane was called Didi by her family when she was little.
Our preference for using – or not using – titles can alter over quite short periods of time. Young people these days are much readier to use first names on initial acquaintance than are their seniors, and don’t so often get irritated when a cold-caller greets them over the phone with a breezy intimacy. It’s hardly surprising, then, to find that the use of titles has changed over the course of centuries. But few have had such a chequered history as Dame.
Today, the use of Dame is very restricted. It’s the female equivalent of a knight of an order of chivalry, in the British honours system, and people notice it when someone well known receives it, such as Dame Judi Dench. It also has a limited use elsewhere. Lady baronets and some retired female judges can be called Dame. These are the last vestiges of a title which was originally widespread in English society.
When dame arrived from French in the 13th century, it was immediately used for ladies of high rank, and for any woman in charge of a community, such as an abbess or prioress. But it quickly went downmarket. By the 16th century, any woman married to a person with social standing, even if relatively low in rank (such as a squire or a yeoman), could be called Dame.
At the same time, the word was being used in a general way to describe ‘the lady of the house’ – a housewife. From there it was a short step to find it used for any mother, whatever her social position. And in the 14th century, a mother tongue was often referred to as a dame’s tongue.
The original vowel in dame, coming from French, was pronounced more like the one we hear in modern English dam, and this spelling, along with damme, was soon used. But dam, perceived to be a different word, began to attract negative connotations. It was used for female animals as well, and when used for a human mother it usually had a tone of ridicule or contempt. The emergence of the phrase the devil and his dam didn’t help.
In the early 20th century dame went further downmarket, especially in the United States, where it became the usual slang word for a woman. ‘There is nothin’ like a dame’ went the refrain (in South Pacific). Then a most curious development took place in Britain. In pantomimes it came to be used for a comic middle-aged female character, traditionally played by a man. And the comic overtones spilled over into other comic roles, as in the famous case of Dame Edna Everage (aka Barry Humphries). This is as far away from the upper strata of society as it’s possible to imagine.
The higher up the social scale we go, the more strictly the address rules are imposed. At the highest levels, whole books have been devoted to how we should address a prince, a duke, a baroness, a president, a professor, a cardinal, a judge, a mayor … It can get very complicated, especially in Britain. Is a duke called Your Grace or My Lord? What about an earl, a marquess or a baron? Most people would have to look up the answer. (All are My Lord, except the duke.) Is the sovereign’s son called Your Royal Highness? Yes. What about the sovereign’s son’s son? Yes. And the sovereign’s son’s son’s son? No. Getting it wrong would be a terrible faux pas, in some circles.
Skirt
a word doublet (13th century)
When two cultures come together, the words of their languages compete for survival. We can see the process taking place early on in the history of English, following the Danish invasions of Britain. The Danes spoke a language known as Old Norse, and this had many words that had a related form in Old English. What would people end up saying? Would the Danish settlers adopt the Old English words? Or would the Anglo-Saxons adopt the Old Norse ones?
In the event, people went in both directions. During the Middle English period we find Norse egg and sister ousting Old English ey and sweoster. And Old English path and swell ousted reike and bolnen. But there was a third solution: the Old English and Old Norse words both survived, because people gave them different meanings. This is what happened to skirt and shirt.
Shirt is found occasionally in late Old English (spelled scyrte), with the meaning of a short garment worn by both men and women. Skirt, from Old Norse, is known from the 1300s, and seems to have been used chiefly for the female garment – the lower part of a dress or gown. But the word could also be used for the lower part of a man’s robe or coat too. And it is this notion of ‘lower part of something’ which led to the later sense of skirt meaning an edge or boundary – hence such words as outskirts and skirting board.
Shirt and skirt went different ways during the Middle English period. Shirt became increasingly used only for the male garment, and skirt for the female. But the distinction has never been complete. Today, women’s fashion includes shirts, and skirts are normal wear for men in many countries (though, kilts aside, rarely encountered in Western culture). Clothing such as the T-shirt is gender-neutral. And most of the idioms using shirt are too. Both men and women can bet their shirt, give away the shirt off their back and keep their shirt on.
Cases like shirt/skirt, where both words survive, are known as doublets, and there are many of them in English. From the Danish period, we find Old Norse dike alongside Old English ditch, and similarly hale and whole, scrub and shrub, sick and ill and many more. There are even more in regional dialects, where the Old English word has become the standard form and the Old Norse word remains local, as in church vs kirk, yard vs garth, write vs scrive and – of especial interest because of its widespread dialect use – no vs nay.
Jail
competing words (13th century)
One of the most noticeable features of English vocabulary is the large number of words that entered the language as borrowings from French, especially in the period after the Norman invasion of 1066. Some of them are illustrated by the cooking and legal terms that form part of the story of pork and chattels (§§17, 18). The vast majority of French loans were borrowed just once – which is what one would expect. But on a few occasions, a word got borrowed twice.
Why borrow a word twice? If English speakers were already using it, what would be the point? The answer lies in the fact that the people who introduced these words had different social and linguistic backgrounds. In the early part of the period, they were usually speakers of the dialect of French spoken in Normandy; in the later part, they were people who had learned the French of Paris – the ‘posh’ dialect that was becoming the standard. Several words had different forms in these two dialects. The Norman version was borrowed first; a Parisian version came along later. And English sometimes kept both of them.
That’s why we have both gaol and jail. The g-spellings are recorded first, in the 13th century: we read about a gayhol and a gayll. The j-spellings, such as iaiole and iayll come long later (i and j weren’t distinguished as separate letters in the Middle English period). It must have been quite confusing. Which form should one use? Even as late as the 17th century, people were scratching their heads. The point was noted by the political author Roger L’Estrange, writing in 1668: he talks about the ‘rage’ some people feel because they can’t decide ‘whether they shall say [write] Jayl or Gaol’.
5. In Monopoly, one goes directly to jail, not gaol. Over a hundred local variants of the game have now been licensed. A spin-off dice-game was called ‘Don’t Go To Jail’.
But at least the meaning stayed the same in this instance. In many other cases of ‘double borrowing’, the two words developed different meanings. Today, convey (from Norman French) doesn’t have the same meaning as convoy (from Parisian French). Nor are Norman reward, warden, warrant and wile the same as Parisian regard, guardian, guarantee and g
uile.
Three hundred and fifty years on, the problem of gaol and jail is still there in British English. The Americans sorted it out in the 18th century, opting for jail, and that’s the only form found in the USA today. But Britain kept both. Official legal documents preferred the gaol spelling. British and Irish prisons were originally spelled Gaol. Oscar Wilde wrote a ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’. In speech, of course, there’s no difference: both words are pronounced ‘jail’.
Gaol seems to be disappearing from everyday writing nowadays in Britain, though lawyers still use it. And it’s still popular in some other countries, such as Australia. Overall it’s definitely the junior partner: a mere 2 million hits on Google in 2010, compared with 52 million for jail. It’s difficult to say just when the replacement trend started. Some people put it down to the influence of the popular board game Monopoly, invented in the USA. When the game was ‘translated’ into Britain in the 1930s, the non-London squares weren’t changed. That’s why there is a distinctly American-looking policeman on the ‘Go To Jail’ square. And suddenly British players were being sent ‘directly to jail’.
Take away
a phrasal verb (13th century)
It must have come as quite a shock to Samuel Johnson, slowly working his way through the alphabet for his Dictionary of the English Language in the early 1750s, when he reached the letter T. The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.
The high total was caused by a large number of combined forms, where take was used along with another word, such as in, off, up and out, or two words, as seen in take up with. These are called phrasal verbs in modern grammatical parlance. The combination of words expresses new senses. Take off, for example, has such meanings as ‘become airborne’, ‘be successful’ and ‘remove’. Aircraft and projects can take off. Clothes can be taken off.
Phrasal verbs became an important feature of English vocabulary during the Middle Ages. Take away is first recorded around 1300 in its general sense of ‘remove’ or ‘withdraw’, and it soon developed special applications. If someone was taken away, it could mean he died or was killed. If servants were taking away, they were clearing the table after a meal. If something took away from an achievement, it detracted from it. And other senses have arrived in modern times. Since the 1930s, we have had the option of eating food in the place where it has been prepared or taking it away to eat elsewhere.
A few phrasal verbs take on a second life as nouns. If I hand something out, what I deliver is a handout. If I tell someone to go ahead, I give them a go-ahead. And this has happened to take away too. In Britain, the shop that sells food that can be eaten off the premises is called a takeaway (often hyphenated, as take-away), usually with a characterising adjective: a Chinese takeaway, an Indian takeaway. The word can be used as an adjective too: a takeaway curry, takeaway hamburgers. And since the 1970s it has been applied to the meal itself: We’re having a takeaway tonight. But takeaway isn’t universal in the English-speaking world. In Malaysian and Singaporean English, they use a Chinese word – tapau, food. And American English has opted for different phrasal verbs – take-outs or carryouts.
Cuckoo
a sound-symbolic word (13th century)
Most words don’t resemble the things they refer to. There’s nothing about the shape of the word table that shows us an object with four legs and a flat surface. And there’s nothing in the sound of the word commotion that makes us hear a violent disturbance. But English has quite a few words where the opposite is the case: cough, knock, murmur, zoom, crunch, bang, clatter, teeny, babble, splash, plop … The sound of the word seems to imitate the reality to which it refers. Such words are often called onomatopoeic – a term from Greek meaning ‘word creation’ – especially when people are talking about the effects heard in poetry. Linguists call them instances of sound symbolism.
Cuckoo is an excellent example of a sound-symbolic word. In many languages the name of this bird echoes the sound of its call. The effect can’t be heard so well in the Old English word for a cuckoo, geac; but in the Middle Ages it comes across clearly in the form cuccu. The earliest recorded use, from the mid-13th century, is in the famous ‘Cuckoo Song’, the earliest known singing ‘round’ in English:
Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu
The translation is ‘Spring has come in. Loudly sing, cuckoo!’ In Middle English, there was no separate word for springtime; spring as the name of a season isn’t recorded until the 16th century. The word summer was used for the entire period between the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
But even sound-symbolic words can change their meaning and lose their original echoic associations. This has happened to cuckoo. In the 16th century we see it being applied to people. The bird has a monotonous call and lays its eggs in the nests of other birds, so anyone engaged in unimaginative repetitious behaviour or doing something perceived to be stupid came to be labelled a cuckoo. When Aristophanes’ Birds was translated in the 19th century, the name of the realm built by the birds to separate the gods from mankind was called Cloudcuckooland, and this was then applied to any impossibly fanciful world. ‘You’re living in cloudcuckooland,’ we might say. Later the expression was also used in a shortened form: cuckoo land. And in the 20th century, American English took this direction further: anyone who was thought to be crazy or making an absurd suggestion was, quite simply, cuckoo. And if you were thought to be seriously crazy, you might end up as Jack Nicholson did in the 1975 film, in a cuckoo’s nest.
Cunt
a taboo word (13th century)
Taboo words are an important element in every language – not because of their number, but because of their notoriety. No other words attract such public emotions, headlines and legislation. But if a word-book is trying to represent all aspects of a language’s lexicon, they have to be included. And they always provide a fascinating story, even if it is one which some readers may find uncomfortable in the telling.
Some studies suggest that the public is becoming more relaxed about traditional taboo words, but cunt remains at the top of any list of words that people find most offensive. It is one of a very few words known by their initials. The expression the f-word seems to have been the first, recorded since the 1950s. The c-word came later, in the 1970s. Today, such usages have extended to other kinds of taboo, such as race (the n-word, for nigger) and mortality (where c-word turns up again, but now standing for cancer).
Some taboo words, such as bloody (§47), emerge quite late in the history of English; others, such as cunt, seem to have been there very early on. But nobody knows exactly where this word came from or when it arrived. There’s an Old Norse word kunta with the same meaning, so maybe it came in with the Vikings. It doesn’t appear in Old English and is rare in Middle English, suggesting that it was a sensitive word even then. There are several instances of it being replaced by a less direct form (a euphemism), such as quaint, and other alternatives emerged, such as cunny, quim and the remarkable quoniam (the Latin word for ‘since’), which must have originated as a scholarly joke. In Lichfield there is a street called Quonians, which may well come from this source.
The story of count and countess is suggestive too. These aristocratic titles were brought over from France when the Normans arrived. But although countess was immediately adopted – there are examples recorded from the 12th century – count was not. Instead, the Anglo-Saxon word earl continued in use. The likely explanation is that count was being avoided because its pronunciation reminded people of cunt. The vowel in count would have been short (as shown by the early Old French spelling cunte). By the 16th century, though, things had changed: count was evidently being pronounced in a sufficiently different way for people to use it without causing a snigger, and the title becomes frequent thereafter. We find Count Orsino,
Count Claudio and other Counts in Shakespeare.
On the other hand, the word evidently didn’t have the same taboo force in the early Middle Ages that it has today. It turns up in various medical textbooks of the period, as a routine part of a description of female anatomy. It appears within surnames, such as John Fillecunt and Bele Wydecunthe. And there are some famous street names, such as Gropecuntlane, which suggest that the word was in common parlance. We won’t find such names today. The old street names have long been replaced by more innocent versions. However, if you find yourself walking down a Grope Street or a Grape Street, it may well have once been a prostitution thoroughfare.
It took longer for the word to be used as a term of abuse. There are occasional signs in the 1500s of people using it when they were calling each other names, but the really forceful insulting use (you cunt!) isn’t recorded until the early 20th century – first with reference to women, then to men as well – and chiefly in Britain. It’s difficult to be sure when this usage began. Once cunt had achieved really strong taboo force, it became rare in writing, so we don’t have any records. Dictionaries would generally exclude it. And when a few writers did dare to use it, it would usually be printed with a dash or asterisks.
Today, most dictionaries include it. But newspapers still vary in their practice. If a footballer calls a referee a cunt, which seems to happen quite often, we might see all three versions in different papers: c---, c*** and cunt. Seeing the word in print at all is a major change compared with fifty years ago. But newspapers no longer dictate norms. If you want to see it used some 20 million or so times, all you have to do is call it up on the internet.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 6
