Slightly off the topic, but worth reporting as an end-note. I don’t know if I’d come across editress before, as the feminine form of editor, but I found it in my trawl through the history of edit. It seems to have been quite popular in the 19th century. So was editrix. Neither one has died out. There are several web sites with editress or editrix in the title. I suspect that most of them are tongue-in-cheek.
Species
classifying things (18th century)
How many words are there in the English language? It’s one of those impossible questions to answer, because it partly depends on what you count as a word. Is flower pot one word or two? And washing machine? Do all abbreviations count as words? How many words are there in Meet me at 4 pm outside your HQ for a G&T? And what are we to do with the thousands of Latin and Greek words used in classifying the natural world?
Some 2 million species of living things have been described using the naming system devised by Carolus Linnaeus in the 18th century. This was a system where plants and animals are first identified as belonging to a particular species; species are then grouped into types called genera (singular form, genus); and genera are grouped into families. Most of the time, a genus and a species are enough to identify what someone is talking about.
For example, the various species of tulip belong to the genus Tulipa, which along with other genera (such as daffodils and lilies) makes up the family Liliaceae. Different species are then distinguished as Tulipa sylvestris (‘woodland tulip’), Tulipa clusiana (‘lady tulip’) and so on. Similarly, the various species of cat belong to the genus Felis, which along with other genera (such as tigers and cheetahs) makes up the family Felidae. Different species are distinguished as Felis catus (‘domestic cat’), Felis sylvestris (‘wild cat’) and so on, then further distinguished as breeds, such as Felis catus siamensis (‘Siamese cat’) and Felis catus anura (‘Manx cat’).
These are all technical terms, intended to replace the vagueness in everyday names. The name bluebell refers to different plants in England and Scotland, and of course has a totally different name when translated into other languages. But the Latin term is always used in the same way, so gardeners in every country can understand each other more easily, and ambiguity is avoided. Most people don’t use the full descriptions, though anyone wanting to be taken seriously as a botanist would have to know some of them.
Do all these classical names count as English? We can’t ignore them. In a discussion at a flower show, we will often hear such sentences as ‘I’ve got a large clump of Tulipa tarda in my garden, and it looks terrific’, and several of the technical names have actually become everyday usage, such as rhododendron and fuchsia. Similarly, any walk around a zoo or a natural history museum will introduce us to the technical names of animals, some of which, such as Homo sapiens (‘wise human’) and Tyrannosaurus rex (‘tyrant lizard king’), have become widely known.
If there are 2 million known species, then there are 2 million names awaiting inclusion in a super-dictionary. And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet, for biologists say that many more millions of species have yet to be discovered.
Ain’t
right and wrong (18th century)
For a word that has regularly attracted a bad press during the 20th century, ain’t is remarkably audible in speech and visible in writing. It’s widely condemned as bad English, and yet all kinds of people use it. It isn’t just something we hear in regional dialect speech. Speakers of standard English use it too, in such expressions as If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, Ain’t it the truth, Ready it ain’t and Things ain’t what they used to be. They’re using the non-standard form to make their speech sound more robust, unpretentious and down-to-earth.
We’ll also find it in written English. Did you notice an example at the end of the previous chapter? It’s by no means the first time that the expression has been used in print. Indeed, in 2002 it was part of a book title: You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: The Future of Media and the Global Expert System. And several other titles have included an ain’t, such as Ain’t Misbehavin’: A Good Behaviour Guide for Family Dogs and It Ain’t Necessarily So: Investigating the Truth of the Biblical Past. The nonstandard form, unusual in print, grabs the attention.
In these last two cases there’s an allusion to a well-known song. We seem to have stored away in our memory such phrases as ain’t misbehavin’ (the name of a Louis Armstrong hit from the 1929 musical comedy Hot Chocolates) and can bring them out again as required, confident that other people will recognise the allusions. Nor is it only song that uses the word. It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum has entered British consciousness as a result of a popular TV programme. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings has prompted a sports commentary cliché.
Ain’t has had an unusual history. It’s a shortened form of several words – am not, are not, is not, has not and have not. It appears in written English in the 18th century in various plays and novels, first as an’t and then as ain’t. During the 19th century it was widely used in representations of regional dialect, especially Cockney speech in the UK, and became a distinctive feature of colloquial American English. But when we look at who is using the form in 19th-century novels, such as those by Dickens and Trollope, we find that the characters are often professional and upper-class. That’s unusual: to find a form simultaneously used at both ends of the social spectrum. Even as recently as 1907, in a commentary on society called The Social Fetich, Lady Agnes Grove was defending ain’t I as respectable upper-class colloquial speech – and condemning aren’t I!
She was in a rapidly diminishing minority. Prescriptive grammarians had taken against ain’t, and it would soon become universally condemned as a leading marker of uneducated usage. There was a chorus of criticism in 1961 when the editor of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary decided it was so widespread, even among cultivated speakers, that he could not possibly omit it. Rarely has a single word attracted such fury. But, as gotcha and other non-standard spellings illustrate, it’s by no means alone (§88).
Trek
a word from Africa (19th century)
In 1883, Olive Schreiner published a novel in London under the pseudonym of Ralph Iron. It was called The Story of an African Farm – a tale about a strong, independent-minded woman working on an isolated ostrich farm. The first novel to come out of South Africa, it became a bestseller.
While she was writing her book, Schreiner knew she had a problem. How was she to present the South African setting in an intelligible way? The opening lines of her story paint a picture of the countryside. It talks about karroo bushes, kopjes and sheep kraals. How would British readers know what she was talking about?
Her solution was to put a glossary of the most important words at the front of the book. There the reader would learn that the karroo was a ‘wide sandy plain’, a kopje was ‘a small hillock’ and a kraal was ‘the space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches, into which sheep or cattle are driven at night’. The words included animals (meerkat, ‘a small weasel-like animal’), people (predikant, ‘parson’), food (bultong, ‘dried meat’), clothing (kappje, ‘a sun-bonnet’) and various domestic objects and activities. Most of the words were of Afrikaans origin, but some were adaptations of British words. An upsitting, for instance, was a custom in Boer courtship: ‘the man and girl are supposed to sit up together the whole night.’
It was during the 19th century that words from Africa began to make an impact on English vocabulary. Previously, there had been very few. Yam and banana had arrived during the 16th century, and a few more followed, such as harmattan (a type of wind) and zebra. In South Africa, kraal appears in the 18th century, first in the sense of ‘village’, then in Schreiner’s sense of ‘animal enclosure’. Hundreds of words remained local to South Africa, such as bioscope(‘cinema’) and dorp (‘village’), along with borrowings from indigenous languages, such as maningi (‘very’) and induna (‘headman’). Several became part of standard English, such as commando, spo
or and veld, as well as politically loaded terms such as resettlement and apartheid. But few have achieved such general usage as trek.
Trek arrived in the 1840s, meaning a journey by ox-wagon, very much associated with Boer movements in the region following the first ‘Great Trek’. It developed several senses in South African English and came to be used in a number of compounds, such as trek path (‘right of way’) and trek swarm (‘migrating honey bees’). But a century later, it was being used for any arduous overland journey in any part of the world. It became the perfect media word to describe dramatic explorations of jungles, deserts and ice caps.
Then trek went in a different direction. People began to use it for activities which, in Boer terms, would have seemed totally trivial. A boring or routine trip to the shops was called a trek. People trekked from home to their offices. Trekking holidays became popular, with trekkers warned to choose a level of physical commitment they could cope with. It didn’t even have to be a physical task. You could go on a mental trek, if you were going on an emotional journey or having difficulty thinking something out.
In the 1960s, there was an unpredictable development: a use developed with a capital T. Devotees of a new science fiction television series came to be called Trekkies or Trekkers (the choice was serious, as each name had its supporters and critics). In 1997 a documentary film about the fans was called Trekkies. The term began to be used beyond the series: anyone obsessed with fantasy space travel might be labelled a trekkie (with a small t). Thanks to Star Trek, the word has regained its ‘long-distance’ meaning, boldly going where no loanword has gone before.
Hello
progress through technology (19th century)
It’s such a natural expression, used every day as a greeting. Surely this is one of those words which has been in the language for ever? In fact, its first recorded use is less than 200 years old.
English people have been using h-words to catch each other’s attention since Anglo-Saxon times. Hey and ho are recorded in the 13th century, and hi in the 15th. Hollo, hillo, holla, halloo and other shouts used in hunting are known from the 16th century, and are doubtless much older. For greetings, one of the words used by the Anglo-Saxons was hal (‘whole’, ‘healthy’) in such expressions as ‘be healthy’. Hail appeared in the 13th century. But we have to wait until the 19th century to see the modern greeting.
When it emerges, we find it in several spellings. All five vowels are used: hallo, hello, hillo, hollo and hullo. The variations arose because the stress in the word was on the second syllable, making it difficult to hear the quality of the vowel in the first. Today, hello is the usual spelling, about four times more common than hallo – except when authors are putting words into the mouths of policemen: Hallo, ’allo, ’allo says PC Palk, answering the phone in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library.
13. An early advertisement for Bell Telephones in the USA, emphasising the social role of the phone in a family context. When the telephone first arrived, there was a degree of concern that it might herald the end of traditional face-to-face social interaction. Ads like this one were intended to counter that scepticism.
Why did hello catch on? The word was around in the early 1800s, but used very informally, often as a part of street slang. The more formal usage seems to have emerged when the telephone was invented. People had to have a way of starting a conversation or letting the other person know they were there, especially if they were using a line where the connection was always open. Various forms were suggested, such as Ahoy!, Are you there? and Are you ready?, but Thomas Edison, the inventor of the telephone, evidently preferred Hello. This was the word he shouted into the mouthpiece of his device when he discovered a way of recording sound in 1877. And there is a famous letter which he wrote to a colleague about the telephone saying, ‘I do not think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away.’ Within a decade, the women who were employed as the first telephone operators were being called hello girls.
Hello illustrates how technology can influence vocabulary, pushing a word in a new direction. Other uses continue to emerge, of course. In particular, since the 1980s hello has developed an ironic attention-getting use, implying that someone has failed to understand or has missed the point in some way: ‘I mean, hello! How crazy was that?’ But its future as an informal greeting is being seriously challenged by Hi, which emerged in the USA in the 19th century. Hi is now heard globally across the age range – though it’s rather less widespread among older people, where hello is still the norm – and has become frequent in written English too. It’s the commonest way of beginning an email to someone we know. Two letters are quicker to type than five, no matter how old you are. Technology rules, once again.
Dragsman
thieves’ cant (19th century)
Dictionaries chiefly deal in the words used by the great and the good. Dr Johnson started a trend when he paid special attention in his Dictionary entries to the cultured usage of the best authors, ‘the wells of English undefiled’. There’s little sign in his pages of the everyday slang of ordinary people – and certainly no coverage of the secretive usage (often called cant, or argot) of criminals. But villains have vocabulary too.
It’s not easy to study, though. If we wanted to collect the words used by criminals and establish their senses, we would have to enter their world and stay for quite some time. A risky business. But some intrepid lexicographers have done precisely that.
One of the first was George Andrewes, who compiled A Dictionary of the Slang and Cant Languages in 1809. He had a highly practical aim in mind. Thieves have a language of their own, he says, so that when they get together in the streets passers-by won’t understand what they’re plotting. His Dictionary, he hopes, will make it easier to detect their crimes: ‘by the perusal of this Work, the Public will become acquainted with their mysterious Phrases; and be better able to frustrate their designs.’
Dragsmen were one of the types of villain he had in mind. In the 18th century, a drag was a private horse-drawn vehicle similar to a stage coach, with seats inside and on the top. A dragsman was its driver. But the term was also used for someone who stole (‘dragged’) goods or luggage from vehicles. They were also called draggers, for obvious reasons. Drag went out of use for the name of a vehicle once the motor car was invented; but it surfaced again in the 1950s when the American sport of drag racing developed (initially along the drag, or main street, of a town).
Andrewes provides a long list of names for the different kinds of criminal activity. Some, such as footpads and coiners (‘counterfeiters’), are still used today. Fencer is close to what we now say for a receiver of stolen goods (a fence). And we might guess what a water-pad is, on analogy with footpad. Someone who robs ships.
Several of the unfamiliar names are highly descriptive. A cloak-twitcher, as its form suggests, was someone who would lurk in a dark place and snatch a cloak from the shoulders of its wearer. A beau-trap was a well-dressed confidence trickster. A diver was a pickpocket. Others are less transparent, and their origins aren’t known. Housebreakers were kencrackers, from an old slang term for a house, ken, but where that word comes from nobody knows. A prigger was a thief. A lully-prigger was a linen-thief. Nobody knows where these words come from either.
Two of the most puzzling terms listed by Andrewes are clapperdogeons and gammoners. A clap-perdogeon – also spelled clapperdudgeon – was a beggar. It seems to be a combination of clapper (‘lid of a begging dish’) and dudgeon (‘hilt of a dagger’). Maybe beggars knocked the lid of their dish with it. A gammoner was a pickpocket’s accomplice – someone who held the attention of the target while a pocket was picked. Give me gammon, the pickpocket might say to the accomplice. Maybe gammon comes from game, in its sense of a ‘scheme’ or ‘intrigue’ – we still say such things as so that’s your little game and two can play at that game. Or could there be an obscure link with the game of backgammon (‘back-game’)? Again, nobody knows.
&n
bsp; Lunch
U or non-U (19th century)
What do you call the meal you have in the middle of the day? For many readers, there is no question: lunch. For many readers, there is no question: dinner. Clearly, there’s an issue here, and it’s one that has been a feature of English vocabulary for a long time.
In Britain, the issue was highlighted in the 1950s, when considerable media attention was paid to the vocabulary differences between upper-class (or ‘U’) speakers and those belonging to other classes (‘non-U’). It was claimed that U speakers said lunch or luncheon; everyone else said dinner. And similarly, U-speakers were supposed to say vegetables, lavatory paper and bike; non-U speakers greens, toilet paper and cycle. Long lists were compiled to illustrate the supposed linguistic ‘class war’.
The situation was never as neat and tidy as the distinction suggested. U-speakers certainly called their midday meal lunch(eon), but if they had a dog they would give it its dinner at that time of day. One didn’t invite one’s dog to take lunch. Similarly, U-children would also be summoned to dinner, especially in school, where the meal in the middle of the day would be served by dinner ladies. Most Christmas dinners were eaten in the early afternoon. So were Thanksgiving dinners. And the words sometimes went in the opposite direction. Businessmen having an evening meal in a restaurant might nonetheless pay for it with luncheon vouchers.
The words have gone backwards and forwards in recent centuries. Originally, there was only dinner – a word that arrived from French in the 13th century to describe the chief meal of the day. This was usually eaten around midday – as is clear from many observations. In Shakespeare’s As You Like It (IV.i.166), Orlando tells Rosalind he has to leave her for two hours: ‘I must attend the Duke at dinner. By two o’clock I will be with thee again.’ It was the same in the 18th century. James Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, writes of being invited to ‘dinner at two’.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 13
