The Story of English in 100 Words

by David Crystal

  The words luncheon and lunch both arrived in the late 16th century, though not in their modern sense. A lunch(eon) was a thick piece of food – a hunk of something. People would talk about ‘a luncheon of cheese’ or ‘a lunch of bacon’. Then luncheon began to move in the direction of its modern meaning. In the 17th century, it was a light repast taken between the main meals. There would be breakfast, then luncheon, then (midday) dinner; or, dinner, then luncheon, then supper. In the 1820s Thomas Carlyle writes about an evening luncheon. And in the USA there are instances of luncheons being served as late as midnight.

  The modern usage of lunch isn’t recorded until 1829, and not everyone liked it. Some considered it a vulgar abbreviation; others, a ridiculous affectation. At the same time, luncheon was attracting criticism as a word unsuitable for use in high society. But dinner was also being frowned upon, because of its growing lower-class associations. So what should people say? There were some strange coinages as they searched for a solution. Lunch-dinner is recorded a few times during the century, as are luncheon-dinner and dinner-supper. It must all have been very confusing.

  Eventually, as we now know, the present-day use of lunch and dinner became established among the fashionable classes. As the 20th century dawned, the pages of Punch magazine are full of references to business lunches and evening dinner parties. Meanwhile, the lower orders of society continued to use dinner for their midday meal, and so the U/non-U distinction was born. But the story of lunch and dinner is not over yet. Expressions such as lunch-box and packed lunch have reinforced a change of usage among many non-U children, so that they now happily talk about school lunches (though still served by dinner ladies). However, when chef Jamie Oliver started his campaign on British television in 2005 for more nutritious food in school lunches, he called it Jamie’s School Dinners.

  Dude

  a cool usage (19th century)

  Dude is another word whose origin is unknown. All we know is that it suddenly appeared in 1883 in New York. The London newspaper The Graphic reported its arrival in March of that year as ‘American slang for a new kind of American young man’. A couple of months later, the North Adams Transcript of Massachusetts confirmed its spread: ‘The new coined word “dude” … has travelled over the country with a great deal of rapidity since but two months ago it grew into general use in New York.’ Rarely do we find such a precise dating of a word (§83). But who coined it, and why, remains a mystery.

  Dudes were aesthetes and dandies – any man who was extremely fastidious about his clothes, speech and general behaviour. They often dressed in a British way and affected a British tone of voice. If you were clothed like a dude, you were duded up. But soon the word began to extend its meaning. Any city-dweller who went ‘out West’ as a tourist would be called a dude. Dude ranches developed to cater for the demand from city dudes. And it wasn’t long before the female dude was identified – and given a name: dudess or dudine, though neither of these words has survived.

  By the turn of the century, anyone who stood out in a crowd was being called a dude. In small-group settings, such as school classrooms, street gangs and jazz clubs, it became a term of approval. Eventually any group of people hanging out together would refer to themselves as dudes. It became one of a large number of ‘cool’ slang terms for people, such as cat (in the jazz world) and geek (in the computer world).

  By the 1970s dude had become a chatty term of address for both men and women, especially popular in American university campuses and often heard in high school and college movies. Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989) contained such famous lines as ‘All we are is dust in the wind, dude!’ and ‘How’s it goin’, royal ugly dudes?’ Bill and Ted’s teacher, Mr Ryan, is unimpressed by the usage.

  Mr Ryan: So Bill, what you’re telling me, essentially, is that Napoleon was a short, dead dude.

  Bill: Well, yeah.

  Ted (to Bill): You totally blew it, dude.

  Brunch

  a portmanteau word (19th century)

  We know the year that brunch entered the English language. According to the satirical magazine Punch, it was 1895. This is what a writer in August 1896 had to say about it:

  To be fashionable nowadays we must ‘brunch’. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly, and indicating a combined breakfast and lunch.

  Indeed he did. Beringer’s article, ‘Brunch: A Plea’, proposed an alternative to the Sunday ‘postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savoury pies’. Brunch, said Beringer, ‘puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week’.

  There certainly is a quirky freshness about the name, which is still with us. It caught on, and by the 1930s the noun was also being used as a verb: ‘I brunched with Jim’, someone might say. We also find it being used to make compound words, such as brunch-style and brunch box. In the 1940s, a type of women’s short house-coat was called a brunch coat. By the 1960s a new kind of eating-house had emerged: the brunch-bar. And Cadbury used that name for a chocolate-covered cereal bar.

  The Punch writer called brunch a portmanteau word. A portmanteau, as its French origin suggests, was a small case which a horse-rider could use to carry (porter = ‘to carry’) a cloak (manteau) or other clothes or belongings. But it changed its meaning in the late 19th century, after Lewis Carroll used it in Through the Looking-Glass (1871) to explain his coinages in ‘Jabberwocky’. Slithy, says Humpty Dumpty, ‘means lithe and slimy … it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’. Today, linguists tend to call such words blends – but there is something rather appealing about Lewis Carroll’s usage which has kept the older term in vogue.

  The meaning of a portmanteau word is different from the sum of its parts. Brunch isn’t two meals – breakfast and lunch – but a meal that is different from either. And this is the pattern we find in all portmanteau words. A spork is neither a spoon nor a fork, but a new device that mixes properties of both. A motorcade is not a motor car nor a cavalcade, but a new kind of procession.

  Portmanteaus have been part of the English language for centuries. Tragicomedy dates from the 16th century; Oxbridge from the 19th. But blending became one of the most popular ways of coining new words during the 20th century. Spork is first recorded in 1909 and motorcade in 1913, and hundreds of others followed – such as gasohol, internet, interpol, motel, chocoholic, docusoap and guestimate. Informal English has a special liking for them – fantabulous, ginormous, happenstance. The process is especially popular today (§98).

  Some of the most unusual blends appear in house-names – if Derek and Susan set up house together, they might call their place Dersan or Suerek. And the tabloid media love to join the names of famous couples together in a personal portmanteau. Who was/were Brangelina? Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. And who was/were Bennifer? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Whether the whole is different from the sum of the parts, in such cases, is a moot point.

  Dinkum

  a word from Australia (19th century)

  On 29 April 1770, Captain Cook arrived in Australia. Two months later he writes in his journal: ‘One of the Men saw an Animal something less than a greyhound; it was of a Mouse Colour, very slender made, and swift of Foot.’ They soon learned its local name. Cook writes on 4th August: ‘called by the Natives Kangooroo, or Kanguru’. It was the first of many words that would eventually become a feature of Australian English.

  The aboriginal languages of the region supplied some of the most distinctive items. Local animals, landscape and culture are reflected in billabong, dingo, koala, wombat, budgerigar, kookaburra and boomerang, Less distinctive, but more numerous, were words from British English used in new ways. A paddock in Britain was a small animal enclosure; now it described a vast tract of rural land. Swag was a slang word for a thief’s booty; it came to mean a bundle of personal belongings carried by a
traveller in the bush. A footpath is paved in Australia – what in Britain would be a pavement and in the USA a sidewalk.

  Bush itself was one of these changes of sense, referring to the huge expanse of natural countryside that formed inland Australia. It became the basis of a wide range of expressions, such as bush mouse and bush turkey, bush cucumber and bush tomato, bush ballad and bush medicine. Few have travelled outside Australia. An exception is bush telegraph, meaning the rapid spread of news or rumours.

  Words from British regional dialects often underlie an Australian usage. Dinkum is a case in point. This is one of the best-known Australianisms, especially in the phrase fair dinkum. It appears in the 19th century in Britain, and is recorded by Joseph Wright in his English Dialect Dictionary. He found dinkum in Derbyshire and fair dinkum in Lincolnshire. Dinkum meant ‘hard work’, and fair dinkum was your ‘fair share of work’.

  These senses travelled to Australia, but soon developed more general meanings of ‘honest, genuine’ and ‘good, excellent’, which is how the word is used today. Its popularity is suggested by the way it developed alternative forms, shortening to dink and lengthening to dinki-di. The origin of the word isn’t known. There are other uses, such as dink meaning ‘finely dressed’ and dinky meaning ‘neat, small’, all with a history in British dialects, but it’s difficult to see how they relate to the Australian use.

  Thanks to the international popularity of Australian films and TV programmes, the English-speaking world has come to be familiar with dinkum and other informal expressions such as cobber (‘mate’), pom (‘British person’), sheila (‘woman’), tucker (‘food’) and g’day (as a greeting), as well as abbreviated forms such as beaut (as a term of praise) and arvo (‘afternoon’). Just occasionally, a colloquialism becomes part of international informal English. Barbies (‘barbecues’) have been with us since the 1970s.

  The down side of media presence is that it often paints an exaggerated picture of Australian English. Outsiders hear colourful phrases and assume that everyone talks in the same way. Books of Australianisms have collected such expressions as miserable as a bandicoot, flat out like a lizard drinking and he couldn’t find a grand piano in a one-roomed house, but it’s debatable just how many people have actually ever used them.

  Mipela

  pidgin English (19th century)

  You won’t find mipela or mifela in a dictionary of standard English, but these words belong to the language nonetheless – used in different varieties of pidgin English. Mipela is one of the pronouns used in the pidgin language of Papua New Guinea called Tok Pisin (‘Pidgin Talk’). People generally have a low opinion of pidgin languages. They think of them as primitive compared with standard English, with little or no grammar and a tiny vocabulary.

  In fact, a pidgin like Tok Pisin is startlingly sophisticated. Its vocabulary is large enough to cope with translations of the Bible and Shakespeare. And sometimes its expression is more subtle than standard English. The standard pronoun system is pretty simple, really. We have first person I (for singular) and we (for plural). Second person is you for both singular and plural. Third person is he, she or it (for singular) and they (for plural). It’s not the best of systems. You, in particular, is ambiguous. If I say I’m talking to you, it’s not possible to tell whether I’m addressing one person or several.

  14. A sign in Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. It reads: ‘Beware of cattle’, literally ‘look out’ + ‘for’ + ‘bull and cow’. Long is a general-purpose preposition with functions expressing such notions as ‘in’, ‘of’, and ‘on’. It’s a shortened form of belong. When Prince Charles visited Papua New Guinea in 1966 he was described locally as nambawan pikinini bilong misis kwin (‘the number one child of Mrs Queen’). Princess Anne, correspondingly, was the nambawan gel (‘girl’) pikinini bilong misis kwin.

  Tok Pisin does much better. It has four different ways of saying ‘you’. Yu, on its own, means I’m talking to one person. If I’m talking to two people, I say yutupela (‘you two’). If I’m talking to three people, I say yutripela (‘you three’). And if I’m talking to more than three people, I say yupela.

  The same system operates for the third person. If I say em, I mean ‘he, she or it’. If I say tupela, I mean ‘they two’. Tripela means ‘they three’. And ol means ‘they four or more’.

  The first person is even more sophisticated, as, in addition to mi (‘I’), Tok Pisin allows speakers to distinguish how many people are included in the conversation. Imagine John and Mary talking to a group. John says, ‘We’re going to be late’. Does he mean ‘Mary and I are going to be late’ or ‘All of us are going to be late’? In English, it isn’t possible to decide without further exploration. In Tok Pisin, however, the distinction is clear. If John meant ‘one of you and me’, he would say yumitupela. If he meant ‘two of you and me’, he would say yumitripela. And if he meant ‘all of you and me’, he would say yumipela.

  But he could do something else. He could also say, addressing Mary, mitupela, which would mean ‘he or she and me, but not you’. If he said mitripela, it would mean ‘both of them and me, but not you’. And if he said mipela, he would mean ‘all of them and me, but not you’. Here he is excluding Mary, whereas with the examples in the previous paragraph he was including her. Standard English has nothing like this. All it has is the highly ambiguous we.

  The vocabulary of the pidgin Englishes of the world contain tens of thousands of words. Many have a spelling which shows a clear link with the source language, such as kap (‘cup’) and galas (‘glass’). Other words are more difficult to interpret, such as liklik (‘little’) and wantaim (‘together’). Taken as a whole, along with the distinctive grammar and pronunciation, some analysts consider the differences from standard English to be so great that they think of pidgin Englishes as new languages. If they’re right, we now have an English ‘family of languages’ on earth.

  Schmooze

  a Yiddishism (19th century)

  It’s the initial two sounds that give schmooze away as a Yiddish word. English words traditionally don’t allow the sound sh to appear before a consonant. A combination of s + consonant is fine, as in spin, still and skin. But if anyone said shpin, shtill and shkin, we would think they had a speech defect – or were engaging in a bad imitation of Sean Connery.

  Things changed in the late 19th century, when a new kind of loanword arrived from Yiddish. English previously had borrowed few words from this language – matzo (‘unleavened bread’) was a very early one, first recorded in 1650. But we don’t find much evidence of them in writing until the 19th century, when we get such words as kibosh (‘finishing off’, 1836), nosh (‘food’, 1873) chutzpah (‘brazen impudence’, 1892), pogrom (‘organised massacre’, 1891) – and schmooze (‘leisurely intimate chat’, 1897).

  Schmooze wasn’t alone as the century turned. Apart from its derived forms (schmoozer, schmoozing), it was accompanied by several other words beginning with schl- or schm-, such as schlemiel (‘clumsy person’) and schmuck (‘objectionable person’). During the 1920s and ’30s we find schlep (‘haul, toil’) and its related forms, such as schlepping and schlepper (‘person of little worth, scrounger’), schnozzle and schnozz (‘nose’) and schmaltz (‘melted chicken fat’), schmaltzy and schmaltziness, whose ‘greasy’ connotations led to the word coming to mean ‘excessive sentimentality’, especially when talking about writing, music and song. Schm- in particular seems to have caught on, because by the end of the decade we find it being used in a remarkable way, forming nonsense words.

  ‘There’s a crisis,’ says one person, and another disagrees. ‘Crisis-schmisis!’ The usage conveys scepticism, disparagement or derision. There’s no crisis, and the first speaker is stupid to suggest there is one. It’s a simple sound substitution, and it became hugely popular, especially in the USA. Spelling varies, with words often appearing with shm-, but all kinds of words have been modified in this way, as in surveillance-shmurveillance, marathon-schmarathon, fancy-shmancy
, baby-schmaby and holiday-schmoliday. It even led to a proper name. Joe Schmoe is a fictitious name for the ordinary American guy.

  OK

  debatable origins (19th century)

  The little word OK has a linguistic reputation that belies its size. Over a thousand words in English have an etymology which, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, is ‘origin unknown’. Nobody knows where bloke comes from, or condom, gimmick, nifty, pimp, pooch, queasy, rogue or skiffle. Theories abound, of course, some very ingenious. Did nifty arise as a shortened form of magnificat? Is gimmick from magicians’ use of gimac, an anagram of magic? But no word has attracted more theorising than OK.

  Is it from Scottish och aye? Is it from French au quai (the goods – or girls – have safely arrived ‘at the quayside’)? Is it from Choctaw oke (‘it is’)? Is it from Wolof okeh (‘yes’). Is it from Latin omnis korrecta (‘all correct’, sometimes written by schoolmasters on homework)? Is it from the Greek letters omega + khi (an early incantation against fleas)? Is it from Obediah Kelly, a railwayman who used to authorise freight movements with his initials? There are dozens more.

  15. Residents of an estate in Fulham, London, celebrate the Queen’s silver jubilee in 1977. Decades later, the slogan shows no sign of disappearing. When Kate Middleton married Prince William in 2011, the Mail on Sunday carried the headline: ‘The Middle Class Rules OK.’

  Thanks to a fine piece of research by American lexicographer Allan Walker Read, we now know that all of these theories are wrong. It first appeared in 1839 in a Boston newspaper, where there was a vogue for inventing humorous abbreviations using initial letters – an early instance of a language game. KY, for example, would be used for the phrase know yuse (= ‘no use’). And OK comes from oll korrect, a humorous adaptation of the words all correct.