The Mother Tongue (10 page)

There have been many other more subtle changes in English since Shakespeare's day. One has been the rise of the progressive verb form. Where we would say, “What are you reading?” Shakespeare could only say, “What do you read?” He would have had difficulty expressing the distinctions contained in “I am going,” “I was going,” “I have been going,” and “I will (or shall) be going.” The passive-progressive construction, as in “The house is being built,” was quite unknown to him. Yet it goes without saying that this scarcely slowed him down.

Even in its greatest flowering English was still considered in many respects a second-rate language. Newton's
Principia
and Bacon's
Novum Organum
were both published in Latin. Sir Thomas More wrote
Utopia
in Latin. William Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of blood (written in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death) in Latin. Edward Gibbon wrote his histories in French and then translated them into English. As Baugh and Cable note, “The use of English for purposes of scholarship was frankly experimental.”

Moreover, in Shakespeare's day English had yet to conquer the whole of the British Isles. It was the language of England and lowland Scotland, but it had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands and islands—and would not for some time. (As recently as this century Britain was able to elect a prime minister whose native tongue was not English: to wit, the Welsh-speaking David Lloyd George.) In 1582, the scholar Richard Mulcaster noted glumly: “The English tongue is of small account, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all.”

He had no way of knowing that within less than a generation English would be transported to the New World, where it would begin its inexorable rise to becoming the foremost language of the world.

^*
 To take a notable, but little-known example, Saint Patrick, the parton saint of Ireland, was the son of a Roman official and his British wife. Far from being Irish, as is commonly supposed, Saint Patrick was Welsh. The only reason he ended up in Ireland was that he was kidnapped at the age of sixteen and taken there by Irish pirates.

^*
 It should be noted that Burchfield, in The English Language, calls this distinction between field names and food names “an enduring myth” on the grounds that the French terms were used for living animals as well (he cites Samuel Johnson referring to a cow as “a beef”), but even so I think the statement above is a reasonable generalization.

5.

Where Words Come From

I
f you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it:
arachibutyrophobia.
There is a word to describe the state of being a woman:
muliebrity.
And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought:
aposiopesis.
If you harbor an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition:
crytoscopophilia.
When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a
myoclonic jerk.
If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it:
properispomenon.
There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and a substantive working together. It is a
hendiadys.
(But of course.) In English, in short, there are words for almost everything.

Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take
velleity,
which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about
slubberdegullion,
a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or
ugsome,
a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for
horrid
until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn't it a shame to let it slip away? Our dictionaries are full of such words—words describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.

And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms—words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little. We have a possessive impersonal pronoun
its
to place alongside
his, her,
and
their,
but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to contrast with the personal
whose.
Thus we have to rely on inelegant constructions such as “The house whose roof” or resort to periphrasis. We have a word to describe all the work you find waiting for you when you return from vacation,
backlog,
but none to describe all the work you have to do before you go. Why not
forelog?
And we have a large number of negative words—
inept, disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt
—for which the positive form is missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, “She's
so
sheveled,” or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert. Many of these words did once have positive forms.
Ruthless
was companioned by
ruth,
meaning compassion. One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line “Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth.” But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost
demit
(send away) but saved
commit?
Why should
impede
have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful
expede
expired? No one can say.

Despite these gaps and casualties, English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. We can distinguish between house and home (as, for instance, the French cannot), between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation, informant and informer. For almost every word we have a multiplicity of synonyms. Something is not just big, it is large, immense, vast, capacious, bulky, massive, whopping, humongous. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly—so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need
fictile
as a synonym for
moldable, glabrous
for
hairless, sternutation
for
sneezing?
Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice:
beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and tribulations, hem and haw, spick-and-span, kith and kin, dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, vim and vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let or hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.

Despite this bounty of terms, we have a strange—and to foreigners it must seem maddening—tendency to load a single word with a whole galaxy of meanings.
Fine,
for instance, has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb. In the
Oxford English Dictionary
it fills two full pages and takes 5,000 words of description. We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine, fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of having many meanings is known as
polysemy,
and it is very common.
Sound
is another polysemic word. Its vast repertory of meanings can suggest an audible noise, a state of healthiness (sound mind), an outburst (sound off), an inquiry (sound out), a body of water (Puget Sound), or financial stability (sound economy), among many others. And then there's
round.
In the
OED, round
alone (that is without variants like
rounded
and
roundup
) takes 7½ pages to define or about 15,000 words of text—about as much as is contained in the first hundred pages of this book. Even when you strip out its obsolete senses,
round
still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be
set.
Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the
OED
60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know
set
is to know English.

Generally polysemy happens because one word sprouts a variety of meanings, but sometimes it is the other way around—similar but quite separate words evolve identical spellings.
Boil
in the sense of heating a pan of water and
boil
in the sense of an irruption of the skin are two unrelated words that simply happen to be spelled the same way. So are
policy
in the sense of a strategy or plan and the
policy
in a life insurance policy.
Excise,
meaning “to cut,” is quite distinct in origin from
excise
in the sense of a customs duty.

Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a
contronym. Sanction,
for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done.
Cleave
can mean cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure, but a horse that has bolted has taken off. If you wind up a meeting you finish it; if you wind up a watch, you start it. To ravish means to rape or to enrapture.
Quinquennial
describes something that lasts for five years or happens only once in five years. Trying one's best is a good thing, but trying one's patience is a bad thing. A blunt instrument is dull, but a blunt remark is pointed. Occasionally when this happens the dictionary makers give us different spellings to differentiate the two meanings—as with
flour
and
flower, discrete
and
discreet
—but such orthological thoughtfulness is rare.

So where do all these words come from? According to the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen words are for the most part formed in one of four ways: by adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them up, and by doing nothing to them. Neat as that formula is, I would venture to suggest that it overlooks two other prolific sources of new words: borrowing them from other languages and creating them by mistake. Let us look at each in turn.

1.
WORDS ARE CREATED BY ERROR.
One kind of these is called ghost words. The most famous of these perhaps is
dord,
which appeared in the 1934
Merriam-Webster International Dictionary
as another word for density. In fact, it was a misreading of the scribbled “D or d,” meaning that “density” could be abbreviated either to a capital or lowercase letter. The people at Merriam-Webster quickly removed it, but not before it found its way into other dictionaries. Such occurrences are more common than you might suppose. According to the First Supplement of the
OED,
there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries that owe their existence to typographical errors or other misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is
messauge,
a legal term used to describe a house, its land, and buildings. It is thought to be simply a careless transcription of the French
ménage.

Many other words owe their existence to mishearings.
Buttonhole
was once
buttonhold. Sweetheart
was originally
sweetard,
as in
dullard
and
dotard. Bridegroom
was in Old English
bryd-guma,
but the context made people think of groom and an
r
was added. By a similar process an
l
found its way into
belfrey. Asparagus
was for 200 years called
sparrow-grass. Pentice
became
penthouse. Shamefaced
was originally
shamefast
(
fast
here having the sense of lodged firmly, as in “stuck fast”). The process can still be seen today in the tendency among many people to turn
catercorner into catty-corner
and
chaise longue
into
chaise lounge.