The Story of English in 100 Words (11 page)

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
guile
.

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.