The Story of English in 100 Words (17 page)

A really odd development was when the word came to be used in a children’s counting game.
One potato, two potato, three potato, four
… – linguistically highly unusual because there’s no plural ending. And something even odder happened in Australian slang, when in the mid-20th century
potato
came to be used as a slang word for a girl or woman. Why? Rhyming slang.
Potato peeler
. Sheila.

Debt

a spelling reform (16th century)

Why on earth is there a
b
in
debt
? This is one of the questions that English learners – native speakers and foreigners alike, faced with yet another irregular spelling to be acquired – ask with a mixture of frustration and resignation. ‘The language seems to have gone out of its way to make things difficult,’ said a student to me once. That’s certainly how it appears. Except we have to remember that language has no existence outside of the people who use it. And it is people who put the
b
into
debt
.

Sixteenth-century people, to be exact. That was a century when writers were hugely expanding the language through the use of loanwords, as we saw with words like
potato
(
§39
), and Latin and Greek were especially favoured because of their prestige in literature and education. Many writers felt that English would become a much better medium, capable of reaching the heights achieved by the classical languages, if it used as many Latin and Greek words as possible. And the more these words looked like classical words, the better.

Debt
, meaning ‘something owed’, had been in English since around 1300. It was a French word, and in French it was spelled
dete
or
dette
. So English did the same, using those spellings as well as
det
and
dett
. Here we have a neat phonetic representation of how the word sounded. Why would anyone ever want to change it?

A good question. But the mindset of the 16th century was different. Scholars pointed out that the ultimate origin of the word was Latin, not French, and in Latin the word was
debitum
. So writers made the word ‘look’ more classical by introducing a
b
, and the practice caught on. It was reinforced by other loanwords where the Latin consonant was pronounced, such as
debit
and
dubious
.

Debt
was not alone. The same process affected
doubt
, which came into English spelled
dute
or
doute
, and a
b
was added because people remembered Latin
dubitare
.
Subtle
got its
b
from Latin
subtilis
, though earlier it had such spellings as
sotill
and
suttell
.
Receipt
got its
p
from Latin
recepta
, despite earlier spellings such as
recyt
and
resseit
. Baptism came in as
baptem
or
baptime
, then acquired an
s
from Latin
baptismus
.
Fault
came in as
faut
or
faute
, then added an
l
from Latin
fallita
. There were many more.

Of course, once a word was spelled in a certain way, some people then thought that all the letters should be pronounced. The pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes, in Shakespeare’s
Love’s Labour’s Lost
(V.i.20), is horrified at the thought that there are people who
don’t
pronounce the
b
in
debt
! In fact, few of these Latin letters ever came to be pronounced, except in jest.
Baptism
was an exception. So was
fault
. We pronounce the
l
today, but even in the 18th century the word was being pronounced ‘faut’. Dr Johnson tells us in his
Dictionary
: ‘The
l
is sometimes sounded, and sometimes mute. In conversation it is generally suppressed.’ And his quotations from Pope and Dryden show it rhyming with
thought
.

Ink-horn

a classical flood (16th century)

About two-thirds of all the new words that arrived in English during the 16th century came from Latin. And Latin continued to supply words at a great rate during the 17th century too. It was all part of a mood to ‘improve’ the language. Many authors felt that they should use a lot of Latin words because, as the playwright Ben Jonson put it, ‘Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style’.

But several writers overdid it. The English diplomat Thomas Wilson wrote a book on rhetoric in 1553 in which he quotes the kind of ornately obscure style that he saw emerging at the time. His example is of a letter written by a Lincolnshire gentleman wanting help in obtaining a job. I’ve modernised the spelling, but several of the words still need a gloss in order to be understood:

Pondering, expending [‘weighing’], and revoluting [‘revolving’] with myself your ingent [‘enormous’] affability, and ingenious capacity, for mundane affairs, I cannot but celebrate and extol your magnifical dexterity above all other.

Wilson roundly condemns this kind of writing. He
calls it ‘outlandish English’. These people have forgotten their mother tongue, he says, and he goes on to remark that if their mothers were still alive they wouldn’t be able to understand a word of what their children were saying.

The critics found a vivid way of describing this style:
ink-horn
, or
ink-pot
. An ink-horn, as its name suggests, was a small vessel, originally made of horn, for holding writing-ink. The Latin-derived words were scornfully called
ink-horn terms
. The idea was that these words were so lengthy that it would take a huge amount of ink to write them. People who used them a lot were said to ‘smell of the ink-horn’.

The argument went backwards and forwards throughout the 16th century. Some found the classical words appealing; others argued for the superiority of ancient Anglo-Saxon words, which were felt to be short and clear. The scholar Sir John Cheke was quite certain about it. He writes in 1557: ‘I am of the opinion that our tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.’

The arguments about the use of classical vs Anglo-Saxon vocabulary resound across the centuries, and are still with us today (
§74
). In the 20th century, George Orwell was one who launched an attack on what he called ‘pretentious diction’ in a famous essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’. But in the end it all comes down to balance. It’s actually impossible to write English without using some
words taken from other languages. Even Cheke, in his comment, has four of them:
opinion
,
mix
,
mangle
and
pure
. And both of Orwell’s critical words come from Latin via French.

English vocabulary, in fact, shows Latin and Greek loanwords of different levels of difficulty. Some of the words that arrived in the 16th century and became a permanent part of English remain ‘hard words’ –
inveterate
and
susceptible
, for instance. But others are so much a part of modern daily expression that most people wouldn’t realise they had classical origins, such as
benefit, climax, critic, explain, immediate, official
and
temperature
. Indeed, some, such as
fact, crisis
and
chaos
, would take up hardly any ink at all.

Dialect

regional variation (16th century)

The many manuscripts written in Old and Middle English show lots of evidence of regional variation, so it’s a bit surprising that the word
dialect
doesn’t actually appear in the language until the 16th century. But it doesn’t take long thereafter for it to be widely used. And as awareness of local dialects increased, so did the collections of dialect words.

Spare a thought for the words that never get into dictionaries. Everyone knows that, in the part of the country where they live, there are local words and expressions which differ from those used further afield. But, precisely because they are local, they don’t get into the big dictionaries. Dictionaries usually focus on the words in common educated use – the standard language. Only occasionally does a compiler allow in some local expressions. Dr Johnson was one who did. We find a few Scottish words in his dictionary, such as
mow
(‘wry mouth’) and
sponk
(‘touchwood’), as well as some words from Staffordshire, such as
proud taylor
(‘goldfinch’) and
shaw
(‘small wood’). Why these places? Five of his assistants were from Scotland, and Johnson himself was from Lichfield. Small nods of appreciation, perhaps.

Most dialect words remain uncelebrated until enthusiasts decide to collect and publish them. Once they do, we soon get a sense of just how numerous they are, and how important they are as a strand in the history of a language. One of the first serious attempts to locate dialect words in Britain was John Ray’s
A Collection of English Words
, published in 1674. Ray is best known as ‘the father of English natural history’ because of his pioneering work in classifying plants and animals, but he was also a keen amateur linguist. Everywhere he travelled he made notes about the words he heard. He found
boor
in Cumberland, meaning ‘parlour’;
bragget
in Lancashire and Cheshire, meaning ‘spiced drink’; and
bourd
in Scotland, meaning ‘jest’. His book contains hundreds of examples.

The greatest dialect wordsmith was Joseph Wright, born in 1855, son of a Yorkshire labourer.
He had no formal schooling, and he learned to read and write only when he was fifteen, but he went on to become professor of comparative philology at Oxford. He collected around half a million observations and between 1898 and 1905 published six large volumes as the
English Dialect Dictionary
. This is where to go if we want to find out how dialect words were used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Which counties used
agoggle
to mean ‘trembling’? Berkshire and Hampshire. Where was
alkitotle
used to mean ‘foolish fellow’? North Devon. In Wright’s pages we see old linguistic worlds passing before our eyes.

But not always passing out of use. If we move on seventy years to a modern dialect survey, the
Linguistic Atlas of England
(1978), we find a surprising number of words still in use. Take
boosy
, the word for a ‘cattle trough’ or ‘manger’. Wright found it chiefly used in the West Midlands, in an area running north–south between Cheshire and Herefordshire. It was still being used there in the 1960s. And in the 1990s, when the Survey of English Dialects published a dictionary, it was still there. The word turns up in John Ray’s book too, and we find it again in the Anglo-Saxon gospels. Some dialect words have a very long life.

Bodgery