The Story of English in 100 Words (19 page)

But even biblical words and phrases don’t stand still, and in later centuries
shibboleth
developed several new senses – a custom, a habit, a catchword, a moral formula, an imaginary error, an unfounded belief. There are lots of shibboleths in the study of language. Some people think it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (
That’s the man I spoke to
) or to split an infinitive (
to boldly go
) or to pronounce
H
as ‘haitch’, even though such forms are widely found in modern English. These are the kinds of issue, often called
linguistic shibboleths
, that have fuelled usage debates since the 18th century. They are debates in which emotions sometimes run high – though never, as far as I know, having an outcome like that of the biblical precedent.

Bloody

an emerging swear-word (17th century)

On 11 April 1914, the
Daily Sketch
, a London tabloid newspaper, ran this headline:

TO-NIGHT’S ‘PYGMALION’, IN WHICH MRS PATRICK CAMPBELL IS EXPECTED TO CAUSE THE GREATEST THEATRICAL SENSATION FOR YEARS.

What was all the fuss about? George Bernard Shaw had given Mrs Campbell, in the character of Eliza Doolittle, a dangerous line to say: ‘Not bloody likely.’ Nobody had said such a swear-word on a public stage before. The paper went on:

Mr. Shaw Introduces a Forbidden Word.
WILL ‘MRS PAT’ SPEAK IT?

She did. And the audience loved it. There was a gasp of surprise, then everyone roared with laughter.

It had taken
bloody
a thousand years to cause such a stir. It was first used by the Anglo-Saxons with such meanings as ‘bleeding’ and ‘stained with blood’, and it developed a range of related senses to do with slaughter and bloodshed. It’s a point we have to watch when we listen to Shakespeare. When Macbeth tells us that his ‘bloody cousins’ have fled from Scotland (
Macbeth
III.i.29), he isn’t swearing but accusing them of a murderous stabbing.

The word began to be used in an emphatic way towards the end of the 17th century – meaning ‘very’, but with an intensifying force. When Jonathan Swift, writing a letter to Stella in 1711, talks about the day being
bloody hot
, he means ‘very hot indeed’. There’s no hint of any impropriety. The word seems to have been used in colloquial speech by all kinds of people at that time.

But during the 18th century the sensitive ears of the aristocratic and respectable classes turned against
bloody
, probably because of its associations with rowdiness and rough behaviour. Aristocratic rowdies were known as
bloods
, so to be
bloody drunk
was to be ‘drunk as a blood’. (We have the same association today, when we say ‘drunk as a lord’.) The historical association with blood and mayhem would have appealed to those for whom rough behaviour was a way of life, and this reinforced upper- and middle-class antipathy. By the middle of the 18th century it was definitely a ‘bad word’. Dr Johnson described it in his
Dictionary
of 1755 as ‘very vulgar’. That settled it.

People who wanted to be emphatic had to find socially more acceptable alternatives.
Deuced
,
rattling
and
ripping
became popular.
Bleeding
was used first by Cockneys in the 1850s, but – perhaps for that very reason – never acquired upper-class respectability.
Blooming
, used from the 1880s, was more successful.
Ruddy
, slightly less so. Dozens of words became fashionable, such as
devilish, damned, jolly, awfully
and
terribly
.

It was all a very British thing. Americans have never understood the British timidity towards using
bloody
, and Australians find it even more puzzling. In both Australia and the USA, the word is used as an intensifer, yet without the aura of rudeness which is part of its historical baggage in the UK.

Usage in Britain is slowly adapting to the world scene – though very slowly.
Bloody
is no longer printed as
b----y
, and it isn’t one of the words relegated to late-night television viewing. But the sensitivity is still there. In 2006 a television ad for Tourism Australia included the sentence ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ This was too much for the regulators at the British Advertising Clearance Centre, who cut it out, and restored it (for late-evening viewing) only after a huge row. So I’m not expecting to hear a BBC weather forecaster say in the foreseeable future: ‘It’s been bloody hot today …’

Lakh

a word from India (17th century)

Here are two recent newspaper headlines from India.

Nearly 5 lakh foreigners throng India for cheap treatment

Rs 50-lakh divorce for runaway wife

Lakh
. A Hindi word meaning 100,000. So,
5 lakh
is half a million.
50 lakh
(Rs = rupees) is 5 million. It’s one of the words you need to know. The figures get bigger when you turn to the business pages. There you find people talking about
crores
as well. A
crore
is 10 million.

These words arrived in English in the early 1600s. Already several Indian words had entered the language from earlier contacts. A
godown
is a place where goods are stored – a warehouse. It’s recorded in a voyager’s report of 1588. It comes from a Malay word,
godong
, and probably took its English form because people heard it as ‘go down’ – the storehouses were often in cellars.

Once the British East India Company was established (in 1600), travel to and from the region greatly increased. It wasn’t long before the local languages began to provide English with new words, and several eventually lost their cultural associations with India. From the north of the Indian subcontinent, where Indo-European languages such as Hindi
were spoken, we find such 17th-century words as
bungalow, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, punch
(the drink) and
pundit
. Examples from the south, where Dravidian languages such as Tamil were spoken, were
atoll, catamaran, cheroot, pariah, teak
and
curry
. In the Far East, Tibetan, Malay, Chinese, Japanese and other languages all began to supply new words, such as
ginseng, bamboo, ketchup, kimono, junk
(the ship) and
chaa
– this last one not immediately recognisable in that form, but the origin of
tea
(and, of course, colloquial
char
).

The various routes to India also brought English into renewed contact with languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Quite a few Arabic words, for example, had come into Middle English, especially introducing scientific notions such as
alchemy
and
almanac
, but in the 16th and 17th centuries there is a significant expansion. In many cases, the Arabic words entered English through another language:
assassin
, for example, is ultimately from Arabic
hash-shashin
(‘hashish-eaters’), but came to English via Italian
assassino
.

The new words reflect local life and customs. Arabic loans include
fakir, harem, jar, magazine, sherbet, minaret, alcove
and
sofa
. From Turkish we find
vizier, horde, kiosk, coffee
and
yoghurt
. From Persian,
bazaar, caravan, divan, shah
and
turban
. From Hebrew,
sanhedrin, shekel, shibboleth, torah
and
hallelujah
.

Today, the regional English vocabulary of a country like India is extensive indeed, and continues to develop. The 20th century has seen a host of food words such as
tandoori
,
samosa
and
pakora
. Among the colloquial words to arrive have been
cushy
,
doolally
and
loot
(‘money’). A new lease of computational life has been given to
avatar
. And in Indian newspapers of the 2000s we will find such local forms as
speed-money
(‘bribe’),
timepass
(‘way of passing the time’),
timewaste
(‘time-wasting’) and
petrol bunk
(‘petrol station’), as well as new uses of older forms, such as
hi-fi
(‘fancy’, as in
hi-fi clothes
). Even the basic vocabulary of the language can be affected, such as kinship terms. Who is your
co-brother
? The man who married your wife’s sister. And your
cousin-sister
? Your female first cousin.

Fopdoodle

a lost word (17th century)

People started to use the word
fopdoodle
in the 17th century. It was a combination of
fop
and
doodle
, two words very similar in meaning. A
fop
was a fool. A
doodle
was a simpleton. So a
fopdoodle
was a fool twice over. Country bumpkins would be called fopdoodles. But so could the fashionable set, because
fop
had also developed the meaning of ‘vain dandy’. Dr Johnson didn’t like them at all. In his
Dictionary
he defines
fopdoodle
as ‘a fool, an insignificant wretch’.

Fopdoodle
is one of those words that people regret are lost when they hear about them. There are several
delightful items in Johnson’s
Dictionary
which we no longer use. He tells us that
nappiness
was ‘the quality of having a nap’. A
bedswerver
was ‘one that is false to the bed’. A
smellfeast
was ‘a parasite, one who haunts good tables’. A
worldling
was ‘a mortal set upon profits’. A
curtain-lecture
was ‘a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed’.

Every generation gives us new words which eventually disappear. I once did a study of words that were being fêted as ‘new’ in the 1960s. Over half of them have gone out of everyday use now. Do you recall
Rachmanism, Powellism, peaceniks, dancercise, frugs
and
flower people
? All frequent in the 1960s. Historical memories today.

It’s always been like this. But dictionaries are notoriously reluctant to leave words out – for the obvious reason that it’s very difficult to say when a word actually goes out of use. You can spot a new word easily; but how do you know that an old word has finally died? Did
grody
(slang ‘nasty, dirty’) die out in the 1970s, or is it still being used in the back streets of Boston?

On the whole, dictionaries keep words in, either until constraints of space force some pruning, or a new editorial broom looks at the word-list afresh and says ‘Enough is enough’. That’s presumably what happened in 2008, when the editors of the Collins dictionary decided that some words are so rare these days that nobody would ever want to look them up. They blamed pressure on space in the dictionary: with 2,000 new words to include, several old words would, regrettably, have to go. They included
abstergent
(‘cleansing or scouring’),
compossible
(‘possible in coexistence with something else’),
fatidical
(‘prophetic’),
fubsy
(‘short and stout’),
niddering
(‘cowardly’) and
skirr
(‘a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight’).