The Story of English in 100 Words (21 page)

10. The front page of
The Oxford Gazette,
published in Oxford in November 1665.

The early newspapers looked very different from those of today. Notably, they had no banner headlines running across the page. A news item in the
Oxford Gazette
began simply with its place of origin and the date, such as
Paris, Nov 18
. Banner headlines didn’t become a feature of the daily press until the end of the 19th century.

Once they did, there was an immediate effect on language. The headline had to catch the eye and capture interest. With a very limited amount of space available, short words became privileged, and a new lexical style quickly evolved. We see it mainly in the tabloid press, but all newspapers are to some extent influenced by the need to keep headlines short and snappy.

So we are less likely to see headlines in which people
abolish, forbid, reduce, swindle
and
resign
. Rather, they will
axe, ban, cut, con
and
quit
(or simply
go
). We will rarely read of a
division of opinion
, an
encouraging sign
, an
argument
or an
agreement
. Instead, it will be a
rift, boost, row
or
deal
. And many short words are doubly appealing because they carry an extra emotional charge:
fury, clash, slam, soar
…

All this is a long way from the cultivated and elaborate language of the
Oxford Gazette
, reporting events in the Anglo-Dutch War:

Not knowing what account the Publick has hitherto received of the progress of the prince of Munster’s Arms, we have thought it not improper without further repetition, to give an account of
such places as he at present stands possest of in the enemies Country …

The writer goes on to list the various forts and ships that the prince had captured. How might a modern newspaper deal with such a situation? If past tabloid performance is anything to go by, it might even be a single word. Few headlines have stayed in the popular memory longer than the one that appeared in
The Sun
for 4 May 1982, reporting the attack on the Argentine cruiser
General Belgrano
in the Falklands War: GOTCHA (
§88
).

Tea

a social word (17th century)

On 25 September 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his
Diary
: ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drunk before.’ The beverage had been imported into Europe from China early in the 17th century, but the British seem not to have taken to it until mid-century. Pepys probably got his tea from one of the coffee houses which had begun to sell both liquid and dry tea in the 1650s. The first recorded reference to the word is 1655.

In 1661, tea-taking was introduced into the Restoration court by Queen Catherine, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. It immediately became a fashionable ritual, accompanied by an elegant apparatus of silver spoons, pots, stands, tongs and caddies, and an occasion for conversation. But the innovation was taken up by other levels of society too. As its price fell, everyone adopted the habit, upstairs and downstairs alike, taking tea usually twice a day.

The linguistic consequences were both functional and social. Over the next fifty years we find a family of words introduced to describe all the bits and pieces needed in order to drink tea efficiently, such as
tea-pot, tea-spoon, tea-water, tea-cup
(with handle, unlike in China),
tea-dish
,
tea-house
and
tea-room
. And a century later the family multiplied in size when society recognised the crucial notion of
tea-time
– the ideal midway point between midday and evening meals.

Thereafter, the technology becomes more sophisticated and the occasions more elaborate. Few words can have developed so many uses so quickly as
tea
. We find
tea-treats, tea-saucers, tea-trays
and
tea sets
. People bought from
tea-shops
and made
tea-visits
. In the 19th century, we find
tea-bags, tea-cakes, tea-towels
and
tea-services
. High society met for
tea circles
and
tea nights
and rang
tea-bells
for service. New fashions introduced
tea-gowns
and
tea-jackets
. In the 20th century, we find an extension into the world of business and manufacture, where
tea trolleys
and
tea wagons
are pushed by
tea ladies
and
tea girls
. People take
tea breaks
and visit
tea bars
.
Teashades
(wire-rimmed sunglasses) were popular among 1960s’ rock-stars such as John Lennon and Ozzy Osbourne.

Meanwhile, the word was worming its way into 20th-century English idiom.
Not for all the tea in China
seems to have started in Australia.
Tea and sympathy
became popular following a stage play and film from the 1950s. The most curious idiomatic development was
cup of tea
. The expression was originally used for a person, as in
You’re a nice strong cup of tea
. Then it became a focus of interest, either a person (
He’s my cup of tea
) or a topic (
Science fiction is more my cup of tea
). We then find it used in a negative way (
Science fiction isn’t my cup of tea
) and then as an expression of comparison (
That’s a very different cup of tea
). Nobody knows how the idiom started. It feels like something that would come out of a Victorian music-hall, but its earliest recorded use in the
Oxford English Dictionary
isn’t until 1908.

The story of
tea
isn’t over yet. It continues to be reported in street slang in a huge range of expressions, though one never knows just how widely used they are.
To go tea tax
? To get really angry.
Tea-brained
? An obtuse person. In 2009,
tea
even became a political acronym in the USA, when the
Tea Party
was formed.
TEA
? Taxed Enough Already.

Disinterested

a confusible (17th century)

Interest
is one of those words where you have to look carefully at the context to see what is meant. It started life in English in the 15th century as a legal expression. If you have
an interest in an estate
, you have a right or claim to some of it. Later it developed a financial sense. If you hold
an interest in a company
, you have a financial stake in it. More general senses emerged. When people say they
have our interests at heart
, they mean our good. When politicians say
It’s in your interest to vote for me
, they mean our advantage. And in the 17th century we find the meaning which eventually became the most common modern use: a feeling of concern or curiosity about something.
What are your interests?

Some of this ambiguity spilled over into the adjective,
interested
. The earliest recorded meaning is the curiosity one.
I’m interested
meant ‘I’m curious to know’. But soon after, the self-seeking meaning arrived.
I’m interested
now meant ‘I spy a personal advantage’, and people began to talk of
interested parties
in a venture.

This leads us to the negative form. How did people express the idea that they were
not
interested? Two prefixes were the chief candidates:
un-
and
dis-
. Which should be used? There are dozens of cases in the 16th and 17th centuries of people experimenting with both. Should they say
discontent
or
uncontent
?
Discomfortable
or
uncomfortable
? Sometimes the
dis-
form survived (as in
discontent
). Sometimes the
un-
form did (as in
uncomfortable
). And in others, both forms survived with different meanings.

What makes
interested
so interesting is that
both forms survived, but with the meanings totally overlapping.

•
Disinterested
is first recorded in the early 17th century. It meant ‘unconcerned, indifferent’. By the mid-century it had come to mean ‘impartial, unbiased’.

•
Uninterested
is first recorded in the mid-17th century with the sense of ‘impartial, unbiased’. A century later it developed the sense of ‘unconcerned, indifferent’.

We might think this would be a recipe for semantic disaster. By 1750 each form could express the same two different meanings.

Dr Johnson tried to sort it out. In his
Dictionary
he gave
disinterested
the unbiased sense (‘not influenced by private profit’) and
uninterested
the ‘incurious’ sense (‘not having interest’). From then on, people strove to maintain the distinction – but with only partial success. In the 20th century, surveys showed that over a quarter of all the uses of
disinterested
in Britain meant ‘bored’, and nearly twice as many used it in this sense in the USA. People regularly say such things as ‘After a while I became disinterested in football, and stopped going to matches.’

As the 20th century progressed, such usages came to be roundly condemned by people who felt that an important distinction was being lost. In fact, the context makes it perfectly clear what is meant. The usage wouldn’t have developed at all if there had been any real ambiguity. And it evidently wasn’t a
big issue in Henry Fowler’s day, for he doesn’t even mention it in his
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
in 1926. But concern evidently grew in the following decades, and when Sir Ernest Gowers came to revise Fowler in the 1960s he added an entry on
disinterested
and pleaded for the distinction to be rescued, ‘if it is not too late’.

It wasn’t. Today, the difference between the two words remains a live issue, thanks to its flagship status among usage pundits. But for many, the controversy has engendered a distrust. If they write
disinterested
meaning ‘unbiased’, will it be understood in the sense they intend? The feeling has grown that perhaps it would be better to avoid the word altogether, and use a synonym. The future of
disinterested
remains in the balance.

Polite