The Story of English in 100 Words (28 page)

There certainly had been a flood of ologies in the previous century, many of them cheeky coinages such as
dogology
and
bugology
.

The usage is still with us. In the 1980s, actress Maureen Lipman, playing the part of Jewish matriarch Beattie in a series of British television commercials for British Telecom, is on the phone to her grandson, who has just admitted to failing most of his exams. However, he has passed sociology, to which she replies proudly: ‘An ology! He gets an ology and he says he’s failed! You get an ology, you’re a scientist!’ When the script-book was published in 1989, it was titled
You Got An Ology?
In 2000, this ad was voted 14th in Channel 4’s ‘The Hundred Greatest Adverts.

If an ology was a branch of knowledge, then an expert in that subject was an
ologist
– a usage first
recorded in 1839. Anything related to an ology was
ological
. Mrs Gradgrind hopes Louisa will turn all her
ological studies
to good account. And anything related to an ologist would be
ologistic
– a usage which has been spotted just once, in the mid-19th century.

Few other suffixes have made such progress. People who have a strong like or dislike for something have sometimes been called
phils
or
philes
(for) and
phobes
(against). In medicine, a disease of a certain kind has sometimes been called an
itis
. They aren’t common. The only ending that could compete with
ology
is
ism
. At least two reference books have been published with the title
Ologies and Isms
, listing all the subjects ending in these ways.

We first find
ism
as a separate word in the 16th century, usually in the plural, and in a context where the writer is being critical of religions (one writes:
Puritanism, Jesuitism, and other isms
). Dozens of coinages such as
Communism
and
Impressionism
led to
ism
being extended to movements in politics and art, and eventually to all kinds of beliefs and practices (a 20th-century writer:
isms like racism and sexism
). Today, the easiest way of being scornful about a set of topics is to call them
isms
.

During the 19th century, the word attracted its own endings. An adherent of an
ism
was an
ismatic
. Ismatics could be
ismatical
. The world of isms was
ismdom
. Turning a topic into an ism was to
ismatise
it. We only lack a record of
ismism
, and I’m sure this will turn up one day. In the meantime, the negative associations of the word are growing. There is now an internet site called the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings: ISMS.

Y’all

a new pronoun (19th century)

The problem with saying
you
is that it’s ambiguous – it can mean one addressee or several (
§69
). So it’s hardly surprising that people have made up new forms to try to get round the problem. The obvious solution, following the usual pattern for nouns, is to make a new plural by simply ‘adding an
s
’, and this was one of the first variants to emerge. We find it recorded in Irish English in the early 19th century.
God bless yees!
says a character in one of Maria Edgeworth’s tales. And the spellings began to proliferate:
yeez, yez, yiz
. The speaker was always talking to more than one person.

Similar forms developed elsewhere.
Yous
was another Irish creation, and it was probably this one which spread to various parts of England, Australia and the USA, often spelled
youse
and sometimes
yows
. But as it spread, it gradually lost its plural sense. Now just one person could be addressed as
yiz
or
youse
. I often heard it used like that, both as singular and plural, when I was a teenager in Liverpool. It was the same sort of development that had happened to
you
in the Middle Ages, once people stopped using
thou
. The ambiguity was back.

The
you
forms that developed in the USA showed a similar pattern of development. Dialect usages such as
yowe yens
from East Anglia probably travelled across in the
Mayflower
, and settled down as
youns
or
you-uns
in the eastern states. It’s still used there today for both singular and plural addressees.

Y’all
is the most famous of all the new pronouns. It’s a shortened form of
you all
, first recorded in southern states of the USA in the early 19th century. Usage varies quite a bit, with some people restricting it to plural addressees and some using it for single addressees as well. It’s the singular usage which can come as a shock to a British person, being addressed by
y’all
for the first time and realising that nobody else is included. When this first happened to me, in Texas in the 1960s, I was completely taken by surprise. As I entered a store, the assistant greeted me with a
Howdy, y’all
, and I actually looked round to see who else had come into the store with me. But there was only me there. And as I left he said
Y’all take care now
.

Nobody knows for certain whether
y’all
started out as a local usage among the southern black population or whether it was introduced by white immigrants. Either way, it rapidly established its presence, and then became more widely used throughout the country. It even travelled abroad, thanks to the many novels, movies and television serials reflecting life in the US south.
Y’all
is the usual spelling, but we’ll also find
ya’ll
,
yawl
,
yo-all
and others.

So, if
you
already exists in modern English, why use
y’all
? The two forms can be used for either singular or plural, so that can’t be the reason. Is there a difference between saying
I hope to see y’all
and
I hope to see you
? Most people find
y’all
‘warmer’ – a sign of familiarity, friendliness, informality or rapport. Some are still a bit suspicious of it and don’t use it, perhaps because it reminds them of past ethnic tensions. But for many, today, it’s simply customer-friendly.

Speech-craft

an Anglo-Saxonism (19th century)

It was only a matter of time before the huge influx of words from Latin, Greek and the Romance languages produced an antagonistic reaction. In the 16th century, the English scholar John Cheke thought English was being ‘mangled’ by all the classical words that were entering the language – the so-called ‘ink-horn’ terms (
§41
). And in the 20th century, George Orwell was a loud voice complaining about the way some writers went out of their way to use a Latin or Greek word when a good old Anglo-Saxon one would do.

Nobody took this position to such extremes as did the 19th-century Dorsetshire poet William Barnes. He felt that if all non-Germanic words could be removed from English, the language would immediately become much more accessible and intelligible.
So he looked for Anglo-Saxon replacements for foreign words. He resurrected long-dead words from Old English, such as
inwit
for
conscience
and
word-hoard
for
vocabulary
. And if there was no Old English word, he invented one.
Ornithology
became
birdlore
.
Pram
(
perambulator
) became
push-wainling
.
Alienate
became
unfrienden
.
Accelerate
became
onquicken
.
Arriving
and
departing
became
oncoming
and
offgoing
. The whole approach was described in his book
An Outline of English Speech-Craft
, published in 1878.

The interest continues today. In 1966,
Punch
celebrated the 900th anniversary of the Norman Conquest by having British humorist Paul Jennings translate passages of Shakespeare into what he called ‘Anglish’, such as Hamlet’s famous soliloquy ‘To be or not to be: that is the ask-thing’. And in 2009 David Cowley published
How We’d Talk if the English had Won in 1066
. He suggests hundreds of Anglo-Saxon equivalences; and several of his coinages, it has to be admitted, have a certain appeal, such as
sorrowword
for
lamentation
,
sameheart
for
unanimous
and
thankworthy
for
acceptable
. I think it unlikely that Alcoholics Anonymous will ever rechristen itself as
Unnamed Overdrinkers
or Americans start talking about the
Forthspell of Selfdom
(Declaration of Independence). But stranger things have happened, in the history of English.

DNA

scientific terminology (20th century)

It’s much easier to have
DNA
as the heading for a chapter on scientific words than its full form:
deoxyribonucleic acid.
Far more people will recognise the first than the second. But both versions are typical of the way scientific language works. On the one hand, we find lengthy compound words; on the other, we find the abbreviations that make it possible for us to talk about these things without running out of breath.

Who knows how many scientific terms there are in English? One of the leading chemical dictionaries contains the names of around half a million compounds. How many species of insect are there? Well over a million have so far been identified. Plant species? Around 400,000. Presumably each of them has a name. There’s little point in asking questions about totals when such large numbers are involved. No dictionary could ever hope to include them all (
§60
).

What general dictionaries do is include the terms from science and technology that are likely to have some currency outside of their specialised source. But even here the numbers are substantial. It’s thought that around 80 per cent of the words in an unabridged English dictionary are going to be scientific terms. Where do they come from?

A large number come from Greek or Latin – anatomical terms, for example, such as
abdomen, femur
,
vertebra, cerebrum, trachea
and
thyroid
. But far more are the result of stringing together separate roots to make compound words of sometimes extraordinary length.
De-oxy-ribo-nucle-ic
is already quite complex at five elements. And that’s the short version. In its full form it’s actually cited as the longest scientific name by the
Guinness Book of Records
, with 16,569 elements.

Prefixes and suffixes are especially important. Scientific terms, of course, use everyday prefixes, such as
pre-
,
un-
and
de-
, but several have special scientific relevance. For example, great use is made of prefixes that express numbers (
bi-
,
mono-
,
poly-
) and metrical quantities (
nano-
,
micro-
,
pico-
). Some of these are becoming more familiar from their use in computing (
§99
). A few years ago, prefixes such as
kilo-
,
mega-
and
giga-
would have been obscure to most people, but today, thanks to
kilobytes
,
megabytes
and
gigabytes
, they are in everyday use.