The Story of English in 100 Words (30 page)

Traffic robots
arrived in 1929 – automated traffic lights. The earliest recorded usage is Canadian, but when I discussed the origins of
robot
in a BBC programme in 2010, several octogenarians from the north of England wrote to me to say they had clear memories of hearing the word used by their parents in this sense around that time. The London
Evening Standard
in August 1931 has the headline
Traffic ‘Robots’ in the City
. The northerners all pronounced it ‘rowbow’. Nobody uses
robot
in that way in Britain any more, nor in the USA, Australia or New Zealand. But in South Africa the usage has stayed. People say such things as
Turn left at the robot
and
The robot’s broken
.

The notion of a robot as an ‘intelligent artificial being’ continued to catch the public imagination. In
real life, people talked about robot teachers, trains, petrol stations, planes and bombs. And in science fiction, the word took on new life, with writers such as Isaac Asimov writing acclaimed novels in which robots played a central role.

It was the science fiction writers who first shortened
robot
to
bot
, but none of them could have anticipated the explosion of usages which arrived in the 1990s, as the abbreviation came to be adopted in computing. Today, a
bot
is any piece of software that runs an automated task, such as in searching the internet or playing computer games. It has also become a suffix, with the function of the bot specified in the other part of the word, as in
searchbot, infobot, spambot, spybot
and
warbot
.

As early as 1923, George Bernard Shaw had applied the word
robot
to people who act mechanically, without emotion, usually because of the repetitive work they have to do. Now anyone accused of unthinking or automaton-like behaviour risks attracting the label. A movie star called Samantha who has taken on the same type of character too many times (in the eyes of the critic) might have her roles described as
Samanthabots
. And in 2009
Obamabots
arrived – people who support Barack Obama without really knowing anything about him.

UFO

alternative forms (20th century)

Words can be shortened in several different ways, as other parts of this book illustrate (§
§3
,
57
,
92
). Abbreviations are a natural process. They save time and energy. They can save money, if the cost of a message depends on the number of letters it contains. And they can be a sign of social or professional identity. People who belong to the same group, such as doctors, lawyers and plumbers, tend to use the same abbreviations when they talk and write to each other.

It’s an impossible task to list all the shortened words in a language, because new ones are always being created. The largest collections in English, such as Gale’s
Acronyms, Initialisms and Abbreviations Dictionary
, contain well over half a million items. Note the title. This book is trying to ensure that all kinds of shortening are included – words like
info
(‘information’) and
poss
(‘possible’), as well as
acronyms
(strings of letters pronounceable as words, such as
OPEC
, the ‘Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries’) and
initialisms
(where the individual letters are pronounced separately, such as
BBC
).

There are some interesting mixes of the two types. How do you say the word
UFO
? Is it ‘you eff oh’ or ‘youfoh’? Both are possible. Similarly, some people pronounce internet
FAQs
as ‘eff eh cues’ and some as ‘facks’.
LOL
in internet and texting slang
means ‘laughing out loud’: it’s pronounced either as ‘ell oh ell’ or as ‘loll’ (
§94
). In American English, a
VP
(vice-president) is sometimes a ‘vee pee’ and sometimes a ‘veep’ – and the spelling
veep
is quite often seen in print these days.

But what does
UFO
mean? For most people, it is ‘unidentified flying object’. But for some it stands for ‘Ultralight Flight Organisation’. In the British military, it could be a ‘Unit Families Officer’. In physics it could be ‘universal fibre optic’. In computing, ‘user files online’. In medicine, an ‘unidentified foreign object’. In the events that take place in online fantasy worlds, it stands for ‘unwanted falling objects’. These are just some of the usages recorded in the dictionaries. There are at least twenty for
UFO
, and some acronyms have hundreds.

The ‘flying saucer’ sense of
UFO
, along with its ‘youfoh’ pronunciation, has allowed it to be the base for other words. In particular, the study of UFOs is called
ufology
and the students
ufologists
.
Ufological
and
ufoish
are also found. It’s unusual for an acronym to generate a family of words in this way.

Acronyms are not just for technical and business uses. Many occur in everyday speech, and have done for centuries –
IOU
(‘I owe you’) dates from the 17th century, as do
NB
,
eg
and
pm
, all derived from Latin words, though most people would be unable to say what the letters stand for (
nota bene
‘note well’,
exempli gratia
‘for the sake of example’,
post meridiem
‘after noon’).
RIP
(‘requiescat in pace’, conveniently
also ‘rest in peace’) and
RSVP
(‘répondez s’il vous plaît’) date from the 19th century. During the 20th century we find such forms as
ETA
(‘estimated time of arrival’),
FYI
(‘for your information’) and
ASAP
(‘as soon as possible’). The internet has also introduced a large number of acronyms, some motivated by the need to keep words as short as possible in text-messaging and tweeting (
§92
).

CD-ROM
is an interesting mix, because it brings together an initialism (
CD
) and an acronym (
ROM
). The first part is sounded letter-by-letter, the second part is a whole word. Nobody would ever say ‘see dee ahr oh em’. Similarly,
JPEG
files are pronounced ‘jay peg’. Organisations which have three identical letters sometimes cheat: the American Automobile Association, or
AAA
, is often called
Triple A
. And
IOU
is unusual too, because it starts off as an acronym and ends up using a letter to replace a whole word. It should really be
IOY
.

Watergate

place-name into word (20th century)

On 17 June 1972 a group of men broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington. The evidence of Republican political involvement, and the attempted cover-up, grew into a national scandal which led to the resignation of President Nixon in 1974.

The political fallout was great, but the linguistic fallout was longer-lasting. The
-gate
suffix became a permanent feature of the language, used by the media to refer to any actual or alleged scandal or cover-up, political or otherwise – especially one which leads to the downfall of the implicated person. It was a very convenient form, short and to the point. Perfect for headlines (
§88
).

Most
-gate
words have a very short life, lasting only as long as a scandal remains news. Who now remembers what
Baftagate
was about in 1991? (A voting controversy surrounding the BAFTA film and television awards.) What was
Camillagate
? (A tape-recording of an intimate telephone conversation between the Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker-Bowles in 1992.) How long will
BP-gate
(from the 2010 oil-spill disaster) remain in the public domain? Or the repercussions of the Iraq War continue to be called
Iraq-gate
? Only one thing is certain: other coinages are waiting in the wings to replace them.

Place-names quite often end up as everyday words in English, developing a more general meaning in the process. People talk about
another Watergate
, meaning ‘another scandal of the Watergate kind’. Governments and civil services become identified with their locations (
Whitehall, the White House
). Battles rarely make it into general use, with just a few exceptions, such as
balaclava
and
armageddon
. If you’re engaged in a decisive and final contest of some kind, you will
meet your Waterloo
. And there is the remarkable verb
use of
Trafalgar
, attested since the late 19th century in the phrase
Trafalgar Square
– to subject someone to a soap-box tirade. ‘He just Trafalgar Squared me.’ It’s not common, but it’s there in the dictionary records.

Most place-names enter the general language in relation to products. We readily make new nouns out of wine locations, and some become so widely used that they lose their capital letter. ‘That’s a lovely Bordeaux. Have a glass of champagne.’ Other place-name drinks include
martini, cognac, port, sherry
and
bourbon
. The same applies to foodstuffs:
Brie
(cheese),
Brussels
(sprouts),
Danish
(pastries),
hamburgers, frankfurters
and
sardines
(from Sardinia). In the clothing world we find
jeans, jerseys, bikinis, tuxedos
and
duffle coats
.

But the process of making a word out of a place-name (a
toponym
) is widespread. Tell someone a limerick? Drive in a limousine? Own an alsatian or a labrador? Play badminton or rugby? Run in a marathon? Dance the mazurka? You never quite know where a place-name is going to turn up.

Doublespeak

weasel words (20th century)

In 1986, during the Australian ‘spycatcher’ trial, held to prevent the publication of a book by a former MI5 employee, the British cabinet secretary, Sir Robert Armstrong, was asked by one of the lawyers to explain the difference between a misleading impression and a lie. ‘A lie is a straight untruth,’ he said. The lawyer suggested that a misleading impression, then, was ‘a sort of bent untruth’? Armstrong replied: ‘As one person said, it is perhaps being “economical with the truth”.’

He was referring to the 18th-century political philosopher Edmund Burke, who had once used the phrase ‘economy of truth’. But that usage didn’t enter the language in the way the new one did. To be
economical with the truth
came to be frequently quoted in the media and applied to other situations. It seems to have earned itself a permanent place in English idiom – one of the latest examples of
doublespeak
.

Doublespeak, or doubletalk, is a term known since the 1950s. It was prompted by George Orwell’s novel
1984
– a blend of his
doublethink
and
newspeak
. It describes any words which deliberately hide or change a meaning in order to achieve an ulterior motive. As the chair of the US Committee on Public Doublespeak said in 1973, it is language