The Story of English in 100 Words (4 page)

Often it’s the name of someone, as with Beorn.
Someone called Blecca lived in the clearing now covered by modern
Bletchley
. Dudda lived at
Dudley
. Wemba lived at
Wembley
. They are mainly men. Just occasionally we see a woman’s name: Aldgyth lived at
Audley
. And sometimes a whole tribe lived in the clearing.
Madingley
means the clearing where Mada’s people lived.

The natural features of the clearing often prompted the name. In
Morley
the clearing was moorland; in
Dingley
it was in a dingle. The land must have been level in
Evenley
, rough in
Rowley
, stony in
Stanley
and long-shaped in
Langley
. Also common is a name where the first part describes the trees that used to grow there, as in
Ashley
,
Oakleigh
and
Thornley
. It can be tricky sometimes to work out what the tree-name is. The birch is hidden in
Berkeley
, the bramble in
Bronley
, the yew in
Uley
and the oak in the strange-looking
Acle
.

Some
lea
names refer to what grows in the clearing. It’s obvious what this is in the case of
Clover-ley
; slightly less obvious in
Farleigh
(ferns) and
Ridley
(reeds). And when the farming started, the name sometimes tells us what was grown (as in
Wheat-ley
and
Flaxley
) or what animals were around (as in
Durley
,
Gateley
,
Horsley
and
Shipley
, for deer, goats, horses and sheep, respectively). Birds and insects are remembered too, in such names as
Finchley
,
Crawley
(crows) and
Beeleigh
.

Place-names are an integral part of a language, and should always be represented in a wordbook.
Lea
is an example of an Anglo-Saxon place-name element. Other such elements are:

ham
– ‘homestead’, as in
Birmingham
and
Nottingham
ing
– ‘people of’, as in
Reading
and
Worthing
ceaster
– ‘Roman town, fort’, as in
Chester
and
Lancaster
tun
– ‘enclosure, village’, as in places ending in
-ton
or -
town

Each wave of invaders brought its own naming practices. The Vikings settled all over the eastern side of England, establishing hundreds of villages ending in
-by
– the Norse word for ‘farmstead’ – as in
Derby
,
Rugby
and
Grimsby
. Several French names (such as
Beaulieu
and
Devizes
) arrived in the early Middle Ages.

We always have to be careful, though, when exploring place-names. Often words with different origins have ended up with the same spelling. For example, rivers named
Lea
or
Lee
are hardly going to mean ‘forest clearing’. We have to look for the meaning of water names elsewhere. There was a Celtic form
lug
-, meaning ‘bright or light’, which was also used as the name of a deity. So River Lea may originally have meant ‘river dedicated to the god Lugus’ or simply ‘river which was bright and sparkling’.

And

an early abbreviation (8th century)

Early in the 8th century, monks at the monastery of St Augustine in Canterbury wrote out a long list of English translations of Latin words, in roughly alphabetical order. Towards the end, in the section on words beginning with U, we find the Latin phrase
ultroque citroque
– in modern English we’d say ‘hither and thither’. The scribe must have been feeling tired that day, because he glosses it wrongly as
hider ond hider
. The second
h
should have been a
d
. But the phrase is interesting for a different reason:
ond
is an old way of spelling
and
. Doubtless the Anglo-Saxons used the word a lot in their speech, as we do today; but in these ancient glossaries we see it written down for the first time.

Why get so excited over a ‘little word’ like
and
? In most wordbooks, it’s the ‘content words’ that attract all the attention – the words that have an easily statable meaning, like
elephant
and
caravan
and
roe
. The books tend not to explore the ‘grammatical words’ – those linking the units of content to make up sentences, such as
in
,
the
and
and
. That’s a pity, because these ‘little words’ have played a crucial role in the development of English. Apart from anything else, they’re the most frequently occurring words, so they’re in our eyes and ears all the time. In our eyes? The four commonest written words in modern English are
the
,
of
,
and
and
a
. In our ears? The four
commonest spoken words are
the
,
I
,
you
and
and
. In Old English,
and
is there from the very beginning, and when it appears it’s often abbreviated.

We tend to shorten very common words when we write them.
It is
becomes
it’s
.
Very good
becomes
v good
.
You
becomes
u
(especially in internet chat and texting).
Postscript
becomes
PS
. The shortened form of
and
is so common that it’s even been given its own printed symbol:
&,
the ‘ampersand’. The modern symbol is historically a collapsed version of the Latin word
et
: the bottom circle is what’s left of the
e
, and the rising tail on the right is what’s left of the
t
. The word
ampersand
is a collapsed form too: it was originally
and per se and
– a sort of shorthand for saying ‘& by itself = and’.

When did people start shortening
and
? We find it in some of the earliest Old English manuscripts. It’s written with a symbol that looks a bit like a modern number 7, but with the vertical stroke descending below the line. In some documents, such as wills and chronicles, where strings of words are linked by ‘and’, we can see 7s all over the page. They’re especially noticeable when they appear at the beginning of a sentence.

And
at the beginning of a sentence? During the 19th century, some schoolteachers took against the practice of beginning a sentence with a word like
but
or
and
, presumably because they noticed the way young children often overused them in their writing. But instead of gently weaning the children away from
overuse, they banned the usage altogether! Generations of children were taught they should ‘never’ begin a sentence with a conjunction. Some still are.

There was never any authority behind this condemnation. It isn’t one of the rules laid down by the first prescriptive grammarians. Indeed, one of those grammarians, Bishop Lowth, uses dozens of examples of sentences beginning with
and
. And in the 20th century, Henry Fowler, in his famous
Dictionary of Modern English Usage
, went so far as to call it a ‘superstition’. He was right. There are sentences starting with
And
that date back to Anglo-Saxon times. We’ll find them in Chaucer, Shakespeare, the King James Bible, Macaulay and in every major writer.
And God said, Let there be light
… Joining sentences in this way has been part of the grammatical fabric of English from the very beginning. That’s one of the lessons the story of
and
teaches us.

Loaf

an unexpected origin (9th century)

Something to eat; something to drink. Words to do with nutrition always play an important part in language history. In particular, the essential role of bread in society, known since prehistoric times, is reflected in a variety of idioms. In English, it can stand for ‘food’, as in
breadwinner
and the plea for
daily bread
(in the Lord’s Prayer). It can mean ‘money’. It can identify a state of mind (
knowing on which side one’s bread is buttered
) or a level of achievement (
the best thing since sliced bread
).

The surprising thing is that
bread
didn’t have its modern meaning in Old English. In one of the word-lists compiled by Anglo-Saxon monks, we find
breadru
translating Latin
frustra
– ‘bits, pieces, morsels’. What seems to have happened is that the word came to be applied to ‘pieces of bread’ and eventually to ‘bread’ as a substance. It’s still used in this way in some dialects: you might still hear someone in Scotland asking for
a piece
, meaning ‘a piece of bread’.

So how did the Anglo-Saxons talk about bread? In another list we find a word from the Bible,
manna
, translated by the phrase
heofenlic hlaf
– ‘heavenly bread’. We would know
hlaf
today as
loaf
. The
h
stopped being pronounced at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and the long ‘ah’ vowel gradually changed into an ‘oh’ vowel during the Middle Ages. While that was happening,
hlaf
came to be more restricted in meaning, eventually being used for just the undivided, shaped amount of bread that we now call a
loaf
.

There are very few instances of the word
bread
in Old English, but
hlaf
appears frequently – and in some interesting combinations. The head of a household was seen as the person who provides bread for all, a
hlaf-weard
, literally a ‘bread-warden’. A servant or dependant was someone who ate his
bread: a
hlaf-æta
, ‘bread-eater’. A steward was a
hlafbrytta
, a ‘bread-distributor’. A lady was originally a
hlæfdige
, ‘bread-kneader’. That
-dige
ending is related to the modern word
dough
.

Hlaf
turned up quite a lot in Christian religious settings too.
Lammas
was 1st August, the day when the eucharistic bread was first baked from the new harvest. That name comes from
hlaf-maesse
, ‘loaf-mass’. Walking to the altar to receive the host was a
hlaf-gang
, a ‘bread-going’. Bethlehem, where Jesus Christ was born, was a
hlaf-hus
, a ‘house of bread’.

Hlaf-weard
changed its form in the 14th century. People stopped pronouncing the
f
, and the two parts of the word blended into one, so that the word would have sounded something like ‘lahrd’. Eventually this developed into
laird
(in Scotland) and
lord
. It’s rather nice to think that the ‘high status’ meanings of
lord
in modern English – master, prince, sovereign, judge – all have their origins in humble bread. And it’s the unexpectedness of this etymology that qualifies
loaf
to take its place in this book.

Loaf
then went on new linguistic journeys. Different kinds of loaves appeared, such as
white loaf
and
brown loaf
. Several derived forms were coined, such as
loaflets
and
mini-loafs
(small loaves),
loaf-shaped
and
loaf-tin
. The shape generated a range of non-bread uses, such as
meat loaf
and
sugar-loaf
. There were technical senses too, such as the religious use of
holy loaf
(for bread distributed at Mass).

But nobody could have predicted the 20th-century
use of
loaf
in Cockney rhyming slang. In fact, two rhymes evolved, but only one survived. The popular usage had
loaf of bread
replacing
head
. It soon reduced to simply
loaf
, especially in the phrase
Use your loaf
, meaning ‘use your common sense’. The
Oxford English Dictionary
has references to this expression from 1938, and it seems to have been widely used in forces slang. It has a somewhat dated feel about it today.