The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  Uncovering the route by which a word has entered one’s language offers several layers of reward. We may well enjoy knowing that botulism comes from a Latin word for a sausage, that muscle is related to mouse (a bunched muscle being a bit like a quivering mouse), or that mortgage literally means ‘death grip’: in each case the link is unexpected and droll. An album is, in the strictly etymological sense, something white, like a blank writing tablet, and to prevaricate means ‘to plough crookedly’; nickname is a corruption of ‘an ekename’ (literally an added name); the noun hyperbole, which we take from Greek, conveys the sense of throwing something too far; and cravat comes from the French word for a Croatian, thanks to the French adopting this flimsy garment from Croatian mercenaries in the seventeenth century. The verb to trounce is related to truncheon. Glamour is etymologically linked to grammar – an understanding of the workings of language was once seen as an occult accomplishment – and, similarly, there are forgotten links from dainty to dignity and from cadence to chance. Cushy comes from the Hindi khush meaning ‘excellent’, and has nothing to do with the word cushion (which for its part comes from Latin culcita, a mattress – also the source of quilt). To doodle originally meant playing the bagpipes, and can be traced to a Turkish word for a flute. Less startling is the information that etymology itself is a compound of the Greek for ‘true’ and ‘word’, but we may still be surprised that it was imported into English from French.

  I could carry on in this vein for a long time. My point, however, is simple: words frequently come from unlikely places, and the unlikelihood is illuminating. Even when the sources are less surprising, the force of an etymology can be bold. The word silk, for instance, has made a long journey through Chinese via Greek and Latin to English. The word’s journey evokes the romance of the Silk Road, and it is worth noticing too that the transition from the Latin sericus to the English silk – from an r sound to an l – may well have been produced by adoption into the Slavonic languages of silk’s early traders in the Baltic. The word empire, which will come up frequently in the course of this book, derives from the Latin imperium and thus, inevitably, calls to mind the immense cosmopolitan might of the Roman people. The story of Rome – its imagery, its language – has been an inspiration for every imperial power since.

  Sometimes the lexical archaeologists disagree: for instance, the end-of-year celebration known as hogmanay has been variously construed as a Celtic exclamation, a version of the Greek hagia mene (‘holy month’), a rendering of the French druids’ cry of ‘Au gui l’an neuf ’ or a corruption of the Latin hoc anno novo. Deciding between competing explanations is usually a matter of identifying which account fits best with our understanding of history. But on the whole etymology is a more secure business, revealing the lustrous past concealed in every word. The poet Don Paterson suggests that ‘Words are locked tombs in which the corpses still lie breathing.’18 It is an image which nicely suggests the more macabre stories preserved in words.

  Already I have referred several times to ‘borrowing’ and ‘loanwords’. Both are misnomers: the language from which we acquire the word does not have to give it up. A word may be on probation, and for a time it may have a disreputable or intimidating image, but we are not expected to return it. What, though, makes a loanword stick? Most new words sparkle briefly, then fade. Those that endure are the ones that are useful, deal with matters of lasting significance, and achieve a high level of exposure. They tend as well to be easy to handle – or at least not furiously complicated. I may like pinpilinpauxa, which is the Basque for a butterfly, but I shall struggle to convince many other people of its usefulness.

  To quote the French scholar Louis Deroy, ‘L’emprunt est un intrus’: ‘The loanword is an intruder.’19 Borrowed words do not slip into a language unnoticed; their arrival may be only gradual, but it is keenly felt. No loanword is ever universally welcomed, and each borrowed term is a tiny affront to the language that borrows it; yet a language totally hostile to change is a language in decline. As islanders, the people of Britain have long had a sense of their apartness, but this has fuelled rather than stymied an appetite for reaching across the seas to discover the many and alluring forms of ‘otherness’. For its part the United States, the world’s most populous English-speaking nation, is also one of the most socially and ethnically diverse, and its eclectic identity is grounded in the understanding that change will tend to bring about improvements.

  There is another aspect to Deroy’s observation: he implies that borrowing is not seamless, that its boundaries are ragged. When words are borrowed, they alter. This is true of their meanings as well as of their pronunciation. The degree to which this happens varies, but sometimes it is profound. Think back to restaurant, or compare, for instance, the pronunciations of these words, all of which are also derived from French: marriage, garage, montage. A loanword’s level of acceptance is manifest in the way we articulate it. It is evident, too, in our willingness to use the word in ways other than that in which it was originally borrowed – as another part of speech, or in a derivative compound. Furthermore, we will happily use a word we recognize as borrowed to afford us what we think is insight into the culture where it originated. ‘I know your words: I know your mind’ goes the inevitable, dangerous, reasoning. Even if we feel confident that we understand, say, jihad or lebensraum, we should be wary of using our understanding of them as keys into languages and world views where their significance is far more complex.

  Borrowing is not a one-way street. For instance, in Kashmiri you may hear a word like bathroom or widow, and in Serbo-Croat shrapnel or scout. In French, as I have noted, there is le weekend, along with les bluejeans, le rip-off and the calque gratte-ciel (skyscraper), which are seen by purists as grave embarrassments. The Swahili madigadi is a version of the English ‘mudguards’, and the same language takes the delightful word kiplefti, meaning ‘traffic island’, from the English ‘keep left’. In Yoruba, a square root is sikua ruutu.20 Russian borrowings from English include the slightly sinister biznismen, as well as dzhemper (‘jumper’) and vokzal (‘station’). The last of these is a corruption of Vauxhall, the name of an area in south London once famous for its pleasure gardens; a Russian delegation of the 1840s stopped there and took this word, displayed on a sign, to be the generic name for a station. Borrowing is a subject that could fill volumes. But here we are concerned only with the traffic in one direction: into English.

  Before we go any further, another word about terminology. Languages are not concrete, and it is not quite accurate to claim that a language ‘alters’ or ‘spreads’, or that it ‘penetrates’ a new area. When one says that a language changes, for instance, what one really means is that some parts of that language come to be used differently from the way they were previously used. Change results from human choice and from contact between individuals who speak differently. It begins with people, not with languages. Nevertheless, in the interests of concision, I shall throughout this book refer to the English language’s ‘changing’, its ‘conquest’ of fresh territory, and its ‘appetite’, as well as to words ‘entering’ the language, and shall assume that readers recognize this as a kind of shorthand. I shall also try where I can to say something about the people whose actions and achievements are amalgamated – compacted, hidden – in the words concerned.

  2. Invade

  To enter in a hostile manner, or with armed force; to intrude upon, infringe, encroach on, usurp

  From the Latin verb invadere, ‘to go or walk in’

  Sometimes it takes an outsider to recognize the heart of a country and its culture. Writing in the 1850s about his experiences of Britain, Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to the ‘composite character’ of its inhabitants. ‘Every thing English is a fusion of distant and antagonistic elements. The language is mixed … [and] the currents of thought are counter.’ The people combined ‘contemplation and practical skill; active intellect and dead conservatism; … aggressive freedom and hospitable law’. ‘Scattere
d by their wars and affairs over the face of the whole earth, and homesick to a man’, they made up ‘a country of extremes’. ‘Who can discriminate them anatomically, ’ he wondered, ‘or metaphysically?’ ‘Mixture’, he concluded, ‘is a secret of the English island.’1

  This mixture is audible and legible in our daily use of English words. Often we have three terms for the same thing – one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion. Consider, for example, the verbs rise, mount and ascend, or go, depart and exit. In each case, the first word has an Anglo-Saxon source and is informal, the second is French and comparatively formal, while the third is Latin and suggests something more specialized or technical. A more extreme example is fire, flame and conflagration; another, holy, sacred, consecrated. In this book you will frequently find the Anglo-Saxon word and the French term, but this is the last you will hear of the rather more intimidating Greek lexeme. One of the strengths of English is that it affords its speakers choices of this kind; the different levels of sophistication allow us great precision, and even if our exact wording is not consciously achieved, it reveals our attitudes, self-image and purpose.

  Think about the distinction between luck and fortune, fatherly and paternal, hearty and cordial, or almighty and omnipotent. In each case the first, Anglo-Saxon, word is more direct, suggestive of something more primal, more resonant, more tangible. What about the difference between altitude and Anglo-Saxon height, or between ordure and shit? An aroma is quite clearly better than a stench. We may casually refer to these as synonyms, but we know they are not exactly interchangeable. Many Anglo-Saxon terms have deep emotional charge. Talk of one’s kin, or of home, or of a person’s mother, can, depending on context, be a sort of verbal handshake or wickedly inflammatory. Ideologues love to play on the associations of such words. Other especially emotive Anglo-Saxon words include evil, freedom, weak, heart, lust, weep, strong and love. The Anglo-Saxon part of the English vocabulary seems to earth us. Its matter-of-fact quality is at odds with the more academic colour of the French and Latin word-stock. There are plenty of French borrowings that are vivid rather than cerebral: for example, glory, cruel, horror, guile and mean. But the pattern is clear enough. Thus, typically, the Old English dead is balder than the French deceased, which is for its part softer and less technical than the Latin defunct.

  The arrival in Britain of French and Latin words provided English with new semantic layers, and over the next few pages we shall see how this came about. The word arrival is itself an example – a Norman import, drawn from the Latin verb adripare, ‘to come to shore’. Immediately we are reminded of the most famous example of words and conquerors appearing on British shores. 1066 is one of the few dates imprinted on the mind of anyone who has studied British history. Had Duke William of Normandy – or William the Conqueror, as we tend dramatically to call him – not invaded England, English would be a very different language.

  Yet several of the key events in the history of English happened before the Norman Conquest. Two and a half millennia ago the Celts were the dominant force in western Europe. Determinedly mobile people, they had provided the Romans with words for wheeled vehicles, and the relics of their culture unearthed by archaeologists include impressive wagons. They had begun to arrive in the British Isles by 2000 BC.2 Broadly speaking, the languages of the Celts in Britain fell into two groups: the Brythonic, which consisted of Welsh, Cornish and Breton, and the Goidelic, comprising Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic. (We do not know about the languages that were spoken in Britain before the coming of the Celts, though the meagre evidence has not prevented speculation. Some have even postulated a link with Basque. Current fashion favours the nebulous name ‘Early Indo-European’.) According to Graeco-Roman legend the Celts were ‘people of alien behaviour, cruel, and prone to such savagery as human sacrifice’; ‘fearless warriors’, they were ‘irrationally brave in the first onslaught but prone to wild despair when the battle turned against them.’3 There was a good deal of truth in this, and, as Caesar and Tacitus would point out, their government was unstable, riven by disputes between competing factions. The rise of the Roman Empire curbed their influence, and between 55 BC and AD 410 England and Wales were occupied by the Romans.

  Communication between Romans and the native Celts was sufficient to introduce some Latin into the vocabulary of their island colony.4 Many of the people who ran Roman Britain were of British stock, but the language of government was Latin. Celtic languages registered this; for instance, the Welsh ysgol, ‘school’, derived directly from the Latin schola.5 For readers familiar with Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic The Eagle of the Ninth, memories may stir of leather-clad Roman frontiersmen conversing fluently with the native hunters, handing over their denarii for dogs and fighting-cocks. The reality was less charming: when not subduing recalcitrant tribes, the Romans busied themselves developing the road network, building sewage systems, and mining gold, lead, iron and tin. Then, after the legions were recalled to Rome in 410 to protect the city against marauding Visigoths, the administrative structures created by the Romans fell apart, and the result was a power vacuum.

  According to a legend established by the sixth-century Celtic scholar Gildas, in his De Excidio Britanniae (‘On the ruin of Britain’), the next wave of conquest was precipitated by military overlords who were desperate to repulse barbarian raiders in the north. Later accounts suggest that around 449 a warlord called Vortigern, harried by these Picts, called for assistance from abroad. The men who answered his call came to British shores in the guise of mercenaries, but soon revealed more rapacious motives: one pack of barbarians took the place of another. Excited by the prospect of fertile land and easy pickings, and under military pressure at home, a diverse group comprising mainly Saxons, Jutes, Frisians and Angles sailed from what we now know as northern Germany and Denmark.

  Once ashore, these people’s methods were savage. In his Germania, written around AD 100, Tacitus had noted their bellicose tendencies, and nothing had changed in the intervening years. Their ambitions were hawkish, and their influence spread fast. Modern accounts tend to present the migration as quick and coherent, whereas it is much more likely that the arrivals came in dribs and drabs. Nevertheless, the general pattern was that the Angles settled in what we now call East Anglia and fanned east and then north, while the Saxons focused on the south-east and the region that would come to be known as Wessex. The Jutes seem to have concentrated themselves in Kent and the Isle of Wight. The different tribes’ patterns of settlement would be reflected in the development of different dialects. And today English-speaking visitors to the countries from which these people came occasionally hear snatches of speech that sound uncannily like English: for instance, the form of the Frisian language spoken on certain islands off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein contains some very familiar-looking words like smoke, man and helpe.6

  Whereas the Romans had treated Britain as an imperial outpost, these newcomers settled permanently.7 Estimates of their numbers vary: a figure of 10,000 has been put forward, but so has one of 200,000.8 While there was probably a period of bilingualism, the Anglo-Saxons’ forceful presence, together with the ravages of bubonic plague, ultimately ensured that little Celtic vocabulary was preserved in the language, although some of the mechanisms of Celtic rhetoric seem to have persisted, and in Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall and possibly also an enclave in the Fens the Brythonic languages held more firm.9 Those elements of Celtic that do survive to the present day are mainly found in place names, such as Dover, Crewe and Penrith, or in the names of rivers, including the Wye and the Thames. A couple of widely acknowledged exceptions include brock (a badger) and tor (a high rock or a hill). Celtic words that were taken up by Old English – such as deor, ‘brave’, and luh, ‘lake’ – there
after faded away.

  The settlers did not all speak one tongue, but they all spoke Germanic languages. They had come into contact with Latin-speakers many times during the previous 500 years, and their languages had absorbed perhaps 300 Latin words. Whereas later borrowings from Latin tended to deal with sophisticated matters of scholarship or religion, these early ones – unusual in coming through personal contact, rather than through books – concerned everyday items. The Romans’ aptitude for laying down paved roads is preserved in the word street, which derived from the Latin via strata, while their word for a rampart, vallum, is the source of wall. These words may have been reinforced in Briton by the presence of similar borrowed terms in Celtic.10 This period of contact also introduced mile, from the Latin mille passuum, and hints of civilization in trifot (tribute), belt, cup and portic (porch). Although many early loans were connected with administration and the military, among the others were the words we know as wine, butter, pepper and radish. Cheese came from Latin caseus, and kitchen from coquina.