Italian verbiage is often the mark of a character who has ideas above his station, or a way of mocking such a person. In Romeo and Juliet, the effeminate and foppish manners of Tybalt call forth a volley of scorn from Mercutio, who, describing him to Benvolio, sneers at ‘antic, lisping, affecting fantasticoes’ and ‘new tuners of accents’ – in other words, people like Tybalt who put on foreign manners and accents, or who use imported terms to make themselves sound modish or clever. Mercutio laughs, in particular, at Tybalt’s fancy fencing jargon. ‘Ah, the immortal passado! the punto reverso! the hai!’ he exclaims. ‘The what?’ blurts Benvolio, suggesting that Shakespeare expected his audience to find these Italian terms bemusingly absurd.
We see something similar in Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in his Humour, where the preposterous Bobadill is showing off about his swordsmanship. Imagining a lunge being made at him, he proudly explains that ‘The best-practised gallants of the time name it the passada: a most desperate thrust, believe it!’ The most desperate thrusts, though, are the verbal ones executed by these fashionable fools; their braggadocio is a bit like the fighting talk of modern schoolboys who have overdosed on martial-arts films and the pedantic belligerence of hip-hop. Indeed, before braggadocio became a word for emptily boastful talk, it was used of the playground swaggerers who gave it breath. It too is a word of Italian origin, first used by Spenser as the name of a cocky character in The Faerie Queene.
Shakespeare, we should be clear, was not alone in his appetite for Italian terms. Miniature , from miniatura, is first used by the exceptionally well-travelled Sir Philip Sidney in his pastoral romance Arcadia. He took the title of that work from the Neapolitan poet Jacopo Sannazzaro, and played a large part in popularizing the Italian sonnet form. Sidney had lived in Venice, where he had known the painter Tintoretto, and had studied at Padua. In his writings, he advocated adventure, professing that the limit of what a poet could achieve was determined by ‘the zodiac of his own wit’. Moreover, his circle included the lexicographer John Florio. But back to miniature: Sidney describes women playing in water, the bubbles of which ‘set forth the miniature of them’. In Italian miniatura had at first been used exclusively of the little images used by scribes to decorate the initial letters of their manuscript chapters. It then broadened to signify any small portrait. It took about a hundred years for the meaning to extend to include anything on a small scale. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726) the Queen of Brobdingnag plops a giant steak on Gulliver’s plate – ‘her diversion was to see me eat in miniature.’
Sidney’s works include many other first sightings. He was a modernizer, keen on experiment and on pushing language to its limits. Some of those first sightings are of words in common use today – bugbear, hazardous, loneliness, pathology – though others are more recondite – such as sdrucciola, for instance, which is a technical term to do with poetry, again borrowed from Italian. In his manifesto An Apology for Poetry (published posthumously in 1595) he contrasts the ‘rude stile’ of traditional ballads with the ‘gorgious eloquence’ of a Greek ode. His appetite for finely trimmed poetry means he rejoices in Italian eloquence. He salutes the ‘fertileness’ of Italian wit, and in his opening paragraph he uses the word pedanteria; he brings in not just Sannazzaro, but also Ariosto, Boccaccio, the Florentine humanist Cristoforo Landino, and the troupes of Italian actors he has seen on a trip to Venice. Classical references outweigh contemporary ones – and he constructs his argument in the seven-part form of a Latin oration – but Sidney is visibly engaged with the literary culture of the Continent. Spanish was spoken in his circle; his uncle was the patron of Thomas d’Oylie, who compiled a valuable Spanish grammar and dictionary, and the Arcadia is indebted to Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance Diana. In 1578 he had considered a voyage to America, and in 1585 the plan resurfaced. But, ordered back from Plymouth by the Queen, he was created governor of Flushing in the Netherlands, and it was there that he died a year later, of a thigh wound sustained in battle. In the final stages of his life he was busy translating the work of a French Huguenot poet, Salluste du Bartas.
The Italian connection is at least as clear in the works of Edmund Spenser, whose friend Gabriel Harvey claimed that as a young man the poet had the look of an ‘Italianate signior’. Spenser had drunk deeply of Ariosto and Tasso, and was the first English poet to give the name canto to the sections of his work. Yet his relationship with foreign terms was equivocal. Whereas his contemporaries tended to be either purists or addicts of neologism, Spenser advertised a third way – the embrace of archaism. His verse is formulaic and steeped in the antique. Perhaps the last major English author to be significantly influenced by Chaucer, he breathed new life into old words and outmoded forms: items like eftsoons and glitterand, beautifullest and ribaudry. When Hamlet questioned the use of the strange word mobled (an old Warwickshire term), a Shakespearean audience familiar with Spenser might have discerned a small joke at the expense of such revivals. In the dedicatory letter prefixed to The Shepheardes Calender (1579), which may have been penned by Spenser or by his Cambridge contemporary Edward Kirke, the author complains that English writers have tried to compensate for the deficiencies of their tongue and have ‘patched up the holes with peces and rags of other languages, borrowing here of the French, there of the Italian, every where of the Latine’. As a result, the English of the day was ‘a gallimaufray or hodgepodge of al other speeches’. ‘Gallimaufray or hodgepodge’, intended as an ironic coupling of modish French and plain English, was fraught with more irony than Spenser realized: while the first signified a French dish made by mashing together an assortment of kitchen leftovers, the latter was, as we saw earlier, an old corruption of hochepot, also French.
Spenser’s values are demonstrated in The Faerie Queene, which is one of those daunting works that tend to be read only by fierce academics and reluctant undergraduates. His goal was to reproduce both the colour of the medieval world and its chivalric values: to this end the poem is ‘clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devices’, designed to ‘fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’. Spenser was fond of ‘good and naturall English words, as have ben long time out of use and almost cleane disinherited’, and recovered some so musty (gride, forswatt) they looked unfamiliar enough for readers to think them brand new. But many of the words in The Faerie Queene that appear venerable are his own coinages. One lasting example is the adjective blatant, beloved today of football commentators (‘a blatant foul’) and teenagers (especially when turned into an adverb – ‘he was blatantly cheating’). He also coined derring-do, a term at which he arrived only as a result of misreading a passage in Lydgate.
A different perspective had been presented by Joachim du Bellay in his Defence et illustration de la langue française (1549). Du Bellay, whose poems Spenser had translated in childhood as an intellectual exercise, had the same sort of interest in the vernacular that Spenser developed, but argued that French could be valuably augmented by new words drawn from Latin – and used in support of this the image of a branch being grafted on to a healthy tree. Du Bellay was keenly aware that language was mutable, and that it could be improved only through what he called the ‘artifice and industry of men’. He and his contemporaries believed the Bible story of the Tower of Babel, and felt that ever since Babel there had been a fierce competition between languages. The only solutions were pragmatic. The purists, he claimed, were like fastidious antiquarians who saw the past as if through a pane of glass; they treated Latin and Greek like precious relics, and were incapable of exploiting other cultures to enrich their own. The virtues of language were achieved through choice and free will, not through squeamishness. Many of his peers believed that to ennoble one’s language one had to seize on the ornaments and excellence of other languages. Du Bellay noted this tendency (‘Nous favorisons toujours les étrangers’) but insisted on a greater degree of autonomy for French. Yet even as French was to be embellished from within, discreet borrowing was prudently to be
continued.
By the time Richard Rowlands entered the fray, the arguments had curdled, and many commentators who would once have fretted about linguistic flux were determined to find in it at least the germ of progress. One of those to put forward the idea of English as an organic being was the Cornishman Richard Carew. In his ‘Epistle on the Excellency of the English Tongue’, published in 1614 but written around 1595, this bee-keeping etymologist applauds the habit of borrowing. Relishing ‘our tongue[’]s copiousness’, he playfully refers to the ‘thefte of woordes’ from other languages, and commends the ‘sweetnes of our tongue’, which contrasts with Italian (‘pleasante but without synewes’), French (‘delicate but over nice’), Spanish (‘majesticall, but fullsome’) and Dutch (‘manlike, but … very harshe’). He concludes excitedly that ‘the most renowned of other nations have … entrusted … [England] with the rarest Jewelles of their lipps perfections. ’37 Carew makes the claim – surprising to most readers of this book, I suspect – that English-speakers are extraordinarily adept at learning other tongues. Less worryingly, whereas many of his contemporaries argued that the majesty of Latin and Greek was the result of their purity, he points out that plenty of Latin and Greek authors had no qualms about borrowing words from other languages.
Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602) offers a different slant on the state of English. He explains that the dominance of the national language has forced Cornish ‘into the uttermost skirts of the shire’: whereas, half a century before, Andrew Borde had claimed that many Cornish folk knew not one word of English, Carew suggests that now very few lack competence in the language and most can speak not even a tiny amount of Cornish. At a time when regional accents and the language of the ‘common people’ are typically derided or overlooked, Carew argues that the language spoken in the south-west is ancient and correct. Carew’s enjoyable chorography, which pauses to consider sign language and the distinctive dancing style of Cornish rats, is yet another strand in the tangled purple of Renaissance arguments about language.
As we have seen, those involved in these arguments traded anxieties about the resources that English-speakers had at their disposal. Did they need to be supplemented, or were they instead to be regulated? In the four centuries since the Inkhorn controversy, the question has frequently returned. During the last few hundred years governments in France, Russia, Germany and Slovakia have mounted campaigns for withstanding foreign influence on their languages. One notable example was the attempt by the Fascist government in Italy to eradicate French and English borrowings, which achieved at least one success in replacing the commonly used chauffeur with the newly invented and nicely Italian-sounding autista.38 By contrast, English has as at no point been subject to a government-endorsed stand against loanwords. The history of the language is in fact remarkable for being free from this kind of intervention. Many of the acquisitions and coinages of the Renaissance were later abandoned as their lustre faded – much of what glitters is little more than trash – but the coextensiveness of innovation and insecurity was now established.
7. Powwow
A shaman or healer; a council or conference of North American Indians; a meeting of powerful people
From the Naragansett powwaw, and ultimately from the proto-Algonquian pawewa, ‘he who dreams’
Potato. Tobacco. No words hint more tantalizingly at the early English experience of the New World, and they serve perfectly to introduce the language’s North American acquisitions. English adventurers crossed the Atlantic in search of gold; they returned with bounty less glamorous but more rich. Potatoes, ferried eastward from Chile and Peru, and intercepted during the Spanish armadas, would become a staple of the English and Irish diet. Tobacco would be the nub of a national mania. Both these words – ordinary to us, but glistening then with possibility – were encountered in the talk of Spanish seamen. Yet we can trace deeper roots: the ancestry of tobacco has been credibly identified as Taino, while potato was a mutation by Spanish-speakers of the Carib batata.
One of the main players in spreading word of the discovery of tobacco in the New World was Jean Nicot, the French ambassador in Lisbon. In 1561 he sent a powdered sample to Catherine de’ Medici to help alleviate a migraine. His name is eternally and somewhat ignominiously preserved in the word nicotine. The leaf was first ferried back to England four years later. The man who brought it – to the Cornish port of Padstow – was John Hawkins. We have met this eminent shipbuilder already, transporting Cephalonian currants; he was also an early pillar of the slave trade, who achieved notoriety by selling Africans to the Spanish. Hawkins brought two other things of value: a favourable report of Florida’s potential for settlement, and the sweet potato. In that year Hawkins could write, ‘These potatoes be the most delicate rootes that may be eaten, and doe far exceede our passeneps or carets.’ But this was Ipomoea batatas, the supposedly aphrodisiac root mentioned by Shakespeare’s Falstaff, not the starchy Solanum tuberosum. And, understandably, Hawkins was more excited by the commercial possibilities of the tobacco leaf: he had seen it smoked by Timucuan Indians and French settlers, and had noted its sedative effects.
Hawkins’s involvement notwithstanding, the first known reference in English to tobacco appears in John Frampton’s 1577 translation of a work by Nicolas Monardes, offering ‘joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde’. Monardes, a doctor practising in Seville, had cultivated tobacco and claimed that it could remedy more than twenty different medical complaints. It could destroy worms, dissolve swellings, and alleviate the ‘naughtie breathyng’ of children. These and other allegedly therapeutic qualities were eagerly publicized. Tobacco offered a taste of America, a draught of New World novelty, the opportunity – as it was put by Henry Buttes in a cookbook published in 1599 – to ‘breathe Indianly’. Sir Walter Raleigh converted many in his circle to the addictive rewards of smoking, and may even have taught Queen Elizabeth the correct way to smoke a pipe. The use of the verb smoke in this context can be traced to the early years of the seventeenth century: the OED’s first citation is from Richard Brathwait’s The Smoaking Age (1617), the frontispiece of which offers what may well be the first picture of a tobacco shop. Cigar is another loan from Spanish; its root is cigarra, ‘cicada’, and the connection is visual, as the cured tobacco leaf resembles that insect’s long papery wings.
Cultivation of the tobacco plant was begun by the English settlers (or planters, as they were known at first) in 1612.1 In the vanguard of this was the pious yet commercially sensitive John Rolfe, who in 1613 established the first truly successful plantation. The first consignment of Rolfe’s fine Virginia tobacco was shipped to England the following year. Thereafter the trade burgeoned. In 1618, 41,000 pounds of tobacco was exported from Virginia; by 1629 the figure was 1,500,000 pounds. Public attitudes to smoking were hardly complacent. In 1604 no less a figure than King James, the one-time importer of skol, wrote ‘A Counterblaste to Tobacco’, decrying the habit as harmful to the nose, the eye, the brain and the lungs. ‘What honour or policie can move us’, he wondered, ‘to imitate the barbarous and beastly manners of the wilde, godlesse, and slavish Indians … in so vile and stinking a custome?’2 Nevertheless, the growth of the colony was accelerated by the demand for this ‘golden weed’. Fertile, untouched land was needed, and plantations began to appear at intervals, extending far up the James River – a bitter-sweet detail. The planters had no tradition of expertise to draw on; their work proceeded by trial and error. The business was obsessional, and they became so absorbed in producing tobacco that they gave the ‘Indians’ firearms and employed them as hunters.
But we need to step back for a moment: the establishment of English outposts in North America sowed the language in what would eventually become the world’s greatest economic power; yet the settlers’ success was no overnight achievement – it marked the end of a string of failures. Virginia was the name the settlers gave to the territory where they established their first truly solid redoubt. They named it for the queen who ha
d encouraged its discovery (and who was ‘virgin’ on account of never having married). The name has endured, and, like the names of so many features of the American landscape, it embodies idealism, a Christian vision of the land’s sanctity. The name is also a sigh of relief on the part of a nation that had struggled to impress itself on a land 3,000 miles away.
We often define ourselves in relation to what we are not. Elizabethan England expressed its essence through its relationship with foreign parts, and strange cultural artefacts acquired abroad became vital images of the triumph of Elizabeth and her court. England’s navy, for which the coal trade served as a nursery, was strong. Yet the English were not the first to try to settle in North America. Indeed, they were slow to get in on the act. Bartholomew Columbus had sought English funding for his brother Christopher’s transatlantic expedition as long ago as 1488, but Henry VII had been more concerned with making good his position in a country he had only recently seized, and when the Columbus brothers did secure funding it was from Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
It took a hundred years for the English to recognize this as a missed opportunity. In the meantime, others made significant advances: the Spanish, besides their extensive claims in South and Central America and in the Caribbean, had penetrated the southern regions of North America, including Arizona and Florida, while the French had closely explored the east coast of America, finally establishing a colony at Acadia. The evidence of their early successes is still manifest in a host of American place names: we can see that Colorado, Nevada, Montana, California and Florida all come from Spanish, while the names of Maine and Vermont testify to the French presence in the early seventeenth century.3 Ironically, neither the eternally famous Columbus nor Amerigo Vespucci, the Florentine from whom the continent probably takes its name, seems actually to have set foot on American soil, although half a millennium before them the Icelandic explorer Leif Eriksson may have done so. But Columbus opened up the idea of America, and those who followed him and did investigate the land saw its promise.
The Secret Life of Words Page 17