The dissenting Quakers saw the world around them as a corrupt place where the flesh and its pleasures were wrongly exalted and obstructed God’s spiritual presence. They strove for an unadorned speech and, in a period when the language of courtesy was staggeringly artificial, dispensed with the crouchings and cringings of compliment and the effortful language of deference. They used the familiar thou with all to whom they spoke, regardless of what custom dictated, even though it often resulted in their being labelled rude or uncivil. Additionally, they had their own special words, such as steeple-house instead of church, and abandoned the familiar names for the days of the week, speaking instead of the ‘first day’ (Sunday), the ‘second day’ and so on.
At the same time as the Quakers were discarding the language of religious ceremony, other areas of language were registering the plight of orthodox religion. The word charity became detached from its theological moorings. Popular words like goodbye (literally ‘God be with you’) and gossip (‘relation in God’) are evidence of the way religion is all but invisibly embedded in our language. Goodbye is not found until the second half of the sixteenth century. Gossip is a word of much greater age, but its meaning has altered dramatically: once the usual term for a godfather or godmother, it from the fourteenth century denoted any close friend, and only from the sixteenth century was it used of idle talkers and people bent on spreading rumour; two centuries later it began to signify not just the folk who indulged in this sort of tittle-tattle, but also the tittle-tattle itself. As Geoffrey Hughes says, these words exemplify ‘phonetic erosion’ and ‘reflect in the secularisation of their meanings the eclipse of the influence of the Church’.6
Many words that now seem secular in flavour have religious origins: salient examples include holiday, anathema, passion and propaganda . Originally propaganda was a special term for the promotion of Christian faith; its use of any systematic spreading of a doctrine grew up in the eighteenth century, and for at least a century now it has been used scathingly of the means used by one cause to discredit others. Where once the word was automatically associated with the Congregation of the Propaganda set up in 1622 by Pope Gregory XV, by the twentieth century its debasement made this use problematic, and in 1967 the committee of cardinals responsible for foreign missions was rechristened, becoming the Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples.
Another such word whose origins are long forgotten is hocus-pocus . This has been taken for a savage seventeenth-century corruption of the Latin hoc est corpus, a phrase pronounced during Communion. According to this view, its childish syllables mocked what some saw as the knavish trickery of claiming that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were the body and blood of Christ. But the link between hocus-pocus and the Latin Mass was not made until the 1690s, seventy years after the word’s first recorded use. Whatever its etymology, the appeal of hocus-pocus was straightforward: its sound brought to mind a juggler’s sleight of hand, while also conveying an illusion of Latin gravity. It was a word, quite simply, to conjure with.
Hocus-pocus belongs to a class of esoteric language that appeals to people who identify themselves as word-lovers. Greek is an especially rich source. A deipnosophist is a person skilled in making talk at the dinner table. Someone described as callipygous has pretty buttocks. One author who especially favoured words borrowed from Greek was the politician Hamon L’Estrange, whose The Reign of King Charles (1656) was censured for its polysyllabic excesses. A critic punned that his high style was difficult to climb over. L’Estrange was quick to counter this wooden conceit: ‘I declare to all the world … that having conversed with Authors of the Noblest and cheif Remarque in several languages … their words … became at length so familiar with me, as when I apply’d my self to that present work, I found it very difficult to renounce my former acquaintance with them.’ He goes on to argue, ‘Our language had of late already admitted very neer all of them into so frequent use in ordinary discourse, as almost amounted to a Naturalization of them.’7 ‘Infelicitous pedantry’ is the nineteenth-century judgement of Isaac D’Israeli, who notes that L’Estrange had ‘opened on us a floodgate of Latinisms’.8 Especially distrusted were popular new tags such as ad hoc, ad hominem, ad infinitum and ad nauseam. The fondness for trite appendages encouraged sloppiness in students. In the preface to a 1672 book intended to help children master Latin, the Grantham schoolmaster William Walker complains ‘What Need there is of all the Helps of this Nature, that can be had, to deliver young Latinemakers from Barbarity in their making of Latin’.9 Bizarrely, he goes on to show readers the correct Latin rendering of such English expressions as ‘Handicrafts men are exercised in sordid arts’ and ‘The blood of innocents maketh satisfaction for one[’]s lust.’10
The flood of Latinisms may have abated, but we hear and see Latin all the time. There are, for instance, most of those words that end -us or -um: it would be easy to provide a vast list, but if we choose arbitrarily from among the fs we have focus, fungus, factotum, forum and fulcrum. (Hokum and tantrum are false friends, not Latin at all.) The word factotum is one of a large number partly rooted in the everyday verb facere, ‘to make’ or ‘to do’; others are facile and effect, facsimile and fact, and even, somewhat indirectly, fetish. While many words borrowed from Latin have been altered – their endings clipped away or adjusted – plenty have kept their Latin form: abdomen, alibi, benefactor, cervix, lumbago, minus, patina and delirium suggest something of their variety. Latin prefixes and suffixes have long been used to build new words on the foundations of existing ones. Again, an adequate survey would be huge, but think of all the things we can do with the prefix extra-, meaning ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’. Extraordinary has become everyday, but what about extrapolate, extramural , extratemporal or extracathedral? If we are deranged, we may have extraterrestrial encounters; if disinclined to keep our wedding vows, extramarital relations. Extravagant is first used in the sense in which we now know it in the early eighteenth century, but before that it meant ‘roving’ or ‘vagrant’: the ‘extravagant’ ghost in Hamlet is so called because he strays out of bounds, not because he is a big spender. Darwin referred to extra-stomachal digestion, and T. S. Eliot, as if with a nod to his ancestor Sir Thomas Elyot, speaks of extra-academic honours. This is to say nothing of the much more common prefix ex-, which we find in so many energetic verbs: excel, explode, exclude, express, extort, extend, expostulate, expunge. Latin is responsible for many of the long-tailed beasts that roam the jungle of print.
A very different source of seventeenth-century lexis was Hebrew. The Reformation had stimulated the study of this liturgical language: the religious haggling of the period urged a return to the Hebrew Bible, Henry VIII’s matrimonial entanglements were scrutinized by Hebrew scholars of theology, and the breach between England and Rome encouraged interest in Hebrew as a specially Protestant language of prayer. The creation of the Authorized Version of the Bible under James I involved no Jews, but was informed by Jewish scholarship, and in the 1640s and ‘50s the study of Hebrew increased – a preparation for the Second Coming, which many anticipated earnestly. It was widely believed that embedded in the Hebrew language were numerous occult truths, and Hebrew patterns of diction were adopted by sectarian writers keen to lend their rhetoric an air of holy mystery. At Oxford and Cambridge, Hebrew scholarship was improved by a Polish immigrant, Victorinus Bythner.
Hebrew words had been borrowed before: hosanna, Satan, behemoth, mammon, and the two calques Passover and Adam’s apple, which were introduced by Tyndale and Hakluyt respectively. Now more loans were taken up. Among them were matzo, mezuzah, the incantation abracadabra (possibly Aramaic) and Selah. The last of these was a word found in the psalter, signifying the need for a pause at the end of a verse – and was later adopted by the poets e. e. cummings and Wallace Stevens. Another potent word of Hebrew origin, Messiah, had been used in Old English translations of the Gospels, but it was only in the King James Bible that it was given its proper Hebraic spelling. Even a comparatively
familiar word of Hebrew origin, such as jubilee, has a deep history of religious significance. Originally it denoted a year of rest taken after seven cycles of seven years: debts were cancelled, and a trumpet crafted from a ram’s horn sounded the call to communal rejoicing. Chaucer is one of the first to use it without a religious context, and in the sixteenth century, despite a renewed awareness of its Hebrew meaning, its secular force increased.
Even as the Authorized Version – ‘drenched with the splendour of a divinely sanctioned authority’11 – established itself in the public consciousness as the most exact and atmospheric rendering of the scriptures, there was a nagging perception that the Bible was no more than an abridgement of the ancient records of Christianity. Radical figures set out to supplement the scriptures. While the Somerset Puritan John Traske was so concerned with eking out the literal truth of the Old Testament that he was thrown in jail for ‘Judaizing’, his disciple John Robins took a different approach. Acclaimed by another visionary, Joshua Garment, as the reincarnation of God, Robins spoke sensational prophecies in tongues – assuring all who cared to listen that ‘my Hebrew, Greek, and Latine, comes by inspiration.’12
It is significant that the verb to Hebraize (‘to use a Hebrew idiom or manner of speech’) makes its first appearance in 1645, in a work by the period’s most important creative writer, John Milton. The fusion of classical and biblical language is limpid in Milton’s works. He considered writing his masterpiece Paradise Lost in Latin, but ultimately decided to compose an English epic to rival its classical forebears and trumpet the integrity of Protestantism – and chose for it a language imbued with classical resonance and allusion. Milton’s sonorous style was in part the consequence of his blindness: having lost his sight in his early forties, he dictated the poem to his daughters and other amanuenses; its acoustic subtlety reflects his oral method of composition. Milton’s command of ten languages is frequently evident: he wrote poems in Latin, Greek and Italian, as well as producing several important prose works in Latin, and the rhymeless verse of Paradise Lost combines the gravitas of Latinism with flightier borrowings. One of the reasons for his use of what can seem very indirect Latin expressions was a concern to dignify a well-worn story; Satan refers to ‘the apple’, but Milton, avoiding the trivializing effect of repetition, calls it ‘the fruit of that forbidden tree’ and ‘that defended Fruit’. Milton’s diction perfectly shows how the Latinate resources of English can be used to add scientific and moral resonance to everyday objects and experiences.
The scope of English as a scientific language was topical. The founding of the Royal Society in 1660 created an institutional standard for scientific writing. Its motto, ‘Nullius in verba’ (literally, ‘On the words of no one’), was a necessary defence against the verbal wranglings of sectarianism, but it highlighted a philosophical creed that put actions before words: experiments counted for more than theories. The cardinal example of this is Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), which spoke ‘ad oculum’: its statements were made in the form of brilliant graphics, not brilliant prose. Where prose was needed, it was to be lean. The stylistic economy preached by the Society’s historian, Thomas Sprat, was the antithesis of the sort of learned amateurism practised by Robert Burton or Sir Thomas Browne. (Sprat, like his nursery rhyme namesake, could take no fat: Browne no lean.) Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy affords first sightings of meteorologist, feral, hirsute and literati, while the colourful Browne, who had studied at Montpellier, Padua and Leiden, was a prolific coiner of new words, responsible for electricity, therapeutic and literary as well as for the altogether more odd-looking but self-explanatory retrocopulation and masculo-feminine. Sprat recoiled from the ‘vicious abundance’ of such phrasing, from ‘volubility’, and from all the tricksy vanity that ‘makes so great a noise in the World’. ‘Primitive purity’ and ‘shortness’ of expression were the order of the day. Sprat’s colleagues in the Royal Society borrowed words, but far more often used prefixes and suffixes to extend the reach of existing vocabulary. 13 Sprat was not the first to insist on primitive purity, and he would not be the last. Nor did the Royal Society have a monopoly on science. But the period’s move toward institutionalizing knowledge promoted a new attitude to the national language.
In universities, teaching was done in Latin. However, those looking to a wider audience needed to untangle the prolixities of Latin diction and find, where they could, equivalents for its cumbrous polysyllables. Interest in Descartes’s philosophy spawned English equivalents for Cartesian terms: subtle matter, moral certainty, and specialized senses of concept and idea. But scientific thinking called for precise language, in which words meant one thing and one thing only. Sometimes polysyllables seemed more exact. Greek was especially useful, given its capacity for fashioning compound and derivative terms. This process of building words using prefixes and suffixes is responsible for the very large number of English words which have at least part of their roots in ancient Greek. This is in fact greater than the total number of ancient Greek words known actually to have existed: speakers and writers of English have imaginatively confected Greek compounds and hybrids far removed from anything that would have passed the lips of an Athenian orator.
I have mentioned Greek in passing several times already. Nicholas Ostler writes, appealingly, ‘This is the language of the people who brought wine, olive oil and literacy to the Mediterranean world, who invented logic, tragic drama and elective government.’ ‘All of Europe’, he suggests, ‘became … their students.’ Yet Greek was spread not just by culture, but also by ‘speculative commerce’ and ‘naked imperialism’.14 Behind the intellectual refinement of Greek lay a powerful military confidence. Ancient Greece was united by conflict, by the need to show unity in the face of opposition. The word barbarian has its roots in Greek disdain for outsiders: the rest of the world, ripe for conquest, bleated what sounded like bar-bar (compare the modern blah blah or rhubarb), a pathetically emasculated noise. The Greeks’ language developed as an instrument of persuasion, a sophisticated rhetorical weapon in their bids to colonize the Black Sea, the Mediterranean and the urban centres of Persia. Later, the triumph of Rome reinforced the position of Greek culture: the Romans were seduced by a heritage that combined political and cerebral muscle with unbridled hedonism (a word rooted in the Greek for ‘sweet’).
In English, Greek words, many of them filtered through Latin, have always conveyed prestige. Greek enjoyed a second wave of influence because of its scientific uses in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – we might think of this as a ‘late’ influence – but its force has since declined with the decline in general knowledge of Greek. Words adopted from Greek have tended at first to be used in technical or scientific contexts, yet many – ecstasy, pathos, method, idea, kudos, phenomenon, hubris, problem – have long since broadened their scope. The strict etymological senses of such words are obscure now to all but a few, and to insist on them is overfastidious. Often, however, we have lost the inherent poetry of a word. Comet derives from kometes, the Greek for ‘long-haired’: the Greeks referred to what we call a comet as an aster kometes, meaning ‘long-haired star’. A comet leaves a trail behind it; the trail is dust, but ever since Aristotle pictured comets as stars with hair, these small celestial bodies have been doomily romanticized, as in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, where comets ‘brandish … crystal tresses in the sky’.
It is from Greek that we get the august philosophy, logic and mathematics as well as the less rarefied grammar. The same source accounts for the more specialized anatomy, astronomy, archaeology and pharmacy. Greek prefixes are continuingly prolific: meta- and micro- are obvious examples, with the latter found in hundreds of words, from microanalysis to microzoon via the comparatively ordinary microphone and the unfortunate micropenis. We find the suffix -cracy, indicating influence or rule, not only in words of plainly Greek origin (aristocracy, democracy), but also in confections like bureaucracy and meritocracy – and in logocracy, a word W
ashington Irving used to characterized the wordy cultural politics of nineteenth-century America. Orthography and ethnography are words sourced in Greek, but discography and radiography are hybrids. A couple of other key prefixes from Greek are poly- and hyper- (as in polygamy and polythene, hypersensitive and hyperspace), while some other fecund suffixes include -scope, -metry and -path – think for instance of periscope, symmetry and sociopath. There is something hard and self-secure about these words. They seem, paradoxically, both real and remote.
During the Renaissance, many new terms for parts of the body were introduced from Latin and Greek. These included penis, clitoris, uterus, scrotum and anus, along with the less intimate skeleton, cranium and pancreas (the last of these the Greek word for a sweetbread). Edward Gibbon would later acclaim the ‘decent obscurity of a learned language’: classical terms were not smutted with the grease of everyday use. The Greek names of certain medical complaints have nevertheless been cut down to size by speakers who have struggled to pronounce them: hydropsis became dropsy, and paralysis shortens to palsy. The source of migraine is the Greek hemikrania, meaning ‘half the skull’. Intriguingly, in the medical profession, many of the more lucrative specialisms have names derived from Greek: gynaecologist, paediatrician, psychiatrist. Compare with these the distinctly Anglo-Saxon and more modestly remunerated midwife.You’re never going to make as much as a tooth-puller as you will by being an orthodontist.
The Secret Life of Words Page 22