The taste for hard words persisted through the seventeenth century. If we look at a highly technical work like Nicholas Culpeper’s 1653 translation of Johann Vesling’s The Anatomy of the Body of Man, we find a host of daunting words. For example, in his description of ‘the Instruments of Generation in Man’, Culpeper writes in a short space of epididymides, pampiniformia, ‘the plexure of the Mesenterium’, a membrane called the albuginea, cremasters and erythroides.15 ‘I wish this poor Nation much good by this Work,’ writes Culpeper in his address to the reader, ‘that the Lord would open their eyes, that they might see the truth and themselves.’ One wonders how many of Culpeper’s contemporaries would have been at ease with his armour-plated language. It seems fitting that a standard work of the period, Richard Wiseman’s Severall Chirurgicall Treatises (1676), was usually known by the blackly humorous title ‘Wiseman’s Book of Martyrs’.16 The adjective chirurgicall must have seemed evasive; the sort of interventions Wiseman had in mind could kill you.
Ultimately, the works to achieve lasting popularity were those that used vernacular syntax and straightforward language rather than Latin structures and baffling verbiage. But, ironically, the seventeenth century was the last in which natural language could girdle all of human experience; since then large areas of thought have become the province of artificial languages comprising formulae, mathematical notation and symbols. Our knowledge of the world, and the images we have of it, increasingly defies expression in words.17 Reviewing the seventeenth century’s grapplings with science, we can see them as a logorrhoeic orgy, yet also, conversely, as a last attempt to encompass experience in terms accessible to the nonspecialist.
In June 1665 John Evelyn, a man of encyclopedic interests that included mechanics, forestry and London’s sewers, wrote to Peter Wyche, who was chairing an inquiry by the Royal Society into the improvement of English, pointing out the need for imported words when there were no available equivalents. The ‘corruption’ of the language had resulted from ‘Victories, Plantations, Frontieres, Staples of Com’erce, pedantry of Schooles, Affectation of Travellers, Translations, Fancy and style of Court, … mincing of Citizens’ and several other things besides.18 Evelyn noted that there was no adequate substitute in English for ennui, bizarre, concert, emotion or naïveté. He was a ready user of such terms. Naïveté was in fact warmly embraced. It proved a useful alternative to describing an action or statement as ingenuous, an adjective which contemporary users were apt to confuse with ingenious.19 Other words looked more parlous: Evelyn feels able to call a village a dorp and a wine-grower a vigneron, and denotes the afternoon as pomerid after the Latin pomeridianus. In 1644 he writes of going to a museum – the term derived via Latin from the Greek mouseion, a place sacred to the Muses. And, recalling 1666, the year of the Great Fire of London (which he terms an incendium), he is the first to write in an English sentence of an annus mirabilis.
French influence was reinvigorated in 1660 when, at the invitation of Parliament, Charles II returned from the Continent. In exile, Charles had shuttled between Brussels and Bruges, Cologne and Paris. Now he entered London jubilantly. Even though support for his return was not emphatic, he soon established a new culture at court, bringing in a gossipy, competitive, salacious temper. He cut a surprising figure: tall, cynical, even vinegary, yet also approachable. Charles and his favourites introduced new amusements. The card game basset, played by Charles’s followers, takes its name from Italian. Yet, on the whole, fashions were French, and so were manners. ‘He brought the spirit of mockery with him,’ observes Logan Pearsall Smith, and brought as well ‘a reaction against the austerity and zeal of the pious Puritans’. Hence, it would seem, such new terms as the verbs burlesque and ridicule, along with the adjective jocose and the nouns badinage and travesty.20 Clique and manoeuvre are new words of the period that suggest its delicate social tactics. Both retained their original spelling, and the former kept its French pronunciation. Caprice is first sighted in 1667; shabby in 1669; bigotry in 1674; nonchalance in 1678. Faux pas first appears in Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer in 1676. Chagrin, which is one of the ‘hard words’ explained in Thomas Blount’s Glossographia, can be traced via French to a Turkish word for coarse untanned leather; the connection is that things apt to trouble the mind are bristly and chafe one’s sensibilities. And in George Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) – a play where we find talk of belles assemblées , bel air and an embarrass of coaches – Sir Fopling Flutter, eager to be the centre of attention, declares when congratulated on his gloves, ‘I was always eminent for being bien ganté.’
Banter is another new word of this period, its etymology uncertain, and it captures the spirit of mockery nicely. Swift disapproved of it and claimed in The Tatler that after a short time in vogue it had ‘at last retired’, but we know otherwise. One of his satiric forerunners, the sadly forgotten Robert Gould, in 1687 wrote that English ‘will fail, / As th’Inundation of French Words prevail’. He proposed as the standard for contemporary usage the poet Edmund Waller – ‘all beyond, / Tho’ spoke at Court, is Foppery and fond.’21 Gould might have been expected to characterize the language of the court using words borrowed from French, but in fact foppery looks to have German origins, while fond, still then commonly used as a somewhat poetic equivalent for ‘silly’, may be from the Norse, related for instance to the modern Icelandic fáni, which means someone who emptily swaggers.
Another source of French – different in route and in mood – was the influx of Huguenots following the decision by Louis XIV to revoke the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and outlaw Protestantism. The exodus brought French talent to England. For instance, many Protestant seamen fled France’s Atlantic ports, depleting the French naval reserves. These people came to be known as refugees, a borrowing from French, where the verb réfugier means ‘to take shelter’. For a long time, a refugee had by definition to be a Huguenot; although today the term is more loosely applied, its emotive force is undiminished. Then as now, refugees adapted to their place of refuge while preserving their own traditions. Londoners who wanted to learn the language of Pascal and Molière could attend services at the French Church in Threadneedle Street, where they heard the eloquent preaching of ministers like Charles Bertheau.
Yet, at the same time as Louis XIV was tarnishing his political reputation, his opulent court at Versailles was adding fresh lustre to the image of his country, and, even if some of the contexts in which the language was encountered were sober, the new borrowings from French tended to relate not to life’s necessities, but to the frippery around its edges. When they kept their French pronunciation – as in the case of naïveté, for instance – it was as though they were at all times to be placed within inverted commas. The playful, self-conscious deployment of French tags is one we can still recognize. The effervescence of French culture apppears to be summed up in the word champagne, which first appears in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras (completed in 1664). In The Man of Mode the characters sing of ‘the joys of good wine’ and in particular of ‘sparkling champagne’, which ‘recovers / Poor languishing lovers’ and ‘drowns all our sorrow’ – at least until the hangover kicks in on the morrow. The reference to ‘sparkling champagne’ is striking, because at that time the preference in France was for the region’s still wines. It was in England that the drink we now automatically call champagne first achieved real popularity, and it only achieved its mythic status in the years after the French Revolution.
Champagne is a sensuous whisper of a word. We hear it and we think of popping corks and winking bubbles, of the gentle ticking of pleasure. In the age of Butler and Etherege it was widely felt that if a word sounded attractive it was fit for adoption. Dryden favoured bringing in foreign words if they were ‘sounding’ (that is, sonorous, like his adoption hoi polloi), and boasted that ‘I trade both with the living and the dead, for the enrichment of our native language.’ In his view, poetry needed ornamental language, and it was often to be found abroad. Yet he argued that innovation ought t
o be carefully managed, ‘for if too many foreign words are poured in upon us, it looks as if they were designed not to assist the natives, but to conquer them’.22 His sensitivity was born of the awareness that people were by inclination ‘censorious’ and ‘detracting’; here was a writer who knew the taut politics of usage, and who was apt to nod to the demands of Hobbes’s compleasance.
All the same, Dryden could use a word like double-entendre, which first makes an appearance in his Marriage à la Mode (1673), and he appears to have been the first author to use à propos and carte blanche.23 À propos was still causing concern a hundred years later, when a critic styling himself Peter Pikestaff chose to defend it in a catalogue of scandalous Gallicisms in Town and Country Magazine. Dr Johnson would later suggest that Dryden’s employment of this type of vocabulary stemmed from ‘a vanity … to show … the rank of the company with whom he lived’. Citing Dryden’s use of fraicheur where he would prefer coolness, Johnson pronounces, not a little pompously, that the poet’s affectations ‘continue only where they stood first, perpetual warnings to future innovators’.24 Of course, Dryden was apt to satirize social aspirations, and affected talk was one of their most obvious markers, so readers should be wary of viewing Dryden’s snippets of French as symptoms of pretentiousness on his part. In Marriage à la Mode, the coquette Melantha changes her allegiances as often as her clothes, and her alertness to the fashion at court for all things French manifests itself in talk of malheur, esprit, douceur and naïveté – words she has written down in a notebook, hoping to make a big impression by using them. The courtier Palamede, whose favour she has been seeking, has to fan himself with his hat after her torrent of Gallicisms, and, left alone on the stage, muses, ‘I never thought before that wooing was so laborious an exercise’-a line that is sure to strike a chord with anyone who has ever thought that the ‘language of love’ involved just a little too much bowing and scraping.
Appropriately, a new word of this period is romantic. It first appears in a couple of entries in John Evelyn’s diary for 1654. Evelyn’s diaries were not published until much later, and he revised them late in life in the 1680s, so his adoption of the word cannot be confidently dated to that year. The first instance recorded in the OED is in 1659. The word meant something along the lines of ‘exhibiting the qualities of romances’, the romances in question being works relating acts of gallantry and chivalry, popular with female readers and with satirists looking for easy targets. The defining quality of these works was their essential unreality: they were full of flying steeds and men of iron, magic armour and ivy-clad castles. This unreality was keenly felt by those who, in the seventeenth century, were beginning to embrace a new rationalism. The emergence of the word romantic testifies to such people’s awareness of the gulf between rationalism and romance. Many regarded with contempt the purely fictitious nature of romance, and at first the word had pejorative overtones (as if to say, ‘How absurd!’). Only in the second half of the eighteenth century did ‘romantic’ sensibility – in particular, a romantic sense of landscape-catch on. Crucially, it said more about our response to things than about the things themselves. And it was a response steeped in the colours of literature.
The sparkle of contemporary life was broadcast in the theatres. Closed during the Civil War, they reopened in 1660. Drama of the period tends to be complicatedly witty, and sexual references are teasingly indirect. When Swift complained, in the 1720s, that the theatre was a wellspring of affectation, he was reviewing some sixty years of highly perishable theatrical usage. One author notable for depicting amorous intrigue from a pointedly female perspective was Aphra Behn, who, having apparently worked as a colonial spy in Surinam, was nicely placed to expose the subtle interplay of politics and gender in her fiction, poetry and works for the stage. Among the terms Behn adopts is, from the Italian, novella, which has a conveniently feminine look about it; another is (as a verb) masquerade, a perfect embodiment of the motley artifice of the Restoration drama. The form’s pre-eminent practitioner was William Congreve, who enjoyed a brief yet large success with five shrewd comedies of manners. In Love for Love (1695) Congreve’s character Valentine depicts the predictable life of the city:
Prayers will be said in empty Churches, at the usual Hours. Yet you will see such Zealous Faces behind Counters, as if Religion were to be sold in every Shop. Oh things will go methodically in the City, the Clocks will strike Twelve at Noon, and the Horn’d Herd Buz in the Exchange at Two. Wives and Husbands will drive distinct Trades, and Care and Pleasure separately Occupy the Family. Coffee-Houses will be full of Smoak and Stratagems.
Congreve evokes a society in which politics, fashion and rhetoric collude, and the coffee house was the capital of modish intrigue – a place, moreover, tinged with foreignness.
The first English coffee house was opened some time in 1652 or 1653 by Daniel Edwards, a merchant who had spent several years in Anatolia. When he returned to London from Smyrna, he was accompanied by Pasqua Rosee, who would run his business in St Michael’s Alley off Cornhill, and he brought back not only coffee, but also an armoury of coffee-making equipment. Many followed his example, and the coffee houses became important meeting places, open to people of all ranks and religions. It would be no exaggeration to say that the coffee houses were instrumental in shaping the very notion of ‘public opinion’. The London Stock Exchange would have its beginnings in a coffee house, and so would its counterpart in New York.
From an early stage pamphlets attacking coffee were frequent, and they were nationalistic in flavour, for the beverage was associated with Turks and other Muslim ‘infidels’, and the democratic nature of the coffee house meant it was typically linked with the political opposition. In 1675 Charles II issued ‘A Proclamation for the Suppression of Coffee-Houses’ to counter their ‘very evil and dangerous effects’; the meetings held in them helped spread ‘False, Malitious and Scandalous Reports’, and they had become ‘the great resort of Idle and disaffected persons’.25 The word coffee is recorded in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary, which says it is ‘originally Arabick, pronounced caheu by the Turks, and cahuah by the Arabs’. Actually, qahwah is more like it – the Turks pronounced it kahveh – and the bracing drink seems related etymologically to an Arabic verb meaning ‘to lack appetite’. The term café caught on in the nineteenth century as coffee-drinking, having become a polite form of public sociality, needed to be detached from the imagery of subversion.
The diaries of Samuel Pepys are a wonderfully engaging source of information about the machinations and manners of the period. In January 1660, soon after he began keeping a diary, he joined a club that met at a coffee house called the Rota, and he would often sit for an hour or two over a cup, enjoying ‘the diversity of company – and discourse’. He drank his first cup of tea on 25 September 1660. Six years later, during the Great Fire of London, he buried his wine and parmesan cheese in the garden to keep them safe. Fittingly, Pepys seems to have been the originator of the expression to have a good time: he may have found the formula in Montaigne.26 His diary entries hint at his contemporaries’ lively interest in the torrid zones of taboo: sex, human nature, the motions of the planets, the value or otherwise of the existing social order. He is quick to learn new words: he provides the earliest citations of gherkin and gimp (both from Dutch), and is an early adopter of that strange verb to drub, which derives from the Arabic daraba, the practice of flaying the soles of a man’s feet as a punishment. He is also a vital source of detail about everyday life. For instance, on 18 July 1662 he mentions his decision to ‘have my dining-room wainscoated, which will be very pretty’. This sort of panelling was fashionable, and its name opens up a subject that preyed often upon the minds of Pepys and his contemporaries.
Wainscot is a word that now has an archaic look about it. It may remind some readers of the passage in As You Like It where Jaques advises Touchstone to avoid having his marriage to Audrey conducted by Sir Oliver Martext – for ‘This fellow will but join you / Together as
they join wainscot; then one of you will / Prove a shrunk panel and, like green timber, warp, warp.’ Or there is Walt Whitman, who itemizes the ‘fluid utterances’ of the ‘solid forest’: among them ‘shingle, rail, prop, wainscot, jamb, lath, panel, gable’. To others it will simply be a term scented with the antique. First attested in 1352, it denoted, before it took on its present meaning, a special type of oak used to make fine panelling.Where does it come from? A clue: its language of origin is the same as that of wiggle, rover, firkin, buckwheat, ogle, walrus, trigger, snack and dope. No? How about if I mention rijstafel? The word wainscot is from Dutch – a corruption of wagenschot or wagenskot – and is one of a large group that we rarely recognize as stemming from that source. Ogle derives from the Dutch oogheler, ‘a flatterer’; dope comes from a word simply meaning ‘sauce’; firkin approximates to vierdekijn, which means ‘a little quarter’ and is thus a rather quaint term for the fourth part of a barrel. Dutch and Flemish are both, like English, the offspring of West Germanic, so it is not surprising that a good deal of those languages looks familiar. Dutch loanwords tend to be simple and concrete, with scarcely a whiff of scholarly sophistication about them.
Who have been the vectors of these words? Soldiers and sailors, for certain, and experts in the handicrafts such as weaving for which the Low Countries long enjoyed fame. Also fishermen, traders and religious refugees. When English wool was the best in Europe, Flemish weavers were its main buyers. The cloth industry in the Low Countries has given us cambric, nap (as in the nap of velvet), selvage and stripe. Admirers of Dutch and Flemish painters – Hals, Rubens, Brueghel and Rembrandt – are obvious candidates to have adopted masterpiece, a calque on meesterstuk which becomes common in the first part of the seventeenth century. Etch, sketch and landscape are also from the Dutch, and early mentions of the last of these preserved the Dutch spelling, landschap. Easel is another Dutch import; its literal meaning is ‘donkey’, and for an understanding of the connection we need only think of our words clothes horse and sawhorse. From the thirteenth century onward, large areas of land were reclaimed by the Dutch from the sea; whereas the English attitude to the sea was confident, the Dutch proved essentially defensive, and an English awareness of Dutch skill in keeping the sea at bay gave new life to the noun dyke and introduced polder. In a different sphere, Henry Lyte’s Herball (1578) was a version of a work by Rembert Dodoens, and introduced many new terms from Dutch, as well as a handful from German. Among the former were amelcorn, catkin, devil’s milk, silverweed and whitewort, and Lyte also provides the first sighting in an English book of tulip, that bellshaped showy flower for which there was a craze in the Netherlands in the 1630s.
The Secret Life of Words Page 23