The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  The eighteenth century has been characterized as an age of politeness and commercialism.5 Perhaps we should not be surprised, then, that it was during this period of dramatic financial expansion that commerce and commercial began to take on the pejorative sense that most of us would now recognize. The century witnessed an increased social mobility. The idea of ‘travel’ emerged from the shadow of its etymological forebear, travail. The art of conversation was cultivated – practised in the coffee house and the salon (1699) – and involved a range of skills such as persiflage (1757) and the epigrammatic neatness of bons mots (1735). Polite society, quick to police its boundaries, espoused new words of disapproval: fatuous, prude, flippant, and, as an at least half-damning word for an illicit relationship, intrigue.6 Indeed, ‘polite society’ is a fabrication of this period. Polite had once meant the same as polished, and had been used of stones and metals. By the early sixteenth century it had come to suggest elegance and refinement, but was applied only to language or accomplishments; it took another hundred years for it to be used of people. The sense ‘well mannered’ arrives in the eighteenth century – as in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of the World (1773), where one character opines that ‘The French are the politest enemies,’ or William Pitt’s definition of politeness as ‘perpetual attention … to the little wants of those we are with’. This sense gained ground at the expense of the older civil.7 Politesse, which originally meant something akin to ‘smoothness’, evolved more specific senses: ‘intellectual culture’, ‘civilized behaviour’, ‘respect for the rules of propriety’. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) the word has a sprightly freshness about it, and it does so still in Fanny Burney’s diary more than thirty years later.

  It is to the second half of this century that we can date the rise of a new fastidiousness about language – a new appetite for euphemisms and polite circumlocutions. (Euphemism is recognizably Greek – it’s one of the Grecian oddities that Thomas Blount chose to explain in his Glossographia.) According to one study, when Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy voices his approval of Elizabeth Bennet’s ‘dark eyes’ he is really passing favourable comment on the size of her breasts.8 In truth, the colour of her heroines’ eyes is frequently of concern to Austen, but we may identify all the same with the experience of passing comment on a person’s eyes when we mean to pay a more juicy compliment.

  Another of Austen’s heroines, Marianne Dashwood, is a study in exaggerated sensibility – a buzzword for a generation who saw hypersensitivity as a virtue. This quasi-religious cult of fine feelings involved a regard for the delicacy of mind and body, the cultivation of taste and sympathy, a kind of self-absorbed benevolence, and close attention to physiognomy (itself voguish – Swift deplored its shortening to phiz). Somewhat predictably, it was associated by many with the pernicious influence of Britain’s neighbours across the Channel. In Maria Edgeworth’s novel Leonora (1806), the scandalous and emotional Lady Olivia is uneasy with English companions, having ‘known the charms of French ease, vivacity, and sentiment’. In this context sentimental became first a catchword, then a smear, and the fancy noun presentiment, also picked up from the French, was greeted with protest.9 Particularly influential was Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), based on a seven-month coach tour undertaken while Britain and France were at war. Sterne’s short, unfinished book proved that conflict did not have to get in the way of tourism, and inspired a host of other ‘sentimental’ writings, which with varying degrees of success expounded a philosophy of pleasure.

  One key figure in the evolving language of fine feeling was Lord Chesterfield, whom we earlier met as the first to refer to a picnic. In his prose Chesterfield is unmistakably keen on French words and phrases; he is almost certainly the first to write of sang-froid and malaise, of matters being hors de combat or de trop, and of a début (originally a term in billiards). Among the other words he imported were gauche, soi-disant and faute de mieux, and he helped naturalize ennui. He knew what he was doing. In a letter dating from 1768 he reports, ‘I feel what the French call a general mal-aise,’ adding that this is ‘what we call in Ireland an unwellness’. He also uses egotism (although it was Joseph Addison who adopted this word from the French), and coined etiquette.

  This last word, which eased aside civility in the second half of the century, embodied Chesterfield’s ideas about proper conduct, and its widespread adoption was a symptom of a change in values. Manners, according to Chesterfield, are separate from morals; they are not absolute, but specific only to a social group. Etiquette, which may be glossed as ‘a small ethics’, consists not of doing good deeds that earn you admiration, but of being pleasantly conformist. (Etiquette could also signify a label or ticket, and codes of conduct were apt, at least in France, to be written down on cards.) Chesterfield argued that in social life it is small virtues rather than large ones that win us love and affection. For many, his concept of etiquette was alluring: it was better to be a chameleon than a paragon. While plenty of readers continued to cleave to the values set out in more puritanical conduct books, Chesterfield’s model of behaviour inspired a new and rather malleable idea of correctness. Etiquette was essentially tactical. The art of social self-preservation involved ‘vigilant self-control and perpetual observation of others’.10

  In the opposite corner was Samuel Johnson, whose A Dictionary of the English Language had been briefly and ineffectually sponsored by Chesterfield. Yet, while plainly divided, the two men were united in their commitment to improving English. There were two responses to the linguistic licence so common in the previous two centuries. One was the idea of an English Academy, like the academy that existed in France: it would rationalize and standardize the language. The other consisted of individual attempts to send the language to school: grammars and dictionaries abounded, and none was more magisterial than Johnson’s, commissioned by a group of powerful booksellers and published in April 1755. Both reflected a heightened concern with the means by which language advanced and the relationship between linguistic and social progress.

  The diversity of English was considered a mixed blessing. It had been made all the more apparent by the Act of Union, which had integrated several ethnically disparate groups into one rather ambiguous unity. Johnson sensed the capacity of such diversity for causing disputes, and found the speech of his contemporaries ‘copious without order’: words had been picked up from many sources, and as a result ‘wherever I turned my view, there was perplexity to be disentangled.’ He believed that ‘from the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance,’ and he saw the language of the period before the Restoration as ‘the wells of English undefiled’. He was dismissive of upper-class slang, much of which was sourced from French, and resisted ‘barbarous jargon’ – which tended to mean anything modish and foreign. Noting that ‘our language, for almost a century, has … been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology,’ he urged that ‘it ought to be our endeavour to recall it.’ Unless the influx of Gallicisms was checked, his countrymen would be condemned to ‘babble a dialect of French’. It is hardly startling, then, that in his Dictionary he omits words as widely used as champagne , clique, façade, tableau, brochure and bouquet, and most words of French origin were treated slightingly. Thus ruse is ‘a French word neither elegant nor necessary’ and finesse is ‘an unnecessary word which is creeping into the language’. The obscure souvenance is ‘a French word which with many more is now happily disused’. These terms, in his view, were the trappings of affectation; they were spouted by idiots seeking to impress even bigger idiots.

  It is a nice irony, then, that the OED’s first citation in support of civilization (‘a developed or advanced state of human society’) is Dr Johnson’s informing his biographer Boswell that he will not include this alien word in the revised fourth edition of his Dictionary. The great lexicographe
r would have associated this buzzword du jour with Voltaire and the whole dazzling business of Enlightenment. His own tastes ran more to Latin, as both his Dictionary and the essays he wrote while compiling it – with their hard words, like equiponderant and terraqueous – generously demonstrate. In Johnson’s eyes the classical world was immutable, and its language was thus gratifyingly resistant to the vagaries of fashion. But others were not convinced: the historian and pamphleteer Owen Ruffhead thought that certain words Johnson used, among them multifarious and indiscerpible , were difficult to pronounce without breaking down in a fit of the giggles.11

  One rather silly French word for which Johnson did find space in his Dictionary was escargatoire, which he defines as ‘a nursery of snails’. His excuse would have been that it could be found in the works of a writer he esteemed, namely Addison. In Addison we see the gamut of the period’s linguistic felicities and inconsistencies, as resonant in 1800 as in 1700. There is perhaps no better record of public taste in the early part of the century than Addison’s magazine, The Spectator. It was influential in equating pure and proper use of language with moral excellence. Addison believed that English reflected the national character – ‘modest, thoughtful and sincere’. His essays were at once urbane and didactic, and their style is strikingly sparing of metaphor and simile; comparison of his manuscripts and his published writings demonstrates that he took pains to repress imagery where he could.12 He fretted about the use of foreign jargon (words like bivouac and chamade) in military reports sent from abroad, and even suggested that British troops have secretaries to help them convey their news in plain English. Certainly it was ironic that the Duke of Marlborough’s troops could defeat the French, then ape their speech and style. Yet Addison seems to have been the first author to use such words as hors d’œuvre and critique, and some of his pet formulae – for instance, fine taste – are renderings of French expressions popularized by Jean de La Bruyère.

  Others felt the same subtle literary influence. It was the influence of La Bruyère’s Les Caractères (1688) that endowed character with connotations of good reputation and distinction. Voltaire boosted tact, and a later generation would mimic his phrase capable de tout. When, in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote of public opinion, he was recreating an expression he had found in Rousseau, while when Jeremy Bentham referred to esprit de corps he may well have found the phrase in the writings of Madame de Staël.

  De Staël is now largely forgotten outside France, but she deserves a moment here as a shrewd commentator on France’s national character. In her account of Germany she memorably noted, ‘The great merit of the Germans is that of filling up their time well; the art of the French is to make it pass unnoticed.’ She was struck that the Poles and Russians she met on her travels spoke only French. German, she felt, was ‘a language … very copious in metaphysics, but very positive in conversation. The French language, on the contrary, is truly rich only in those terms of expression which designate the most complicated relations of society.’13 The complex business of social relations has, as we know, endowed our own language with far more than has been drawn from the domain of metaphysics. Germans’ ‘positive’ talk seemed to her, as to many others, too emphatic, too precise, too explicit; social skill consists in avoiding such dogmatism.

  Nevertheless, there were vital sources of new lexis besides French. Here is the noted conversationalist and wit Richard Owen Cambridge, writing in the magazine The World in 1754: ‘I must … beg leave … to doubt the propriety of joining to the fixed and permanent standard of our language, a vocabulary of words which perish and are forgot within the compass of the year.’ He proposes instead ‘a small portable vocabulary to be annually published’. Among the words that trouble him is the verb to negotiate, and he remarks that the late interest in China has led to much talk of pagodas, junks and palanquins.14 These comments were a response to the previous week’s issue of the magazine, in which Lord Chesterfield had extolled Johnson’s imminent Dictionary. Chesterfield had remarked that ‘Language is indisputably the more immediate province of the fair sex’ and that ‘The torrents of their eloquence … stun all opposition, and bear away in one promiscuous heap, nouns, pronouns, verbs, moods and tenses.’ Women, he claimed, were ‘forever enriching our language by words absolutely new’. It struck him that Johnson ought to add an appendix to his Dictionary – ‘a genteel neological dictionary, containing those polite … words and phrases, commonly used, and sometimes understood, by the BEAU MONDE’.15

  The need was clear.When do you think we find the first recorded use of the Norwegian word kraken or the Swedish nickel? What about savoir vivre, or indeed reinsurance, water-closet and ungainliness? And what about baksheesh and baddish – as in ‘My command of the local dialect was baddish, but I knew I was being importuned for baksheesh’? As it happens, all these words are first found in 1755, the year Johnson published his great lexicon, and it is in a translation, dating from that year, of Erich Pontoppidan’s Natural History of Norway that we first find the word ski. Contemporary critics thought these new words were depraved; Johnson was only one of many who worried about the ‘degeneracy’ of English. Thomas Sheridan, father of the playwright Richard Brinsley, believed that the language’s lack of inflexions made it vulnerable to barbarous incursions. Yet both accepted that, as knowledge increased, vocabulary had to increase too. Individual borrowings might be stigmatized, but, viewed more generally, borrowing was a mark of intellectual progress.

  Inevitably, many of the freshly imported words were connected with fashion, popular delusions and the mania for collecting. Others conveyed more sinister images of abroad. Public knowledge of Pasquale Paoli’s battle for Corsican independence, and his exile in Britain, raised awareness of the concept of the vendetta, which seemed to sum up the island’s spirit of rugged violence. Vampire was a more fashionable yet disturbing import, perhaps from the Magyar language of Hungary or from Serbo-Croatian; in an essay in the Gentleman’s Magazine for March 1732, readers were told how in that part of Europe ‘certain dead Bodies called Vampyres had kill’d Several Persons by sucking out their Blood’ and that ‘those who have been tormented or killed by Vampyres become Vampyres when they are dead.’16 It was not long before the word was being used of all manner of ruthless predators, of extortionate moneylenders, and even of bloodsucking bats.

  Benedict Anderson has written that ‘in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought. The century of the Enlightenment, of rationalist secularism, brought with it its own modern darkness.’17 An age in love with all things tangible, with discovering hard evidence and intriguing specimens, was inevitably sceptical, and, while there was a persistence of faith (as in the widespread conviction that language had been a gift from God), there was a new, almost profane, materialism.

  The period witnessed an explosion of print culture. Its new phenomena included printed tickets, advertisements and receipts, as well as posters, political pamphlets, children’s literature and street maps. Newspapers and magazines flourished. Magazine has its root in the Arabic mahsan, a storehouse; in 1755 Dr Johnson explains it as a ‘repository of provisions’, before adding that ‘Of late this word has signified a miscellaneous pamphlet, from a periodical miscellany named the Gentleman’s Magazine, by Edward Cave’ – a nice puff for his sometime employer. A magazine is either a stock of explosives, a detachable container that feeds cartridges into the breech of a gun, a topical TV show, or, most often, a periodical such as Time or Potato Grower. Each embodies the idea of things being stored up for selective use and enjoyment. After 1774, when the old common-law ‘perpetual’ copyright was ended, another kind of storehouse was able to bloom: the anthology, literally ‘a collection of flowers’. Inexpensive anthologies appealed to readers bent on self-improvement. They also created a sense of literary tradition, a canon of English literature.

  As print culture burgeoned, and as its mar
ket grew, the man of letters became a figure of social importance. While at the start of the century more than a third of the adult population knew how to write, only one in twenty could do so fluently. But the number of readers was on the increase, and they were voracious in their appetite for printed material. The novel, concerned with realistically depicting individual characters and their experiences, reflected the middle-class appetite for coherent, believable fiction. A popular work like Robinson Crusoe (1719) was devoured by philosophers and kitchen maids alike, and its author, Daniel Defoe, strove for a supple, artless style that would make it accessible. The rise of the novel was one part of a pattern in which prose writing became more important. In 1695 Parliament had allowed the statute that permitted pre-publication censorship to lapse, mainly for commercial reasons; the result was a more vigorous public exchange of opinions in the press. A culture of patronage gradually gave way to one in which writers vied for success in the marketplace. At the same time, women writers began to prosper, new legislation improved the rights of authors, and public libraries were set up. As printed material became more common, language was increasingly systematized.