Misprision has urged on the European desire to ‘civilize’ many who are already civilized. Languages, in particular, have on the flimsiest of grounds been dismissed as barbaric. The Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong’o has written that ‘Language … has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture.’ In describing his upbringing, as part of a family of‘about twenty-eight children’, he draws attention to the gap between his home life and the formal education he received. English was the language of the latter, and ‘one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment … or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY.’4 It is implicit that the author suffered this indignity himself, and his experience highlights the institutional suppression of African languages. This was practised by colonialists throughout Africa, and also by the owners of Africans transported as slaves across the Atlantic. Its effect, of course, was to drive these languages underground. Over time, fragments of their vocabularies have teased their way into the languages of the very people responsible for their suppression.
Examples are not hugely numerous, but they are forceful, even if we must hedge them round with qualifiers. Many have first come to light in America, where the legacy of slavery has been hauntingly profound. America’s slave population originated in a range of countries that included Ghana, Senegal, Angola and Nigeria. The slaves’ speech kept elements of their ancestral cultures alive. Eventually, as humanitarian reformists tackled slavery, and as segregation and discrimination were challenged, African traditions, cultural and linguistic alike, became more visible and audible to the rest of the population, in music, dance, literature, folklore, diet, clothing and the everyday use of language. For example, aspects of African culture have been nurtured in America by the Traditional Black Church, an independent institution that has felt no pressure to become Eurocentric.5 Oral tradition has been critical to the creation of African American culture. So has a capacity for combining the old with the new. The words that have emerged from this background seem steeped in the contrasting colours of freedom and suffering.
What are these words? Voodoo we have already seen. The Kongo language spoken today in Angola has provided zombie as well as its less common relative, jumby. Hausa, now mainly spoken in Niger, provides juju, ‘a fetish’, which is seemingly related to the French joujou, while honkie, a familiar term of disparagement for white people, derives from honq, the word for ‘pink’ in Wolof, which is spoken in Senegal, Mauritania and Gambia. Hip is thought to come from the Wolof hipi (‘to open one’s eyes’ – the hipster is open to experience in all its many hues), and the verbs in expressions such as ‘I’m digging this music’ and ‘You’re bugging me’ may also have Wolof origins. It is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he’d checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn’t been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK. Less problematically, the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are ‘frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes’. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6
Another channel is the Gullah creole spoken in the Sea Islands and the nearby coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina. A creole is a language that develops when people from different backgrounds are thrown together and have to arrive at a means of communicating. The vocabulary of Gullah contains words recognizably derived from West and Central African languages, among them Wolof, Hausa, Bambara, Ewe and Igbo. The creole’s foundations seem to have been laid on the Rice Coast, a traditionally agricultural region stretching from Senegal to Liberia. Slaves from this region were sought after by plantation owners who needed workers with experience of tending rice. The Gullah people are descended from these slaves, and today their tongue has as many as 250,000 speakers, although only a handful of them speak no other language.
Gullah has been identified as the precursor of modern African American English, and has provided mojo, as in Jim Morrison’s nickname Mr Mojo Risin’, as well as ninny, a slang term for a woman’s breast. Furthermore, there is a Gullah term juke or joog which means ‘disorderly’ or ‘wicked’, which probably comes from the Wolof dzug, ‘to live wickedly’. The Gullah word turns up in the Black American juke-joint and juke-house, both old names for roadside amusement parlours – establishments where the amusement was part musical and part sexual. These tended to have their own resident bands, but a machine enabling music to be played at the drop of a coin was always likely to prove at once more lucrative and more reliable: the 1890s saw the development of the coin-slot phonograph, and in the 1930s this was superseded by the Gothic triumph of tubes and chrome we know as the jukebox.
A related and more contentious subject is the etymology of jazz. The word seems first to have been used around 1913. Its early spellings were various (including both jas and jascz), and it was certainly in spoken currency before anyone troubled to write about it. One popular explanation traces it to the French Creole spoken in Louisiana. According to this school of thought, its antecedent is either the verb jaser, ‘to chatter like a magpie’, or chasser, meaning ‘to hunt’ – with its implications of spontaneity and wild movement. The trouble is, the use of this word to denote the style of music we know as jazz began in California, and only from there did it spread to Chicago and on to New Orleans. An alternative explanation is that jazz is linked to the Mandingo jasi, which means something along the lines of ‘to become abnormal’ or ‘to become exaggerated’.
The soul of jazz is African American. Its correlative is African American Vernacular English, that direct, performative and rapidly evolving object of controversy. Today, the interplay of black talk and Standard English is fertile – the differences between them less extreme than tends to be claimed – and African Americanisms wield a small yet significant influence over the use and lexicon of Standard English. While there remains wide resistance to black language – which is perceived in certain quarters as lazy, solecistic, illogical, a mark of poor education and low academic ability, and inimical to its speakers’ learning standard forms – the fact remains that it is commonly co-opted by advertisers, and nowhere is its presence more keenly felt than in music, a medium which quickly and memorably disseminates words and phrases among people (mainly young people) of very diverse backgrounds. As one recent account notes, ‘African Americans are on the cutting edge of the sociolinguistic situation in the USA’ and ‘Hip Hop Nation Language’ is ‘the cutting edge of the cutting edge’.7 Moving beyond the US, the impact of African American vernaculars is evident in ‘a sense of the figurative possibilities behind the sentence; a sense of the flow and flavour of rhyme, meter, assonance, and alliteration’.8 Plainly, yet also subtly, across a large part of the English-speaking world the cadences, vocabulary, tone and tenor of Black Englishes are asserting themselves. Each assertion is a reassertion.
So are Standard English and the locutions of African American and Black British English converging, or are they moving further apart? Observation suggests there is convergence. The widespread adoption of Black English usage by people of other heritages is a form of ‘inward borrowing’, a process whereby a word moves from a particular department of the language into more general use. This is a vital theme of Modern English.
15. Angst
Anxiety, anguish, neurotic fear, dread, guilt
The word is German, related to the Latin angustus, meaning ‘narrow’ or ‘restricted’. It has been popularized through the works of Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung and Martin Heidegger.
I
n the twentieth century the English lexicon grew by some 90,000 words. Of these, around 5,000 were imported from other languages – a large enough number, but the smallest volume of borrowings in any century since the Norman Conquest. The variety of languages from which English borrowed was greater than ever. An increasing number of cultures were impinging on English, which in turn was impinging on an increasing number of others. Continuities were evident, but so were newly brittle patterns of usage.
John Evelyn could refer to a chassis in 1664, Tobias Smollett to a cabriolet in 1766, and Thackeray to a hangar in 1852, but the phenomena with which we now associate these words – as well as a host of others that share with them the distinction of originating in French, such as limousine, chauffeur and fuselage – are twentieth-century creations. Although the first internal-combustion engine was designed in the early years of the nineteenth century, large-scale manufacturing of cars did not begin until Ransom Olds launched his first assembly line in Detroit in 1901. Two years later, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The implications of these events were huge. Both ultimately accelerated human relations. The car, especially, has liberated and mobilized us, affording us opportunities to see people and places we could never otherwise have seen, yet it has become a kind of shield, ‘quasi-heraldic’, a tool that is more than just a tool.1
The twentieth century witnessed many such doubled-edged achievements, both liberating and estranging. Man walked on the moon. The atom was split. Widespread electrification allowed us to tap into the world’s energy resources. Other notable innovations included personal computers and television – and, on a smaller scale, nylon, oral contraceptives and the credit card. We might also flag up mechanized agriculture, dramatic improvements in water supply, the development of lasers and fibre optics, or the rise of household appliances like the electric oven and the vacuum cleaner. Concurrently, the age of empires folded. Western control in the East declined, and Japan and China became major world powers.
Yet this was above all a century of science, of technical and theoretical advances that to many observers seemed nothing short of sorcery, and a century of wars, of slaughter on a giant scale – ‘the bloodiest century in modern history’ according to one recent study, and ‘far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era’.2 The two domains, war and science, were closely related. As the century unfurled, scientific endeavour’s ‘centre of gravity’ moved from Europe to America, with obvious political and lexical consequences.3 The wars, meanwhile, were of a kind not previously experienced – industrial, technologized.
War disrupts language even as it depends on it. Familiar assumptions are destabilized, as are everyday moral categories.4 People used to speak of ‘a boast of soldiers’ – as they still do of ‘a flock of sheep’ or ‘a futility of husbands’ – and military vocabulary has a necessarily triumphalist ring. Moreover, soldiering lies behind many common idioms. If you choose explicitly to stick to your guns, dig yourself in, mark time, fall into line, steal a march or take somewhere by storm, you are exploiting this tradition. This is the talk of troops on the front line – to be supplemented by something more transient, the virile jargon that builds unity in the trenches and the barracks. Yet, as technology has become ever more central to military dominance, so the lexis has become more opaque: the language of modern warfare, as of modern policing, is robotic.
Whenever war is raging, we assimilate new words. The atrocities of modern combat are neutralized with talk of friendly fire and collateral damage, terms eloquent only of the bureaucratic nature of the modern military. Euphemisms rub epauletted shoulders with detachments of management speak and pseudo-science – plus the odd blackly humorous item like gremlin. In this context the verb degrade means kill, while explosive device and physics package take the place of bomb and warhead. The noun incident is used of almost any unsavoury occurrence. Today’s army officers sound like business consultants, trading in impressive gibberish or fancy obfuscations. Violence is routinely disguised. Talk of engagements, operations or that old CIA favourite clandestine activities is, according to your perspective, quaint, diplomatic or appallingly evasive. In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military’s deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a ‘pre-dawn vertical insertion’. And, in a surprising return to the spirit of the spice wars, President Ronald Reagan whimsically excused the intervention on the grounds that Grenada was the world’s richest source of nutmeg, explaining that ‘You can’t make eggnog without nutmeg.’5
Conflict also causes us to absorb words from our enemies’ languages. As a result of the Napoleonic Wars, we have French terms like battalion, bayonet, fusillade and grenade. Commando, a word originally Portuguese, became highly visible at the time of the Boer War, as did laager, and the political tensions of Victorian South Africa lent currency to terms like trek and kraal. The First World War was remarkable for its violence and for the technical innovations it unleashed. From German we learnt a wave of new items – ersatz, achtung, the calque expression ‘sunk without trace’ – and from French camouflage and the suddenly popular espionage. In the wake of the war came the distress signal mayday (from French: m’aidez). The Spanish Civil War brought in the fifth column – one of its earliest adopters was Ernest Hemingway. The rise of fascism and the Second World War popularized Weltpolitik and Herrenvolk, and then blitzkrieg and quisling. Scorched earth was calqued on a Chinese expression, common under Chiang Kai-shek; Japanese involvement in the war gave an international profile to the code of honour known as Bushido. One of the features of the Second World War was a vocabulary of military ‘philosophy’, which James Dawes has called a ‘rationalized organization of violence’. The six-year conflict ‘saw language shattered in the centralizing bureaucracies of the military-industrial [powers] … and reinvented in the rise of international human rights law’.6
Our vocabulary of warfare comprises many other obviously foreign words: torpedo, guerrilla, salvo, bazooka. Of these, guerrilla is especially interesting, as it gained currency during the Peninsular War of 1808-14, when the British encouraged the efforts of Spanish partisans against Napoleon’s army; the OED gives as the first recorded instance a dispatch written in 1809 by the Duke of Wellington. Literally meaning ‘little war’, it at first denoted wars against France and the French revolutionary cause. Only in 1959, with the Cuban Revolution, was the word appropriated by Marxists .7 We associate it immediately with the handsome visage of Che Guevara, plastered on countless student bedroom walls. Yet we also know that the term has broadened its scope to include all manner of irregular and independent practices, not many of which are really belligerent. So, for instance, a trawl through a well-stocked bookshop will reveal titles such as Guerrilla Marketing: Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business, Guerrilla Home Recording and The Guerrilla Guide to Credit Repair. What we see here is common enough: small business and personal finance, as well as film-making and music production, are presented as exercises in military stealth.
The imagery of war, at first shocking and alien, rapidly gets attached to the trivial and everyday. Thus the term kamikaze is now most often used metaphorically and hyperbolically: of a rodeo rider, an aggressive driver or someone hooked on speed-dating. Yet kamikaze has the literal meaning ‘divine wind’ – something beautiful, ethereal, enormous – and was originally used in Japanese of a wind that destroyed a fleet of invading Mongols in 1281. It was adopted into English by the half-Greek, half-Irish travel writer Lafcadio Hearn at the end of the nineteenth century, and acquired greater currency after the suicidal attacks by Japanese pilots on Allied ships in the Pacific in the autumn of 1944. The OED cites the poet Sylvia Plath as the first to use the word figuratively to suggest any kind of reckless and self-destructive behaviour. In the context of Plath’s pathos-laden writing, the word is potent, but its painful specificity has since been deadened by casual use. Many Japanese terms w
ere transformed amid the carnage of the Second World War. The best example is banzai; once a cheer used in greeting the emperor, it became a vicious war cry, unavoidably associated with Japan’s fanatical soldiers. Now it is probably best known as the name of a spoof gameshow and a hapless hyena in The Lion King, or, when shouted, as an expression of forced jollity. The postwar occupation popularized other Japanese words, such as honcho, which circulated among American servicemen in Korea and was later given an unwelcome boost during the Watergate hearings.8
A more extreme example of semantic blunting is bikini. This was the name of an atoll in the Marshall Islands where an atomic bomb was tested in July 1946, and it was adopted as a word for a significant explosion. The style of bathing suit we now know as the bikini existed before then, but got its name only when the designer Louis Réard chose to use it to draw attention to a collection he was showing a few days after the bomb test. Bikini, we might argue, should have become a word to sum up the devastation that a nuclear weapon can cause; instead it became a word for a skimpy piece of beach attire.
One word not transformed in this way is holocaust, which from the 1950s was – with an initial capital – the standard name for the Nazis’ campaign of destruction against European Jews. It derives from the Greek rendering of a Hebrew word meaning ‘completely burnt’, and can be found in Tyndale’s Bible in the early sixteenth century. The Hebrew term was connected with sacrifice – religious offerings had to be burnt in their entirety – but it clearly now has nothing to do with sacrifice in this sense. However, its force seems too specifically Jewish to allow wider use. Ideological purists prefer the half-Greek, half-Latin genocide to denote the mass destruction of an ethnic or religious group.
The Secret Life of Words Page 37