The changing theatres and practices of war continue to thrust new words into the limelight. A recent example is jihad, which I mentioned briefly in my opening chapter. The word has been used in English since the second half of the nineteenth century, but is now inextricably associated with the new breeds of militant Islamist who have emerged over the last decade. Whereas in Arabic, fighting and hostility are only parts of jihad – which can be understood as a larger struggle towards the realization of a perfect faith – the word is used in English of a form of violence without ethical limit, carried out in the name of religion but with obvious political intent. Moreover, it has spawned jihadist, a word that manages to be at once ersatz and downright sinister.
In time of war, while new terms are swiftly acquired, some existing loanwords are demonized. Our pets and the food we consume are especially vulnerable to this. The dachshund, so strongly associated with Germany, became a ‘liberty pup’ during the First World War, and after it the increasingly popular German Shepherds were renamed Alsatians in light of persisting anti-German feeling. During the same period frankfurters and sauerkraut were relabelled as ‘hot dogs’ and ‘liberty cabbage’. In the Second World War the Japanese showed a similar concern with eradicating traces of the enemy from their language, and dropped certain American terms customarily used in baseball – for instance, first base became ichi ryu.
Given the turbulent history of Russia in the twentieth century, together with its large presence in world events, it is hardly a surprise that the bulk of Russian borrowings into English occurred during that period. On the whole, those Russian words that are known to English-speakers are reserved for purely Russian phenomena: examples are dacha, babushka and shashlik. But there are exceptions. Czar and tsar, which came in during the sixteenth century, when trade with Russia was in its infancy, have slackened to suggest not just an emperor, but any dictatorial figure of authority, and other borrowings before the last century – steppe, samovar, mammoth, pogrom – have assumed wider significance. In the nineteenth century Russian literature was a conduit of influence on English, and in the twentieth science played the same role. But above all in the last century there was a large category of vivid, specialized borrowings needed to convey the workings of the region’s politics. Now, as memories of the Cold War and Communism recede, the currency of these words diminishes. They were used to play up the difference between ‘us’ and ‘them’; today the political motives for dramatizing that difference are less urgent.
Soviet and Bolshevik are used far less widely than they were a generation ago. The cosmonaut and sputnik, beacons of Soviet technical achievement, also seem superannuated. We no longer hear the once-common kulak or ukase. Perestroika and glasnost – both of which were indices of political and social changes in the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s, and were later used more generally – have declined in popularity, as have the values they denote. Those terms that live on are redolent of a half-interred past: examples are agitprop, apparatchik and samizdat. The last of these, which denotes the clandestine copying of state-suppressed texts, was coined by the poet Nikolai Glazkov, who was active in the 1930s and ‘40s. In an age where the Internet allows individuals to circulate messages with a minimum of state scrutiny, it looks doomed, though we should note the Chinese authorities’ use of ‘deep packet inspection’ to identify subversive online communication. Intelligentsia, whose early adopters included H. G.Wells and Aldous Huxley, also seems to be a concept in decline, although readers of this book may demur. A few Russian-sourced calques have lasted: fellow traveller, the party line, and (possibly) bogeyman. But, overall, the Russian element in English is increasingly tinged with nostalgia. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the prospects for the Russian language have not looked auspicious, and significant loans from this source are from now on likely to be more scarce, despite the international wanderings of Russian-speaking plutocrats.
In the years after the First World War and the Russian Revolution there gathered the insurgent energies of Modernism. The movement’s defining mission was a rethinking of fundamentals, in the service of the spiritually and practically enriching possibilities of new art, architecture and design, often to be facilitated by machines. ‘We all make vows to ourselves on New Year’s Eve,’ writes Peter Conrad, and ‘The twentieth century began with the bravest, most ambitious, perhaps the most foolhardy of such self-improving resolutions: a promise to make the world modern, which meant to create it all over again.’9 For the innovators who sought to live up to this promise, the forces of progress needed a new analytical language.
Reviewing humankind’s achievements in the twentieth century, it is impossible not to see the long shadows cast by Marx, Freud and Einstein, the architects of socialism, psychoanalysis and the atomic age. They renovated thought, and their achievements are legible in language we use every day. I shall say more about Freud soon, but for now it is worth pausing to reflect on the peculiarly post-Einsteinian resonance of photon, space-time, quantum and curvature, as well as relativity, and of the Marxist tang of alienation, bourgeoisie, hegemony, proletariat and praxis. We should note as well that Marxist language now tends to convey an air of contempt that Marx would not have recognized.
The fixation of bourgeois citizens with drawing up an inventory of all things they possessed was guyed by the surrealists, whose work celebrated desire, the unconscious and the magic of madness. The noun surréalisme was coined by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire in 1917, and was adopted by André Breton as the name for a movement of convulsive artistic liberation. Cyril Connolly would use it with its French spelling in 1927; the English version became current a decade later. The word’s tentative emergence may suggest a certain reticence about embracing this attention-seeking assault on order and conformism. At a time when political relationships within Europe were being nervously recalibrated, it seemed tactlessly selfindulgent.
The Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson has argued that an important trait of modernity is a move ‘away from positive content, and from the various dogmatisms of the signifier’. 10 The key idea here is that the mechanisms we use to create meaning (words or signs) are not the same thing as the meaning itself; it appears to follow that one can create meaning without using those established mechanisms. Surreal and modernist art explored new ways of doing this. Hints of the period’s artistic temper were contained in new borrowings from French: collage, cubism, montage, élan vital (coined by Henri Bergson), and, less seriously, ooh-la-la. The magazine transition was founded in 1927 by an American exiled in Europe, Eugene Jolas, and became a furnace of avant-garde creativity. Jolas craved what he called ‘an enrichment of language’, comprising ‘new words, millions of words’. He sought to break down the barriers between different languages, celebrated the modern lexicon’s ‘scintillating assemblage of phonetic novelties’, and made sure that the verbiage of high culture was spread as far as possible, in the hope of driving out the ideology of what he saw as ‘a rotting civilization’. Borrowing from other languages created a ‘fantasia of many-tongued words’; it promised to erase borders and inequalities.11
For Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dadaism, sound mattered more than sense. Some observers thought that Dada took its name from the French word for a hobby horse, but the Dadaists cultivated confusion about its etymology. Devotion to reason seemed destined to lead only to conflict; the Dadaists renounced bourgeois rationality and aesthetics, choosing instead anarchy – a preference for instinct rather than meaning. In an appealing irony, while the exiled Dadaists fermented raucous discontent at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire, another exile, Lenin, drew up his plans for political revolution in an apartment nearby. (Cabaret had only lately come to signify a nightclub offering a floor show; originally it had meant a wooden shed or booth.) For a generation of radicals, even if actions spoke much louder than words, there had to be a new vocabulary of dissent and self-realization. This vocabulary is with us still. To the period between the wars we can trace the rise of atonal, pressure gro
up, escapism and technocrat; sociopath, autism and sex drive; and, reenergized and repositioned, nucleus, partisan, workshop, serious and stream of consciousness.
Many of these words were offshoots of older ones or were clawed back from oblivion. To seminal writers such as James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, other people’s leftovers were the ingredients of their urban masterpieces. In Finnegans Wake (1939) Joyce audaciously reversed the experience of Babel, making a universal language out of the cacophony of different tongues. The book, famously difficult, at once celebrated the possibility that we could all make sense of each other and invited a bleak sort of amusement at the expense of our mutual incomprehension.12 It may also have inspired the adoption of the German word quark, literally a curd (and, less literally, an item of no consequence), to denote a tiny fundamental particle that is one of the building blocks of the atom. For his part Eliot redeemed words used in Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour, while for Virginia Woolf’s character Katharine Hilbery, in Night and Day (1919), there was to be a new language that could enable ‘a riveting together of the shattered fragments of the world’. In 1922 – the year of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Waste Land, as well as of the Ottoman Empire’s abolition and the founding of the BBC – newly used words included anschluss and provocateur; in the previous few years one could have spotted not only fascist and putsch, but also yippee and blah. Political nervousness precluded neither excitement nor world-weariness.
In radically different ways, ranging from vandalism to the most abstruse kind of scholarship, modernism’s pioneers tried to replenish meaning by dismantling received ideas. As Peter Conrad observes, a central requirement of modernism was ‘to insist on knowing how things work’, and after Einstein’s theoretical advances ‘physics treated the universe itself as a kit of parts.’13 The mechanics of experience could be picked to pieces: the possibilities of science and technology seemed boundless. In his play R.U.R. (1920) Karel apek used robota, a Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning ‘forced labour’, to signify a new type of ‘artificial’ being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future’s potential.
The first English reference to a robot is dated by the OED to 1923. That same year, in his Vers une architecture, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier presented a seasonable blueprint: the house as a machine à habiter. Le Corbusier’s model dwelling had to be elegantly proportional, but also geared towards hygiene and warmth. The new purity he sought to introduce into the world of objects was embodied in his celebrated Villa Savoye, built at Poissy near Paris. The reinforced concrete stilts that supported the house’s upper structure were called pilotis. The word seemed unfamiliar to English-speaking admirers, yet had been used in an English text as early as the seventeenth century – and by no less an eighteenth-century writer than Defoe. For Le Corbusier, the piloti was supposed to give the sense of a building floating in the air yet still connected to the ground. In acknowledging this paradox – the simultaneous desires for connection and disconnection – and in developing an architectural style that was geometric, machinist, anonymous and utopian, he grasped the architect’s social responsibilities while also tapping into the rising spirit of consumerism, in which pleasure was presented as highly individual yet was assiduously mass-produced.
In person and in his philosophy, Le Corbusier insisted on a manicured anonymity. His real name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret; he adopted his pseudonym as part of an attempt to prove that people, objects and communities could be refashioned. Yet his functional artefacts appealed to the adherents of conspicuous consumption. That phrase’s originator, Thorstein Veblen, explained it as ‘a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure. As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.’15 Veblen reported the tendency to buy goods for show – to satisfy psychological needs, not practical ones. This was not a new phenomenon, but it had become more perceptible in the 1880s with the development of the department store, and it ballooned in the early years of the century that followed. (For me, at least,‘conspicuous consumption’ calls to mind Jay Gatsby’s tear-jerking panoply of shirts and the Xanadu of Citizen Kane.) Among the most striking features of the twentieth century as a whole was the growth of the leisure industry, which became a bigger and bigger part of the world’s industrialized economies. Work came to be seen as a necessary obstacle to enjoyment. Leisure meanwhile became narcissistic, and the language of leisure became self-involved.
One symptom of this has been the changing use of the word addict. Many of us think of addiction as properly referring to drug addiction, so it may come as a surprise to find Gladstone referring in 1858 to an ‘addiction to agricultural pursuits’ or Edward Phillips in 1675 mentioning Shakespeare’s ‘addiction to books’. The noun addict is a twentieth-century coinage, initially used exclusively of habitual drug-users. But it has come to encapsulate the pathological tendencies of modern living. We continually hear about addicts of sex, shopping, chocolate, slot machines, chatrooms, gossip, fashion and television. More than anything, these are addicts of the New. Addicts think of themselves as addicts, and this affects not just their self-image, but also their relationships.
Consumerism has generally altered the way we classify people. We judge those around us by what they own and how they spend their money. The emergence of the teenager – of a self-conscious youth culture – was a phenomenon of the 1940s and ‘50s. It amounted to a youth-led revolution. The actual concept of a teenager was much older (and adolescence had been adopted by John Lydgate in the fifteenth century), but to the 1940s we can date a new, decisive, use of it as a means of classifying a large and diverse group through a single characteristic. In the same period there emerged hipster, youth club and baby boom, and in 1942 the Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons explicitly identified what he called youth culture.
This appealed to the advertising industry. As we know, advertising propagates desire. In an essay that appeared more than 250 years ago, Samuel Johnson diagnosed that ‘Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,’ and explained that ‘Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very neglectfully perused, and it is therefore become necessary to gain attention by magnificence of promises, and by eloquence sometimes sublime and sometimes pathetic.’16 Advertising puts pressure on us to identify ourselves through what we consume. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that it exists to make us feel bad about ourselves and salve our bad feelings by spending money. Companies commissioning advertisements certainly recognize the need to prey on insecurities. The General Motors executive Charles Kettering, who invented the electric ignition system for cars, aptly spoke of ‘the organized creation of dissatisfaction’. What we are being sold is Hope.
Advertising has been around for several millennia – since at least 5,000 years ago, when Babylonian cobblers hung from their doors the shoes they had expertly mended – but it was in the first three decades of the twentieth century that it became a coherent, systematic business, grounded in market research. One of the architects of this change was King Gillette. Gillette’s The Human Drift (1894) was a disturbing manifesto which envisioned a society where mass marketing would eliminate the very essence of human character and individuality.17 Whereas Thorstein Veblen had had his pet terms, like the pejorative and pseudo-French nouveaux arrivés (along with emulative and ostensible), Gillette had no gift for neologism or indeed for prose. Mass distribution of disposable goods was his forte – he sold 168 razor blades in 1903, 12 million the following year – and his aggressive and shrewdly positioned advertising played a key role in shaping consumer culture. After Gillette, and then especially in the 1960s, the philosophy of
advertising became scientific. As goods became less truly magical to those who acquired them, the methods of their promotion had to evolve. It seems relevant that the word hype – a debased scrag of Greek – acquired its present meaning in that decade; one early appearance noted by the OED is in an article in the Sunday Times, in August 1968, where the author explained, ‘Hype is an American word for the gentle art of getting a tune into the pop charts without actually selling any records. Its methods are various: from the crudest bribery to devious techniques for upsetting the … calculations of chart-compilers.’ We know this well, though it hardly now seems a ‘gentle’ art.
The business of advertising has its own cant, in which products effect miracles and realize fantasies. Vagueness is invaluable: empty claims are clothed in the illusory skeins of exactitude. An especially tired formula is the use of luxury as an attributive. Once, an advertiser had only to attach this word to a cruise, a flat or a brand of toilet paper and the item acquired cachet. Now, however, we tend to be suspicious of it. What was formerly ‘luxurious’ has been democratized. True luxury may have kept its sparkle, but in this realm the word luxury is avoided, as it is associated with vulgarity and striving aspiration. Most of us know, from our own painful experience, that any food described as mouth-watering and any hotel that boasts of its old-world charm will leave us somewhere short of total satisfaction.
The Secret Life of Words Page 38