The Secret Life of Words

by Henry Hitchings

  30 James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 146.

  31 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (London: Fontana, 1989), 198-9.

  32 See Kingsley Bolton, Chinese Englishes: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 145.

  33 Raymond Chang and Margaret Scrogin Chang, Speaking of Chinese (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 11.

  34 Martin Booth, Opium: A History (London: Pocket Books, 1997), 110.

  35 Emperor Qian Long’s letter is quoted in Nayan Chanda, Bound Together: How Traders, Preachers, Adventurers, and Warriors Shaped Globalization (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2007), 35.

  36 Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 123.

  37 A Vocabulary, Containing Chinese Words and Phrases Peculiar to Canton and Macao, and to the Trade of those Places (Macao: The Honourable Company’s Press, 1824).

  38 See Mimi Chan and Helen Kwok, A Study of Lexical Borrowing from Chinese into English with Special Reference to Hong Kong (Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, 1985), 83, 88, 91.

  39 Anatoly Lieberman, Word Origins … and How We Know Them (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 140.

  40 McArthur, Oxford Guide to World English, 358.

  Chapter 12: Blizzard

  1 The Diary of Samuel Sewall, I, 543.

  2 Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World, 43.

  3 See Peter C. Herman, ‘“We All Smoke Here”: Behn’s The Widdow Ranter and the Invention of American Identity’, in Robert Appelbaum and John Wood Sweet (eds.), Envisioning an English Empire: Jamestown and the Making of the North Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 254-74.

  4 See H. L. Mencken, The American Language, 4th edn (New York: Knopf, 1963), 5.

  5 Hoffer, Sensory Worlds in Early America, 217-18.

  6 David K. Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf, America in So Many Words: Words That Have Shaped America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 70.

  7 Quoted in Jill Lepore, A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York: Knopf, 2002), 5.

  8 Linda and Roger Flavell, The Chronology of Words and Phrases, 213.

  9 John S. Farmer (ed.), Americanisms – Old and New (London: Thomas Poulter, 1889), x, xiii.

  10 Mencken, The American Language, 498-501.

  11 See Baugh and Cable, A History of the English Language, 360.

  12 G. Hughes, A History of English Words, 284-5.

  13 Ostler, Empires of the Word, 490.

  14 Stuart Berg Flexner, I Hear America Talking: An Illustrated Treasury of American Words and Phrases (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1976), 20.

  15 For this last example, see Beverly Olson Flanigan, ‘Different Ways of Talking in the Buckeye State (Ohio)’, in Walt Wolfram and Ben Ward (eds.), American Voices: How Dialects Differ from Coast to Coast (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 122.

  16 It is worth noting here that many other states have names that now seem prosaic but must once have been poetic: Alabama takes its name from a Choctaw expression meaning ‘I open the thicket,’ while Minnesota’s comes from a Dakota Sioux word for ‘sky-tinted water’, and Kansas is, in Sioux, the ‘land of the south wind people’.

  17 Harold W. Bentley, A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English: With Special Reference to the American Southwest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 56.

  18 John Algeo,‘Spanish Loanwords in English by 1900’, in Felix Rodriguez Gonzalez (ed.), Spanish Loanwords in the English Language (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996), 13-40.

  19 Bentley, A Dictionary of Spanish Terms in English, 101.

  20 Ibid., 197.

  21 Garland Cannon, ‘Recent Borrowings from Spanish’, in Gonzalez (ed.), Spanish Loanwords in the English Language, 45.

  22 Thomas E. Murray, ‘Spanish Loanwords in Contemporary American English Slang’, in Gonzalez (ed.), Spanish Loanwords in the English Language, 105-37.

  23 Terms specific to particular regions are much less likely to make the journey. A non-American speaker of English will in all likelihood be flummoxed by the Southern pulley bone (wishbone), the Midland spouts (gutters) or the Northern spider (frying pan). Yet much American regional usage can be traced back to the colonial period.

  24 Christian Mair, Twentieth-Century English: History, Variation, and Standardization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 60.

  25 My information here is taken mainly from Sol Steinmetz, Yiddish and English:The Story of Yiddish in America, 2nd edn (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001).

  26 This definition is provided by Gene Bluestein in Anglish-Yinglish: Yiddish in American Life and Literature (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 57.

  27 Quoted in Leo Rosten, Hooray for Yiddish! (London: Elm Tree Books, 1983), 85.

  28 This example is from Steinmetz, Yiddish and English, 74.

  29 Richard W. Bailey, ‘The English Language in Canada’, in Bailey and Görlach (eds), English as a World Language, 141.

  Chapter 13: Ethos

  1 Quoted in Doug Nickel, ‘The Camera and Other Drawing Machines’, in Mike Weaver (ed.), British Photography in the Nineteenth Century: The Fine Art Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1.

  2 Meena Alexander, ‘Shelley’s India: Territory and Text, Some Problems of Decolonization’, in Betty T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (eds.), Shelley: Poet and Legislator of the World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 171-2.

  3 See Frances Austin, The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989).

  4 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1988), 31-2.

  5 This subject is covered in depth in Graham Tulloch, The Language of Walter Scott (London: André Deutsch, 1980), 182-266.

  6 Manfred Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 103.

  7 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 12 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973-82), V, 45.

  8 Garland Cannon, ‘Turkish and Persian Loans in English Literature’, Neophilologus 84 (2000), 291-2.

  9 Fiona MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend (London: Faber, 2003), 128.

  10 In relation to the latter, see Tilar J. Mazzeo, ‘The Strains of Empire: Shelley and the Music of India’, in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 180-96.

  11 H. G.Wells, A Short History of the World (London: Collins, 1934), 274-5.

  12 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 187.

  13 Quoted in Ostler, Empires of the Word, 511.

  14 Emerson, English Traits, 115-16.

  15 Sassoon, The Culture of the Europeans from 1800 to the Present, 596.

  16 Pei, The Story of the English Language, 102.

  17 Lawrence James, The Middle Class: A History (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 232.

  18 See Michael Shortland, ‘Geology’, in Sally Mitchell (ed.), Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (New York : Garland, 1988), 327-8.

  19 Barfield, History in English Words, 193.

  20 Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 86-7, 100.

  21 Enquire Within Upon Everything, 69th edn (London: Houlston, 1884), 270-71, 280.

  22 Michael Curtin, Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners (New York: Garland, 1987), 46-7.

  23 The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook of Etiquette for Ladies and Gentlemen (London: James Hogg, 1859), 219.

  24 Ibid., 49.

  25 Thomas Preston, A Dictionary of Daily Blunders (London: Whittaker & Co., 1880), 56.

  26 Ibid., 5, 7.

  27 D’Israeli, Amenities of Literature, 361.

  28 Henry Alford, A Plea for the Queen’s English (London: Strahan, 1864), 6, 28
0.

  29 Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England, 108.

  30 Lynda Mugglestone, ‘English in the Nineteenth Century’, in Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford History of English, 299.

  31 Pedro Carolino, The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English (Peking: privately published, 1869), 109, 134.

  32 Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England, 107.

  33 For a full account, see Lynda Mugglestone, Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 102-9.

  34 William B. Hodgson, Errors in the Use of English (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1881), 65-6, 70.

  35 J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1884), 57, 304.

  36 K. C. Phillips, Language and Class in Victorian England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 1-23.

  37 These details are taken from Dea Birkett, Spinsters Abroad: Victorian Lady Explorers (London: Gollancz, 1991).

  38 Roswell Park, A Hand-Book for American Travellers in Europe (New York: Putnam, 1853), 48.

  39 Grant Allen, The European Tour: A Handbook for Americans and Colonists (London: Grant Richards, 1899), 2, 190.

  40 Hugh and Pauline Massingham, The Englishman Abroad (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1984), 60, 144.

  41 Ibid., 107, 117.

  42 Ibid., 47, 50.

  43 Ibid., 17.

  44 Anton Tien, The Levant Interpreter; A Polyglot Dialogue Book for English Travellers in the Levant (London: Williams and Norgate, 1879), 102, 114.

  45 Practical Guide for the Wintering Places of the South (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1872), xlix.

  46 Williams, Keywords, 41.

  47 See Michael Baxandall, ‘The Language of Art Criticism’, in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (eds.), The Language of Art History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

  48 See Richard Gilman, Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet (London: Secker & Warburg, 1979), 73-109.

  49 Some of these examples are borrowed from Charles T. Carr, The German Influence on the English Vocabulary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934).

  50 Barbara M. H. Strang, A History of English (London: Routledge, 1989), 124. Glockenspiel, known from the 1820s, hardly counts, and leitmotiv, another word which might be considered an exception, comes much later.

  51 Pasta comes in many forms. Most of us would recognize macaroni and tagliatelle as words absorbed into common use, but what of mostaccioli or tonnarelli?

  52 Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery, for Private Families, rev. edn (London: Longman, 1865), 605-22.

  53 Richard W. Bailey, Nineteenth-Century English (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 162.

  54 Christine Ammer, Fruitcakes and Couch Potatoes and Other Delicious Expressions (New York: Plume, 1995), 100-101.

  55 Massialot’s book, arranged alphabetically, is described by Roy Strong as ‘the great cookery classic of the eighteenth century’. Roy Strong, Feast: A History of Grand Eating (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002), 229.

  56 The Forme of Cury, A Roll of Ancient English Cookery (London: J. Nichols, 1780), 67. Cury was a general term for cookery, deriving from the French queurie.

  57 Guardian, 19 April 2001.

  Chapter 14: Voodoo

  1 Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, 312-14.

  2 Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 217-18.

  3 Allan Metcalf, The World in So Many Words (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 67-8.

  4 Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 10-13.

  5 Geneva Smitherman, ‘Word from the Hood: The Lexicon of African-American Vernacular English’, in Salikoko S. Mufwene, John R. Rickford, Guy Bailey and John Baugh (eds.), African-American English: Structure, History, and Use (London: Routledge, 1998), 209-10.

  6 David Dalby, ‘The African Element in American English’, in Thomas Kochman (ed.), Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out: Communication in Urban Black America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 177, 185.

  7 H. Samy Alim, ‘Hip Hop Nation’, in Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 396.

  8 Lerer, Inventing English, 233.

  Chapter 15: Angst

  1 I take my lead here from L. J. K. Setright, Drive On! A Social History of the Motor Car (London: Granta, 2003), 178.

  2 Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (London: Allen Lane, 2006), xxxiv.

  3 I have borrowed this image from Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994), 523.

  4 For a sustained discussion of the way war and its strategic violence influence language, see James Dawes, The Language of War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the Civil War through World War II (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).

  5 For the text of President Reagan’s speech, see http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1984/12684h.htm.

  6 Dawes, The Language of War, 23.

  7 Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, 78-9.

  8 Garland Cannon, The Japanese Contributions to the English Language (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1996), 63.

  9 Peter Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places: Life and Art in the 20th Century (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 13.

  10 Fredric Jameson, The Prison-House of Language (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 195.

  11 See Marjorie Perloff, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 82-101.

  12 I adapt this idea from Derek Attridge, ‘The Wake’s Confounded Language’, in Morris Beja and Shari Benstock (eds.), Coping with Joyce: Essays from the Copenhagen Symposium (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989).

  13 Conrad, Modern Times, Modern Places, 125.

  14 A reference to robota can be found in an English translation dating from 1797 of a work by the conspiracy theorist Augustin Barruel. See Christopher Goulding, ‘Robot: Antedating the Entry in the Oxford English Dictionary’, Notes and Queries 52 (2005), 380-81.

  15 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York : Macmillan, 1899), 75.

  16 Samuel Johnson, The Idler and the Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 125.

  17 John Hood, Selling the Dream: Why Advertising is Good Business (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), 32, 40.

  18 Robert O’Brien, This is San Francisco (New York: Whittlesey House, 1948), 83-4.

  19 Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006), 186-7.

  20 For a fuller treatment of the subject, see G. Hughes, Words in Time, 67-91.

  21 David Crystal, By Hook or by Crook: A Journey in Search of English (London: HarperPress, 2007), 271-2.

  22 David S. Levine, ‘“My Client Has Discussed Your Proposal to Fill the Drainage Ditch with His Partners”: Legal Language’, in Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks (eds.), The State of the Language (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 406.

  23 Tony Thorne, Shoot the Puppy: A Survival Guide to the Curious Jargon of Modern Life (London: Penguin, 2006), 28-9.

  24 Kenneth Hudson, The Jargon of the Professions (London: Macmillan, 1978), 14-15.

  25 Adrian Furnham, The Psychology of Managerial Incompetence: A Sceptic’s Dictionary of Modern Organizational Issues (London: Whurr, 1998), 99.

  26 Richard Maltby (ed.), Dreams for Sale: Popular Culture in the 20th Century (London: Harrap, 1989), 19.

  27 Melanie Phillips, ‘Illiberal Liberalism’, in Sarah Dunant (ed.), The War of the Words: The Political Correctness Debate (London: Virago, 1994), 47.

  28 Glanville Price, ‘Romani’, in Glanville Price (ed.), Languages in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 207.

  29 See Anthony P. Grant, ‘Romani Words in Non-Standard British En
glish and the Development of Angloromani’, in Yaron Matras (ed.), The Romani Element in Non-Standard Speech (Wisebaden: HarrassowitzVerlag, 1998).

  30 Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and Culture, 29, 32, 37, 41, 43, 51-3.

  31 This is too large a subject to cover in detail here. A recent and impressive scholarly study is Andrew Goatly, Washing the Brain – Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007).