Wicked
a radical alteration (13th century)
When a word changes its meaning, it can sometimes take people by surprise, especially when the new meaning is very different from the old one. In the later decades of the 20th century, parents were taken aback when they heard their children start using wicked as a term of strong praise. In fact there was nothing especially unusual about the development. This wasn’t the first time a word had taken on a meaning that was the opposite of its original sense.
Wicked emerged as an adjective during the 13th century. It seems to have come from the Old English word wicca, ‘wizard’ (and wicce, ‘witch’), and from its earliest uses it had all the associations of evil and malignant supernatural powers. The Wicked One came to be a description of Satan, and any stock evil characters in plays would tend to attract the epithet. Pantomime today continues that tradition, with its Wicked Fairy and Wicked Stepmother.
Before long the word began to broaden its meaning, and was applied to all kinds of bad situations. Any cruel, fierce or vicious being, human or animal, could be called wicked. So could harmful, dangerous or offensive happenings. The air could be described as wicked, if it was foul-smelling; food also, if it was foul-tasting. A difficult road might be called wicked.
Then, towards the end of the 16th century, a lighter tone emerged. Someone might be described as having a wicked tongue or wicked eyes. Children were said to be wicked imps. Here the meaning is ‘mischievous’, ‘sly’ or ‘naughty’, and often the usage was distinctively jocular in tone. Later, people would even use the word to describe themselves in this way, adapting the biblical phrase (from the Book of Isaiah) to say no peace/rest for the wicked!
It was a short step from here to the 20th-century sense of ‘amazing’, ‘splendid’, ‘remarkable’ – a usage which is actually found in American slang as early as the 1920s. It’s by no means alone. Other words which have developed the same set of laudatory senses include sick, mad, insane and crazy. The oddest, to my mind, is horrorshow. This was one of the words invented by Anthony Burgess in his novel A Clockwork Orange. It’s a phonetic rendering of a Russian word meaning ‘splendid’, and that’s how it has entered English slang. If someone were to say that ‘this book was horrorshow’, I’d really be rather pleased.
Wee
a Scottish contribution (14th century)
In 1955, Frank Sinatra released an album called In the Wee Small Hours. Its title track – ‘In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning’ – was one of those songs that stay in the mind, and it’s since been recorded by several other vocalists. But the expression wasn’t a modern coinage. It has an ancient Scottish ancestry, and represents an important strand in the history of English.
Wee had travelled a long way by the time it reached the Hollywood recording studios. We first find it in the north of England in the 1300s, in such phrases as a little wee, and it soon moved up into Scotland. It could mean several things – ‘a little child’, ‘a small quantity’ or ‘a short distance or period of time’. The senses were all to do with the ‘amount’ of something. There’s a relationship with the Old English word weigh.
6. The cover of the 1955 record album by Frank Sinatra. The nursery rhyme ‘Wee Willie Winkie’ has done a great deal to popularise the word among non-Scottish children.
Eventually wee became an adjective meaning ‘extremely small’, ‘tiny’. And often it was used in a more general sense: ‘little’. A wee bairn was just a ‘small child’. Then an interesting development took place: wee became a term of endearment – a friendly, welcoming word – and began to lose its association with size. That’s how it’s often used today. If someone in Scotland invites you for a wee drink, beware! It won’t necessarily be a small one.
Scottish English emerged as a really distinctive dialect of the language very early on. It all began when English loyalists fled to Scotland after the Norman Conquest in 1066. They were made welcome there, and by the 13th century English had become the dominant language of the lowland south and east. Then, in 1296, Edward I of England invaded Scotland – the start of a 300-years war. It’s hardly surprising, accordingly, that with Scots identity at stake the English language would soon evolve a local character, quite unlike anything south of the River Tweed.
And it certainly did. Today, Scots English is alive and well, heard and seen in a variety of dialects, and with a local vocabulary of thousands of words, such as gang (‘go’), richt (‘right’), bonnie (‘pretty’) and mickle (‘great’). Some of the words and phrases have travelled well outside Scotland, as wee illustrates. But the prize for the most famous and well-travelled Scots expression has surely got to go to Auld Lang Syne – the Robert Burns poem sung traditionally at New Year. It literally means ‘old long since’ – that is, ‘for old times’ sake’. The words and tune have attracted the singers too, such as Billy Joel and Bobby Darin, and they’ve appeared in dozens of films. Not a bad result, for a British regional dialect.
Grammar
a surprising link (14th century)
Grammar is glamorous? For many people, that would be an impossible association of ideas, remembering a time when they were taught English grammar in school, trying to analyse complicated sentences into parts, and learning rules and terms whose purpose was never clear. Glamorous it wasn’t. For others, the association would be pointless, for they were never taught any English grammar at all.
This was a great shame, as grammar, when taught properly, is indeed an exciting and stimulating subject. It’s the study of the way we compose our sentences, of how we say what we mean and of the different effects we convey by varying the order of our words. In short, grammar shows us how we make sense. And the more we know about grammar, the more we understand how language works.
But this book isn’t about grammatical constructions; it’s about words. And when we explore the origins of the word grammar, we find some real surprises. Would you expect an encounter with magic and the supernatural? Read on.
Grammar comes from a Latin word, grammatica, which in turn derives from gramma, meaning a written mark, or letter. It originally included the study of everything that was written – literature as well as language – and eventually this sense was extended to mean the knowledge that a person acquires through literacy. But people who could read and write were an élite. They included not only monks and scholars but also those who dealt in astrology and magic. This is where the supernatural comes in. In medieval Europe, the word grammar was often used to talk about the study of the occult. And when the word arrived in English, in the 14th century, it brought in those associations. A new word emerged: people would talk about gramarye, meaning ‘occult learning’, ‘necromancy’.
It’s this magical sense that leads to glamour. In the 18th century in Scotland, people took up the word grammar, meaning ‘an enchantment’ or ‘a spell’, but they changed the pronunciation. Devils and wizards were said to cast the glamour over the eyes of onlookers. From here it was a short step to the meaning of an alluring charm surrounding someone or something. And in the 20th century, we see the word arriving at its present-day sense of ‘charm’ and ‘attractiveness’. In the 1930s, people talked about glamour boys – a phrase given popular appeal when it was used to describe the handsome young airmen of the wartime RAF. Eventually the adjective came to be used chiefly for women, especially after the movies popularised the phrase glamour girls, and the pin-up photograph became widespread.
The word took an unexpected direction in the 1950s, when it began to be used as a euphemism for nude or topless modelling. If you were offered glamour photographs, you wouldn’t expect to see much clothing. Girls, such as those gracing page 3 in The Sun newspaper, were described as glamour models, and the agencies and events promoting them were said to be on the glamour circuit. The term is still widely used in this way.
The unexpected link between grammar and glamour illustrates a general point about the history of words. Often, a source word develops meanings that are so
different from each other that we don’t suspect they have a common origin. Who would ever guess that there’s a common origin for salary, sausage, sauce and salad? And who would ever have predicted that grammar would one day give birth to such a flamboyant and publicity-seeking child as glamour? Grammar hasn’t yet achieved such a vivid popular presence – but I live in hope.
Valentine
first name into word (14th century)
On 14 February each year, in many countries, people send valentines as love tokens – usually a card, flowers or a small gift. Often it’s a chance for one person to express secret admiration for another. People sometimes spend ages deciding what to send and whether they ought to send it. But they probably don’t spend a moment reflecting on the linguistic character of what it is they’re sending.
Valentine is an example of a first name being used as a common noun. The practice is surprisingly common, though many of the uses are specialised or slang. Certain kinds of apples, pears, daisies, magpies and fish have all at some time or other been called Margaret. Certain kinds of flags (Blue Peter) and card tricks (in whist or bridge) have been called Peter – as have cash registers, prison cells and penises.
Sometimes the name becomes part of a generally used idiom. People talk about a Jack of all trades, simple Simon, a proper Charlie, taking the Mickey and every Tom, Dick or Harry. In Australian English, Sheila is used colloquially for a young woman and John for a policeman (from French gendarme – ‘johndarm’). John can be a lavatory in American English. Literature provides examples too, such as a Sherlock for a detective or a Lolita for a sexually precocious young girl. And the Bible has given us an Adam for a gardener, a Samson for a strong man and a Solomon for a wise man. Named disasters can travel too: ‘We don’t want to see another (hurricane) Katrina.’
In many of these cases, we have no idea who the source person was. Charlie may well have been Charlie Chaplin, but who was the original Jack or Sheila? Nobody knows. And Valentine presents a puzzle too. The feast day of 14 February commemorates two early Christian martyrs from Italy, both named Valentine. But neither of them seems to have had any obvious link with romantic love. The amorous associations first come to the fore in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem ‘The Parliament of Fowls’, written in the early 1380s, telling the story of Nature convening an assembly where the birds choose their mates.
Humans evidently rather liked the idea, because quite soon we find a variety of activities associated with the day. A common practice was a valentine lottery: names would be written on folded pieces of paper and placed in a pot, and the pairings which were drawn out would motivate a special relationship for the coming year. As a result, the papers themselves came to be called valentines, and this led to the practice of sending paper valentines and then valentine cards. In the 19th century it became big business, with manufacturers producing highly ornate creations, adorned with lace and ribbons. Children would go from house to house on the day, asking for small gifts. The practice was called valentining.
But we can never predict the course of language change, and eventually senses of valentine developed where the romantic associations of the word were left far behind. In the 16th century, a sealed letter from the Crown to landholders demanding the arrest of lawbreakers came to be called a valentine. And in the Second World War the name was given to a 16-ton heavy infantry tank. Why? Its production was apparently given the go-ahead on 14 February 1938.
Egg
a dialect choice (14th century)
One of the most famous words in the history of English language studies is eggs. It’s all because of William Caxton, who introduced printing to England in 1476.
Caxton was faced with a real problem. For hundreds of years, English had been written down by scribes from different parts of the country with different kinds of training. There was a huge variation in the way words were spelled. A word like might appears in manuscripts in over thirty different spellings – micht, mycht, myght, mihte and so on. Caxton had to make a choice. Which one was most likely to be most widely understood?
It wasn’t just spelling that posed a problem. People from different parts of the country used different words for the same thing – dialect variations. And this is where eggs comes in. In the prologue to one of the books Caxton printed, he tells a story he had heard about a shipful of sailors who were becalmed in the Thames estuary, and who decided to make a shore visit while they waited for the wind to pick up. One of them went into a café (as we’d call it today) and asked for some ‘eggs’, but the lady who ran the establishment didn’t understand what he wanted, and replied that she couldn’t speak French. This made the sailor angry, because he couldn’t speak French either! He just wanted ‘eggs’. Then someone else told the lady that what the sailor actually wanted was ‘eyren’. She understood that, so the sailor got his eggs.
This story sums up Caxton’s confusion. ‘Lo!’, he says, ‘what should a man in these days now write, eggs or eyren?’ And he goes on: ‘It’s hard to please every man because of diversity and change in language.’ He would have to choose one or other of these words, if he were printing a text about eggs, and which one should he go for? He was a businessman, not a linguist, and he was – understandably – confused.
Why were there two words? Eggs was a word used chiefly in the north of England at the time. It was an Old Norse word, presumably brought to England by the Viking invaders a few hundred years earlier, though it doesn’t appear in writing until the 14th century. Eyren was used in the south of England – a development of the word that the Anglo-Saxons had used. Eventually, as we now know, eyren died out and eggs became the word in everyday use.
We don’t know whether the café owner was serious, or whether she was having a joke at the expense of the hungry sailor. But the tale does illustrate well the way people were beginning to feel the need for a kind of English that would be understood throughout the country. In the egg story we see one of the origins of present-day standard English.
Royal
word triplets (14th century)
Monarchs couldn’t have been regal or royal in Anglo-Saxon times. They could only have been king-like or queen-like. But during the 14th century, as part of the huge influx of vocabulary into English from French and Latin, regal and royal arrived, and along with kingly/queenly made up a cluster of words that have, rather sweetly, been called triplets.
Why did English speakers welcome these new words? All three basically mean ‘king/queen-like’, after all. Why have three words when one might do? The answer reveals something of the character of the language, for this triplet is not alone. We see the same sort of development taking place repeatedly, such as with Germanic ask, French question and Latin interrogate; Germanic fire, French flame and Latin conflagration; and Germanic holy, French sacred and Latin consecrated. As the examples build up, we can begin to see a pattern. The Germanic words are short and feel down-to-earth; the Latin words are long and scholarly; and the French words have a different set of associations.
It’s sometimes said that we know a word by the company it keeps. From the very beginning, regal and royal went in different directions. Regal went conceptual, used with such ‘authority’ words as throne, government and power, as well as ‘appearance’ words such as demeanour, figure and look. Royal went personal, used with ‘ancestry’ words such as blood, birth and family, as well as ‘position’ words such as princess, majesty and highness. Learnèd Latin offered an alternative mode of expression to courtly French, and both were more stately, refined and cultured than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.
These trends are still apparent today. Regal has had relatively little development over the centuries. It still typically adds connotations of superiority or distinction. Anything regal, by implication, is ‘fit for royalty’ – hence its application to such things as cars (Buick Regal), whisky (Chivas Regal), buildings (Regal Cinema) and the visit from an especially magisterial great-aunt.
By contrast, royal has accumulated a huge rang
e of uses. It’s used in relation to the activities and words of royal people (royal charter, visit, assent, command, warrant and not forgetting the royal we – ‘We are not amused’) as well as social groups (Royal Navy, Borough, Society) and a host of person-related activities such as transport (Royal Scot), colours (royal blue) and cards (royal flush).
The words don’t substitute for each other. The Royal Mail could not become the Regal Mail or the Queenly Mail. Nor is it possible, except in jest, to talk about the Regal Shakespeare Company or the Kingly Albert Hall. Kingly and queenly seem to be dying out, in fact, with only a few hundred thousand hits on Google, whereas regal has 20 million and royal 200 million.
But we can never predict the future, when it comes to vocabulary. Who would ever have thought, in the Middle Ages, that royal would one day be used as a colloquial intensifier, similar to bloody? But it happened in the 19th century, and the usage is still with us. I recently heard someone say He’s a royal pain in the neck. And the defeat of a local football enemy was summed up in the regal words: They got a right royal hammering.
Money
a productive idiom (14th century)
Vocabulary isn’t just a matter of single words. It includes thousands of idioms – strings of words which have taken on a special meaning. We talk about doing something at the drop of a hat (‘immediately’), getting cold feet (‘becoming afraid’) and having a heart of gold (‘a generous nature’). Some words are very frequently used in idioms. Money is one of them – a popular idiomatic source since the word arrived from French in the 14th century.
You can give someone a run for their money, see the colour of their money, get your money’s worth, have money to burn and spend money like water. Maybe you won’t do something for love nor money, perhaps because you’re not made of money. Or maybe you will, because it’s money for old rope, money for jam. If you’ve got some, then money is no object and it might burn a hole in your pocket. You can put your money where your mouth is. Money talks, after all. And if you’re feeling proverbial, you can observe that money is the root of all evil, doesn’t grow on trees and makes the world go round. Even nonstandard grammar can survive in standard English as an idiom. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 7