Bodgery
word-coiners (16th century)
The history of English contains thousands of words that never made it – coinages invented by individual writers that simply didn’t catch on. There is just a single instance of bodgery recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. It is from the playwright Thomas Nashe, who used it in 1599. It means ‘bungling, botched work’.
Some 16th-century poets and playwrights seem almost to have coined words for a living. Nashe was second only to Shakespeare in the number of words whose first recorded use is found in his writing – nearly 800 – and several did become a permanent part of the language, such as conundrum, grandiloquent, multifarious and balderdash. Nashe also coined a word which would one day receive new life in science fiction: earthling.
But, like Shakespeare, quite a few of his coinages evidently didn’t appeal. Either they were never used by anyone else, as far as we know, or they had a brief flurry of usage before being quietly dropped. Probably no tears would ever be shed over the loss of collachrymate (‘accompanied by weeping’) or baggagery (‘worthless rabble’). But I rather regret that bodgery disappeared (though bodge and bodger are still heard in some dialects), along with tongueman (‘good speaker’) and chatmate (‘gossip’).
The list of words that never made it has a surreal quality. From Philip Sidney we have disinvite, hang-worthy, rageful and triflingness. From Edmund Spenser, disadventurous, jolliment, schoolery and adviceful. From John Marston, cockall (‘perfection’), bespirtle (‘to spot with vice’), fubbery (‘cheating’) and glibbery (‘slippery’) – creations Lewis Carroll would have been proud of. Sometimes it’s impossible to say why one word stayed and another didn’t. Why did Spenser’s tuneful catch on but his gazeful did not?
However, you can never tell what will happen. Musicry was coined by John Marston, and nobody used it after him – until 1961, when a writer revived it for a book on the arts. Nashe’s chatmate is currently the only instance of its use in the Oxford English Dictionary. But that will soon change, for in the world of chatrooms, social networking and internet dating, what do we find? Chatmates. There’s hope for bodgery yet.
Undeaf
a word from Shakespeare (16th century)
In Shakespeare’s Richard II, there’s a scene in which Richard’s uncle, John of Gaunt, expresses the hope that the king will listen to his dying words of advice about ruling more wisely. He wouldn’t listen to me while I was alive, he says, but ‘My death’s sad tale may yet undeaf his ear’ (II.i.16).
Undeaf. It’s one of those words which must be a genuine Shakespearean coinage. There are over 2,000 words in Shakespeare where the Oxford English Dictionary says he is the first recorded user. That doesn’t mean to say he invented all of them. In many cases, he just happened to be the first person we know of to write an already existing word down on a page. The English of his time used an oath God’s blood – usually shortened to ’sblood. The first recorded use is in the first part of Henry IV. But people would have been swearing like that for years.
Undeaf is different. The man and woman in the street wouldn’t have said that. Nor would they since. It’s a vivid way of expressing the idea that Richard needs to listen. Shakespeare could have written ‘My death’s sad tale may open yet his ear’. Undeaf has more dramatic impact. Why? Because it’s impossible. If you’re deaf, you can’t suddenly become undeaf. Deep down, John of Gaunt knows that there’s nothing he can say that will change the king’s behaviour.
Now if this were an isolated case, it wouldn’t deserve a chapter in a wordbook. But it’s by no means alone. Shakespeare loves to play with language in this way. He often takes a word and reverses its meaning by adding a prefix like un-, even if the action is strictly speaking impossible. In Macbeth, Lady Macbeth calls on the spirits to unsex her. Later in the same play, Malcolm affirms he is going to unspeak what he has said. In Coriolanus, the people are asked to unshout their earlier shouting.
If we go counting, we’ll find 314 instances in the Oxford English Dictionary where Shakespeare is the first citation for an un- usage. Most of them are adjectives, such as uncomfortable and uneducated, but there are no fewer than sixty-two cases where the prefix has been added to an already existing verb. Some of them, such as unlock, untie and unbend, have become a routine part of the language. But undeaf and several others have not.
What Shakespeare does today, the rest of the world does tomorrow. And indeed, it has become a routine feature of creative English expression to make new words by adding a prefix such as un-. The language seems to be returning to its Germanic roots, for coinages with un- were very common in Old English, and words like unfriend (§36, 99) have their parallels in unwine (‘enemy’, literally un + wine, pronounced ‘wee-nuh’, ‘friend’). In recent times we have had hundreds of coinages, such as uncool, unfunny, ungimmicky, unsorry, untouristy, untrendy, un-with-it and unyoung. Unyoung? ‘Why not just say old?’ you might ask. But there’s a difference. Many senior citizens refuse to accept that they are old, though they might reluctantly agree that they are unyoung.
Skunk
an early Americanism (17th century)
In 1585, Thomas Hariot travelled with Sir Walter Raleigh in his attempt to establish a colony on Roanoke Island in Virginia. When he returned to England, he wrote A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, in which he gives a great deal of information about the place and the people. He identifies ‘two kinds of small beasts greater than conies [rabbits] which are very good meat’, naming them saquenúckot and maquówoc.
People have puzzled over which animals these must have been. Were they raccoons, opossums, muskrats … or even skunks? The first clear use of the name skunk doesn’t turn up until 1634, in another account of early America. The Oxford English Dictionary derives it from a different Indian language from the one spoken in Roanoke. But saquenúckot certainly looks as if it might be the origin of skunk.
Skunk is an early Americanism. It was one of dozens of words that were borrowed from the Algonquian languages in the early 1600s. Many of them didn’t last. Nobody today (except possibly in some dialects) talks about a sagamore (‘chief’) or a pocosin (‘swamp’). But several words did survive, such as caribou, moccasin, moose, opossum, persimmon, powwow, tomahawk, totem and wigwam. Today there are hundreds of words that distinguish American from British English (§58).
It’s sometimes difficult to recognise Indian words in early writings. The indigenous languages were very different from anything Europeans had encountered before, and they had no idea how to spell the words they heard. Captain John Smith arrived in Virginia in 1606 and explored the new territory at length, writing an account of the meetings between the colonists and the local tribes. He’s best known for the famous story of his escape from execution by the Indian chief Powhatan through the intervention of Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas. He sent an account of the colony back to England, where it was published in 1608.
His book contains many Amerindian place-names, and at one point – during a visit to the Powhatan Indians – a new noun:
Arriving at Weramocomoco, their Emperour proudly lying uppon a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelves Mattes, richly hung with Manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great Covering of Rahaughcums.
Rahaughcums? A little later in his book he spells it Raugroughcuns. These are the first brave attempts to write down raccoons in English.
Shibboleth
a word from King James (17th century)
The King James Bible, published in 1611, is often called the ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible because – as it says on its title-page – it was ‘appointed to be read in churches’. Earlier translations of the Bible, such as William Tyndale’s (§37), had introduced many new words and idioms into English, but the King James Bible popularised them in a way that hadn’t been possible before.
The team of translators didn’t actually introduce many new words and phrases themselves. They say in
their Preface that their job was not to make a new translation, but rather ‘to make a good one better’. They had no choice in the matter, actually, as they’d been given guidelines, approved by King James, which required them to use a previous edition (known as the Bishops’ Bible) as their model. As a result, there are very few words and phrases which actually originate in the text of the King James Bible.
Only forty-three words are currently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as having a first recorded use there. They include several religion-specific expressions, such as Galilean (as a noun) and rose of Sharon, as well as a few general words, such as battering-ram, escaper and rosebud. Far more important are the idioms which the Bible popularised: there are over 250, such as salt of the earth, a thorn in the flesh, root and branch, out of the mouths of babes and how are the mighty fallen. Their significance in the shaping of English mustn’t be forgotten. Idioms are part of vocabulary too.
Shibboleth is not among the forty-three, because this word had been used in all the earlier English translations. But there is nonetheless something distinctive about the way it appears in the King James Bible: its spelling. Shibboleth appears in the Old Testament Book of Judges. We are told how the regional accent of an unfortunate Ephraimite, who had fallen into the hands of the Gileadites, reveals his origins:
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.
The spelling of the word varies in the earlier translations. In John Wycliffe’s version, the Ephraimite seems to have more of a lisp, for he says Thebolech instead of Sebolech. Other versions have Schibboleth and Scibboleth. The Geneva Bible and the King James Bible both have Shibboleth, and it is this spelling which has prevailed.
But even biblical words and phrases don’t stand still, and in later centuries shibboleth developed several new senses – a custom, a habit, a catchword, a moral formula, an imaginary error, an unfounded belief. There are lots of shibboleths in the study of language. Some people think it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (That’s the man I spoke to) or to split an infinitive (to boldly go) or to pronounce H as ‘haitch’, even though such forms are widely found in modern English. These are the kinds of issue, often called linguistic shibboleths, that have fuelled usage debates since the 18th century. They are debates in which emotions sometimes run high – though never, as far as I know, having an outcome like that of the biblical precedent.
Bloody
an emerging swear-word (17th century)
On 11 April 1914, the Daily Sketch, a London tabloid newspaper, ran this headline:
TO-NIGHT’S ‘PYGMALION’, IN WHICH MRS PATRICK CAMPBELL IS EXPECTED TO CAUSE THE GREATEST THEATRICAL SENSATION FOR YEARS.
What was all the fuss about? George Bernard Shaw had given Mrs Campbell, in the character of Eliza Doolittle, a dangerous line to say: ‘Not bloody likely.’ Nobody had said such a swear-word on a public stage before. The paper went on:
Mr. Shaw Introduces a Forbidden Word.
WILL ‘MRS PAT’ SPEAK IT?
She did. And the audience loved it. There was a gasp of surprise, then everyone roared with laughter.
It had taken bloody a thousand years to cause such a stir. It was first used by the Anglo-Saxons with such meanings as ‘bleeding’ and ‘stained with blood’, and it developed a range of related senses to do with slaughter and bloodshed. It’s a point we have to watch when we listen to Shakespeare. When Macbeth tells us that his ‘bloody cousins’ have fled from Scotland (Macbeth III.i.29), he isn’t swearing but accusing them of a murderous stabbing.
The word began to be used in an emphatic way towards the end of the 17th century – meaning ‘very’, but with an intensifying force. When Jonathan Swift, writing a letter to Stella in 1711, talks about the day being bloody hot, he means ‘very hot indeed’. There’s no hint of any impropriety. The word seems to have been used in colloquial speech by all kinds of people at that time.
But during the 18th century the sensitive ears of the aristocratic and respectable classes turned against bloody, probably because of its associations with rowdiness and rough behaviour. Aristocratic rowdies were known as bloods, so to be bloody drunk was to be ‘drunk as a blood’. (We have the same association today, when we say ‘drunk as a lord’.) The historical association with blood and mayhem would have appealed to those for whom rough behaviour was a way of life, and this reinforced upper- and middle-class antipathy. By the middle of the 18th century it was definitely a ‘bad word’. Dr Johnson described it in his Dictionary of 1755 as ‘very vulgar’. That settled it.
People who wanted to be emphatic had to find socially more acceptable alternatives. Deuced, rattling and ripping became popular. Bleeding was used first by Cockneys in the 1850s, but – perhaps for that very reason – never acquired upper-class respectability. Blooming, used from the 1880s, was more successful. Ruddy, slightly less so. Dozens of words became fashionable, such as devilish, damned, jolly, awfully and terribly.
It was all a very British thing. Americans have never understood the British timidity towards using bloody, and Australians find it even more puzzling. In both Australia and the USA, the word is used as an intensifer, yet without the aura of rudeness which is part of its historical baggage in the UK.
Usage in Britain is slowly adapting to the world scene – though very slowly. Bloody is no longer printed as b----y, and it isn’t one of the words relegated to late-night television viewing. But the sensitivity is still there. In 2006 a television ad for Tourism Australia included the sentence ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ This was too much for the regulators at the British Advertising Clearance Centre, who cut it out, and restored it (for late-evening viewing) only after a huge row. So I’m not expecting to hear a BBC weather forecaster say in the foreseeable future: ‘It’s been bloody hot today …’
Lakh
a word from India (17th century)
Here are two recent newspaper headlines from India.
Nearly 5 lakh foreigners throng India for cheap treatment
Rs 50-lakh divorce for runaway wife
Lakh. A Hindi word meaning 100,000. So, 5 lakh is half a million. 50 lakh (Rs = rupees) is 5 million. It’s one of the words you need to know. The figures get bigger when you turn to the business pages. There you find people talking about crores as well. A crore is 10 million.
These words arrived in English in the early 1600s. Already several Indian words had entered the language from earlier contacts. A godown is a place where goods are stored – a warehouse. It’s recorded in a voyager’s report of 1588. It comes from a Malay word, godong, and probably took its English form because people heard it as ‘go down’ – the storehouses were often in cellars.
Once the British East India Company was established (in 1600), travel to and from the region greatly increased. It wasn’t long before the local languages began to provide English with new words, and several eventually lost their cultural associations with India. From the north of the Indian subcontinent, where Indo-European languages such as Hindi were spoken, we find such 17th-century words as bungalow, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, punch (the drink) and pundit. Examples from the south, where Dravidian languages such as Tamil were spoken, were atoll, catamaran, cheroot, pariah, teak and curry. In the Far East, Tibetan, Malay, Chinese, Japanese and other languages all began to supply new words, such as ginseng, bamboo, ketchup, kimono, junk (the ship) and chaa – this last one not immediately recognisable in that form, but the origin of tea (and, of course, colloquial char).
The various routes to India also brought English into renewed contact with languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Quite a few Arabic words, for example, had come into Middle English, especially introducing scientific notions such as alchemy and almanac, but in the 16th and 17th centuries there is a significant expansion. In many cases, the Arabic words entered English through another language: assassin, for example, is
ultimately from Arabic hash-shashin (‘hashish-eaters’), but came to English via Italian assassino.
The new words reflect local life and customs. Arabic loans include fakir, harem, jar, magazine, sherbet, minaret, alcove and sofa. From Turkish we find vizier, horde, kiosk, coffee and yoghurt. From Persian, bazaar, caravan, divan, shah and turban. From Hebrew, sanhedrin, shekel, shibboleth, torah and hallelujah.
Today, the regional English vocabulary of a country like India is extensive indeed, and continues to develop. The 20th century has seen a host of food words such as tandoori, samosa and pakora. Among the colloquial words to arrive have been cushy, doolally and loot (‘money’). A new lease of computational life has been given to avatar. And in Indian newspapers of the 2000s we will find such local forms as speed-money (‘bribe’), timepass (‘way of passing the time’), timewaste (‘time-wasting’) and petrol bunk (‘petrol station’), as well as new uses of older forms, such as hi-fi (‘fancy’, as in hi-fi clothes). Even the basic vocabulary of the language can be affected, such as kinship terms. Who is your co-brother? The man who married your wife’s sister. And your cousin-sister? Your female first cousin.
Fopdoodle
a lost word (17th century)
People started to use the word fopdoodle in the 17th century. It was a combination of fop and doodle, two words very similar in meaning. A fop was a fool. A doodle was a simpleton. So a fopdoodle was a fool twice over. Country bumpkins would be called fopdoodles. But so could the fashionable set, because fop had also developed the meaning of ‘vain dandy’. Dr Johnson didn’t like them at all. In his Dictionary he defines fopdoodle as ‘a fool, an insignificant wretch’.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 10