Fopdoodle is one of those words that people regret are lost when they hear about them. There are several delightful items in Johnson’s Dictionary which we no longer use. He tells us that nappiness was ‘the quality of having a nap’. A bedswerver was ‘one that is false to the bed’. A smellfeast was ‘a parasite, one who haunts good tables’. A worldling was ‘a mortal set upon profits’. A curtain-lecture was ‘a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed’.
Every generation gives us new words which eventually disappear. I once did a study of words that were being fêted as ‘new’ in the 1960s. Over half of them have gone out of everyday use now. Do you recall Rachmanism, Powellism, peaceniks, dancercise, frugs and flower people? All frequent in the 1960s. Historical memories today.
It’s always been like this. But dictionaries are notoriously reluctant to leave words out – for the obvious reason that it’s very difficult to say when a word actually goes out of use. You can spot a new word easily; but how do you know that an old word has finally died? Did grody (slang ‘nasty, dirty’) die out in the 1970s, or is it still being used in the back streets of Boston?
On the whole, dictionaries keep words in, either until constraints of space force some pruning, or a new editorial broom looks at the word-list afresh and says ‘Enough is enough’. That’s presumably what happened in 2008, when the editors of the Collins dictionary decided that some words are so rare these days that nobody would ever want to look them up. They blamed pressure on space in the dictionary: with 2,000 new words to include, several old words would, regrettably, have to go. They included abstergent (‘cleansing or scouring’), compossible (‘possible in coexistence with something else’), fatidical (‘prophetic’), fubsy (‘short and stout’), niddering (‘cowardly’) and skirr (‘a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight’).
9. A group of US scholars offer a toast to Samuel Johnson, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of his Dictionary in 1955. A Johnson Society was founded in 1910, based in his home town of Lichfield, where the Birthplace Museum has a permanent exhibition of his life and times.
The Times was having none of this. In its issue of 22 September 2008 it launched a campaign: ‘How you can help to save some cherished words from oblivion.’ People could vote to save the words they fancied. Collins, which is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, agreed that words would be granted a reprieve if evidence of their popularity emerged.
It was a curious headline, if you think about it, for if these words were being genuinely cherished, why should they be in this list at all? Nevertheless, there was quite a reaction. Andrew Motion went on record as supporting skirr. Stephen Fry was all for saving fubsy. Indeed, a ‘save fubsy’ online petition group was set up.
Just because words are left out of a dictionary of standard English doesn’t mean that they have disappeared from the language, of course. Some of the words remain alive and well in regional dialects. I know niddering and skirr are still used in parts of Scotland and the north of England, and fubsy (along with fub, ‘stout’) is mentioned in several dialect books.
It’s a daring decision, to leave a word out, because you can never predict the future with language. A word or phrase can be obsolescent, then suddenly have its fortunes reversed by being used by some celebrity. Or attitudes change towards a word, so that one generation loves it and the next hates it and the next loves it again. But whatever has happened to words in the past, the future is going to be very different. The internet is changing everything, because in an electronic world dictionaries can be of unlimited size, pages are time-stamped and nothing disappears (§83). The internet is already the largest corpus of attested historical language data we have ever known. In that dictionary words never die. Even fopdoodle, attracting a lowly 8,000 hits on Google in 2011, will live on. If words could talk, they would say they had finally achieved what they always wanted: immortality.
Billion
a confusing ambiguity (17th century)
As scientists extended the boundaries of knowledge, so they needed larger numerals to talk about what they found. A million, known since the Middle Ages, wasn’t enough. They needed billions, trillions and more. Popular usage followed suit. People were already saying things like a million to one and one in a million in the 17th century. Then inflation set in. One in a billion sounded much more impressive.
But what did billion mean, exactly? The English thought of the six zeros in a million (1,000,000) as being a functional unit, so the next value up was going to be twice six zeros (1,000,000,000,000). Billion in Britain thus meant ‘a million millions’ – a ‘long-scale system’, as it later came to be called. But French mathematicians later went in a different direction. They thought of 1,000,000 as two groups of three zeros, so for them the next unit up was three groups of three zeros – that is, 1,000,000,000. In France, billion thus meant ‘a thousand million’ – a ‘short-scale system’.
The history of usage is complicated and varies enormously from country to country. Britain stayed with the long-scale system, but in the 19th century the USA adopted the short-scale system. For over a century, American English dictionaries recommended ‘thousand million’ and British dictionaries ‘million million’. Then, in 1974, Britain capitulated. The prime minister of the time, Harold Wilson, made a statement to the House of Commons:
The word ‘billion’ is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other sense.
However, usage doesn’t take kindly to government statements. Although officially a billion is now a thousand million in the UK, people are still aware of the older use, and uncertainty is common. So whenever I use billion, I gloss it. If I say that ‘English is spoken by 2 billion people’, I immediately add, ‘2 thousand million’, to be on the safe side.
It’s the normal state of affairs in a language for everyday words to have more than one sense. We only have to look in a dictionary to see that. There’s usually no ambiguity, because when we use the words in sentences we see which sense is involved. On its own, bed is ambiguous: it could mean (for example) a place where we sleep or a place where we plant flowers. But we have no problem interpreting I stayed in bed until ten or Look at that lovely bed of roses.
It’s unusual to find a scientific term developing an ambiguity of the kind displayed by billion. Normally, when scientists create terms, they’re accepted by the whole scientific community. There are standard definitions of such words as hydrogen, atom and pterodactyl, and we don’t expect to find differences between American and British usage. But here’s a mathematical term which is not only ambiguous but where the ambiguity doesn’t disappear when we put it in a sentence. When we read, ‘The disaster has lost the company a billion pounds’, we can’t tell how much has been lost. Billion reminds us of the ever-present dangers of ambiguity in the history of the language.
Of course, for most of us, the difference isn’t important. It’s simply ‘a lot’. And the language has come to reflect this ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. The -illion ending is now used to express very large but indefinite amounts. In the mid-20th century we find zillion and bazillion, later gazillion and kazillion. People with really huge amounts of money were zillionaires. The Record, a New Jersey newspaper, took the coinages to new heights when it talked about an economic crisis in 1990:
The savings-and-loan industry bailout, which as of yesterday was expected to cost taxpayers $752.6 trillion skillion, is now expected to cost $964.3 hillion jillion bazillion, not including the Christmas party.
Doubtless these words got a new lease of life during the banking crisis twenty years later.
Yogurt
a choice of spelling (17th century)
How do you spell yogurt? When the word arrived in English from Turkish in the early 17th century, people made several stabs at it. The first recorded usage is yoghurd. Then we get yogourt. Then yahourt, yaghourt, yogurd, yogho
urt, yooghort, yughard, yughurt and yohourth. In the 19th century, there was a trend to simplify, and yogurt emerged as the front runner. It still is. In 2011 it was getting some 14 million hits on Google, with yoghurt 8 million and everything else a long way behind.
Preferences vary somewhat between countries, however. Yogurt is the norm in the USA. In the UK, both are used, but yoghurt is three times more common than yogurt. Yogourt has achieved some presence in Canada, because of its French-looking character, but even there yogurt is more widespread. In Australia and New Zealand, yoghurt is commoner than yogurt, but yogurt is catching up, probably because of exposure to American and internet usage. Yogurt is catching up in the UK too. You have to be careful where you look, when you consult a dictionary. Some give yogurt as the headword, which places it after yogi and yogic. Others give yoghurt as the head-word, which places it before.
Yogurt is not the only word that turns up at different places in a dictionary depending on how it’s spelled. The differences between British and American spelling can lead to very different locations. Depending on the dictionary you use, you’ll look under either MO- or MU- for moustache/mustache, under PY- or PA-for pyjamas/pajamas and under FO- or FE- for foetus/fetus. The problem is especially noticeable when the first letters of a word are affected. At least aeroplane and airplane keep you in letter A, and tyre and tire in T. But we have to make some big jumps with oestrogen and estrogen, aesthetics and esthetics and kerb and curb. A good dictionary will always anticipate the problem and include a cross-reference to get you from one place to the other.
Probably the commercial use of the word will condition the ultimate success of one yogurt spelling over the others. If you explore the yogurt-making world, you’ll encounter a whole family of derived forms. There are compound words such as yogurt machine, yogurt maker and yogurt freezer. Adjectives such as yogurt-like, yogurtish and yogurty. And brave new worlds too, it seems, judging by the name of an American international chain of frozen yogurt stores – Yogurtland.
Gazette
a taste of journalese (17th century)
The year 1665 is known for the Great Plague. Charles II moved his court out of London to Oxford. But how would the court keep in touch with the news? Publisher Henry Muddiman was authorised to produce what is often called ‘the first English newspaper’, the Oxford Gazette. When the danger was over, and the court moved back to London, the paper changed its name, becoming the London Gazette in February 1666.
The word gazette had come over from the continent, where it was used to describe a popular – though by all accounts not very reliable – news-sheet. One commentator described gazettes as including ‘idle intelligences and flim flam tales’ – frivolous nonsense. Perhaps for that reason, it was soon displaced in everyday usage by the word newspaper, whose first recorded use is in 1667, written as two words: news paper. However, gazette remained as the name of various official journals. If you were gazetted, you were the subject of an official announcement. And the journalists who wrote for them were called gazetteers.
10. The front page of The Oxford Gazette, published in Oxford in November 1665.
The early newspapers looked very different from those of today. Notably, they had no banner headlines running across the page. A news item in the Oxford Gazette began simply with its place of origin and the date, such as Paris, Nov 18. Banner headlines didn’t become a feature of the daily press until the end of the 19th century.
Once they did, there was an immediate effect on language. The headline had to catch the eye and capture interest. With a very limited amount of space available, short words became privileged, and a new lexical style quickly evolved. We see it mainly in the tabloid press, but all newspapers are to some extent influenced by the need to keep headlines short and snappy.
So we are less likely to see headlines in which people abolish, forbid, reduce, swindle and resign. Rather, they will axe, ban, cut, con and quit (or simply go). We will rarely read of a division of opinion, an encouraging sign, an argument or an agreement. Instead, it will be a rift, boost, row or deal. And many short words are doubly appealing because they carry an extra emotional charge: fury, clash, slam, soar …
All this is a long way from the cultivated and elaborate language of the Oxford Gazette, reporting events in the Anglo-Dutch War:
Not knowing what account the Publick has hitherto received of the progress of the prince of Munster’s Arms, we have thought it not improper without further repetition, to give an account of such places as he at present stands possest of in the enemies Country …
The writer goes on to list the various forts and ships that the prince had captured. How might a modern newspaper deal with such a situation? If past tabloid performance is anything to go by, it might even be a single word. Few headlines have stayed in the popular memory longer than the one that appeared in The Sun for 4 May 1982, reporting the attack on the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War: GOTCHA (§88).
Tea
a social word (17th century)
On 25 September 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his Diary: ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drunk before.’ The beverage had been imported into Europe from China early in the 17th century, but the British seem not to have taken to it until mid-century. Pepys probably got his tea from one of the coffee houses which had begun to sell both liquid and dry tea in the 1650s. The first recorded reference to the word is 1655.
In 1661, tea-taking was introduced into the Restoration court by Queen Catherine, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. It immediately became a fashionable ritual, accompanied by an elegant apparatus of silver spoons, pots, stands, tongs and caddies, and an occasion for conversation. But the innovation was taken up by other levels of society too. As its price fell, everyone adopted the habit, upstairs and downstairs alike, taking tea usually twice a day.
The linguistic consequences were both functional and social. Over the next fifty years we find a family of words introduced to describe all the bits and pieces needed in order to drink tea efficiently, such as tea-pot, tea-spoon, tea-water, tea-cup (with handle, unlike in China), tea-dish, tea-house and tea-room. And a century later the family multiplied in size when society recognised the crucial notion of tea-time – the ideal midway point between midday and evening meals.
Thereafter, the technology becomes more sophisticated and the occasions more elaborate. Few words can have developed so many uses so quickly as tea. We find tea-treats, tea-saucers, tea-trays and tea sets. People bought from tea-shops and made tea-visits. In the 19th century, we find tea-bags, tea-cakes, tea-towels and tea-services. High society met for tea circles and tea nights and rang tea-bells for service. New fashions introduced tea-gowns and tea-jackets. In the 20th century, we find an extension into the world of business and manufacture, where tea trolleys and tea wagons are pushed by tea ladies and tea girls. People take tea breaks and visit tea bars. Teashades (wire-rimmed sunglasses) were popular among 1960s’ rock-stars such as John Lennon and Ozzy Osbourne.
Meanwhile, the word was worming its way into 20th-century English idiom. Not for all the tea in China seems to have started in Australia. Tea and sympathy became popular following a stage play and film from the 1950s. The most curious idiomatic development was cup of tea. The expression was originally used for a person, as in You’re a nice strong cup of tea. Then it became a focus of interest, either a person (He’s my cup of tea) or a topic (Science fiction is more my cup of tea). We then find it used in a negative way (Science fiction isn’t my cup of tea) and then as an expression of comparison (That’s a very different cup of tea). Nobody knows how the idiom started. It feels like something that would come out of a Victorian music-hall, but its earliest recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t until 1908.
The story of tea isn’t over yet. It continues to be reported in street slang in a huge range of expressions, though one never knows just how widely used they are. To go tea tax? To get really angry. Tea-brained? An
obtuse person. In 2009, tea even became a political acronym in the USA, when the Tea Party was formed. TEA? Taxed Enough Already.
Disinterested
a confusible (17th century)
Interest is one of those words where you have to look carefully at the context to see what is meant. It started life in English in the 15th century as a legal expression. If you have an interest in an estate, you have a right or claim to some of it. Later it developed a financial sense. If you hold an interest in a company, you have a financial stake in it. More general senses emerged. When people say they have our interests at heart, they mean our good. When politicians say It’s in your interest to vote for me, they mean our advantage. And in the 17th century we find the meaning which eventually became the most common modern use: a feeling of concern or curiosity about something. What are your interests?
Some of this ambiguity spilled over into the adjective, interested. The earliest recorded meaning is the curiosity one. I’m interested meant ‘I’m curious to know’. But soon after, the self-seeking meaning arrived. I’m interested now meant ‘I spy a personal advantage’, and people began to talk of interested parties in a venture.
This leads us to the negative form. How did people express the idea that they were not interested? Two prefixes were the chief candidates: un- and dis-. Which should be used? There are dozens of cases in the 16th and 17th centuries of people experimenting with both. Should they say discontent or uncontent? Discomfortable or uncomfortable? Sometimes the dis- form survived (as in discontent). Sometimes the un- form did (as in uncomfortable). And in others, both forms survived with different meanings.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 11