Nonsense words go in and out of fashion. Does anyone still use jigamaree or whigmaleerie nowadays? And what has happened to oojah? An issue of the Washington Post in July 1917 refers to new British army slang, and mentions oojah as coming from the East – from Arabic or Persian, perhaps. It was very common in forces slang during the Second World War, when it developed into such forms as oojamaflop. My Uncle Bill, ex-RAF, used that one all the time. But I don’t think I’ve ever used it myself, except in articles like this one.
Blurb
a moment of arrival (20th century)
Is it ever possible to say exactly when a word was invented? Yes, if someone keeps a record (§65, 66). But more often we find new words known by the date the public got to know about them.
In 1906, the Huebsch company published a book by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, which sold very well. The next year, at a publishing trade association dinner, free copies were given out of a limited edition, printed – as was the association’s custom – in a special dust jacket. Burgess had devised a jacket which showed a charming lady, Miss Belinda Blurb, ‘in the act of blurbing’ – shouting out the title of the book and the name of its author. ‘YES, this is a “BLURB”!’ said the headline. The accompanying text was full of unbelievable praise: ‘When you’ve READ this masterpiece, you’ll know what a BOOK is’.
17. The book jacket which introduced the word blurb into the English language in 1906.
The word caught on. Any testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a blurb. In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, Burgess defined his own term:
A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.
And the word has been with us ever since. There is a blurb on the back of this book.
We don’t know the exact moment that Burgess invented the word, but we do know that it began to circulate after that dinner. The same thing happened to the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, launched by the Russians on 4 October 1957. Before that, the word sputnik (translated as ‘travelling companion’) would have been known only to a small group in the Soviet Union. After the launch, it was everywhere.
The publication of a literary work has been the usual means of establishing the year in which a new word is introduced to the world. Catch-22 arrived in 1961, following the publication of Joseph Heller’s novel of that name. Nymphet, in the sense of a sexually attractive young girl, came in 1955 with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Chortle appeared first in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in 1871.
Cases of this kind are the closest we can get to the origins of a word. Usually all we can say is that the word appeared ‘in the early 1960s’ or ‘in the late 14th century’. But the internet is changing everything (§49). If I activate the appropriate software, it is possible for the date, hour, minute and second at which I create a text to be time-stamped. And if that text happens to contain a new word, or a word in a new sense, its birthday will be known for ever.
Strine
a comic effect (20th century)
In 1964 the Sydney Morning Herald carried a story about what had happened to the English author Monica Dickens while she was signing copies of her latest book in a Sydney bookshop. A woman handed her a copy and said, ‘Emma Chisit’. Dickens thought this was the woman’s name, so she wrote ‘To Emma Chisit’ on the flyleaf. The would-be purchaser was puzzled. ‘No. Emma Chisit’, she repeated. Eventually it transpired that what she was saying was ‘How much is it?’ in an Australian accent. And Strine was born.
The story is told at the beginning of Strine: The Complete Works of Professor Afferbeck Lauder (real name: Alistair Morrison). Strine is the supposed Australian pronunciation of the word Australian. Let Stalk Strine was a best-seller when it appeared in 1965, and it’s still in print. It contained such fine examples as ebb tide for ‘appetite’ (as in I jess got no ebb tide these dyes) and cheque etcher for ‘did you get your’ (as in Where cheque etcher big blue wise?). The idea caught on, and several compilations of supposed regional dialect speech were published in other parts of the world, such as Lern Yerself Scouse (for the dialect of Liverpool).
Words coined for comic effect don’t usually become a permanent part of the language. If I start speaking in a mock way, putting on a dialect voice or pretending to use an old spelling-pronunciation (such as saying yee oldee tea shoppee), the effects are of the moment. Nobody would expect oldee to become a recognised pronunciation. But if a humorous form is used often enough, and begins to appear in novels and other literature, then it may well eventually enter the dictionary (with a warning that it is jocular). This is what has happened to stoopid (for stupid), recorded since Thackeray used it in Vanity Fair (1848), and velly (mock-Chinese ‘very’), first recorded in the 1890s. Thanks to Rudyard Kipling and others, squat-tez-vous (mock-French for ‘sit down’) has achieved some usage. So has el cheapo (mock-Spanish for ‘very cheap’), recorded since the 1950s. They’re all in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Baby-talk can sometimes make its mark: toothy-pegs, wakey-wakey, pussy-cat, beddy-byes, din-din, ickle (‘little’), diddums and oopsie-daisy are all examples of nursery language which adults use when they’re being playful. Comic proper names can get into the language too. Dr Seuss introduced everyone to a grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1957), and the word is now quite common for a spoilsport or ill-tempered person. Cartoon characters can introduce or popularise a comic word, such as Homer Simpson’s D’oh, Elmer Fudd’s wabbit, the Flintstones’ Yabba dabba doo and Mr Jinx’s I’ll tear you meeces to pieces.
18. The cover of the first ‘strine’ book, published in 1965.
Jocular forms of grammatically irregular verbs also sometimes achieve a widespread use. How often have you heard people say they’re fruz or froz, instead of frozen? Or: Shakespeare thought every thought that’s ever been thunk. Here too, literature can give these usages a blessing. Mark Twain is one of many whose characters smole a smile. James Joyce used thunk in Finnegans Wake. And so did Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh.
Alzheimer’s
surname into word (20th century)
Names are important in word-making. We’ve already seen how place-names can make words (§80) and first names (§28). Now it’s the turn of surnames.
A remarkable variety of everyday objects come from the names of the people who invented them or who are closely associated with them. We find them in such areas as clothing (cardigan, leotard, mackintosh), including hats (stetson) and boots (wellingtons), food (garibaldi, pavlova, sandwich), flowers (begonia, dahlia, magnolia), musical instruments (saxophone, sousaphone) and guns (colt, derringer, mauser). Creative people, especially (if they’re famous enough), can have their surname turn into a general word. Film buffs talk about a movie being Hitchcockian, and similar coinages are found in other areas of the arts, such as Dickensian, Mozartian and Turnerian. Language buffs who admire Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage have created no fewer than three adjectives to characterise his approach – Fowlerian, Fowlerish and Fowleresque.
Science, in particular, recognises achievements in this way. Think of all the names of physical constants that come from scientists, such as ampere, celsius, hertz, ohm and watt. Many terms in anatomy, physiology and medicine reflect their discoverers, such as the Rolandic and Sylvian fissures in the brain or the Eustachian tube between throat and ear. When diseases are person-named, they are usually shortened. So Ménière’s disease becomes Ménière’s, Parkinson’s disease becomes Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease becomes Alzheimer’s.
Derived uses soon follow, as the case of Alzheimer’s shows. The disease was first described by the German pathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1907, and the name was soon used as an adjective in such phrases as Alzheimer patients and Alzheimer sufferers, sometimes with an ’s and sometimes not. By the 1930s, the name of the disease was being abbreviated to Alzheimer’s or (especially in the USA) Alzheimer
, even in medical journals. Concern over the effect of the disease grew in the early 2000s, so much so that it became one of the few diseases to be identified by an initial letter: the big A. (The big C – cancer – is another.)
Surnames that become common nouns and adjectives don’t have to belong to a real person. English literature has provided several examples of characters who have given their name to a general situation. What would it mean to call someone a Scrooge, a Cinderella, a Girl Friday, a Romeo? In each case the situation described in the original book has been left behind, and the words are even sometimes written without the capital letters. Rather less usual is the use of two surnames together. A Jekyll and Hyde personality. A David and Goliath situation. A Holmes and Watson relationship. There aren’t many of these.
Several fields go in for first name + surname. The world of roses, for example, has hundreds of examples of cultivars named after the whole name of an individual, including such well-known personalities as Cary Grant and Bing Crosby. And we’ll find whole names in such domains as dog breeds (Jack Russell), ships (USS Ronald Reagan), locomotives (Winston Churchill), cocktails (Rose Kennedy) and cakes (Sarah Bernhardt). Titles are not ruled out (Earl Grey tea). These do lead to some unusual English sentences: ‘Just smell that Cary Grant’; ‘Would you like some Earl Grey?’; ‘I’ll have two Rose Kennedies.’
Grand
money slang (20th century)
Some areas of vocabulary are more productive than others. I once went through a dictionary pulling out all the ways there are in English for saying ‘good’ things about the world (such as wonderful, happily, a marvel) and all the ways there are for saying ‘bad’ things (such as awful, clumsily, a disaster). I found 1,772 expressions of positive sentiment and 3,158 expressions of negative sentiment. It’s almost twice as easy to be critical in English, it seems.
Everyday concerns attract the largest vocabularies, especially as slang. Drugs, sex and booze have each generated hundreds of expressions. And so has money, both for the general meaning and for specific units and amounts. The different currency systems of English-speaking countries have added to the diversity (§31). Even old terms can live on in idioms: people still say in Britain that someone is worth a few bob, even though bob for a shilling (‘12 old pence’) disappeared decades ago. In Australian English we find buckaroo (‘a dollar coin’), brick (‘$10’) and shrapnel (‘small change’). In Jamaica, a coil is a ‘roll of banknotes’. In Trinidad, a dog is a ‘$20 bill’ – perhaps an echo of the days when people used dog dollars (‘dollar coins where an original lion design had been worn away into something resembling a dog’).
Slang words for ‘money’ vary greatly. Some go back hundreds of years. In Britain, brass, associated with the colour of gold coins, is found from the late 16th century. Ready (= ‘ready money’) is recorded from the 17th, now heard only in the plural readies. Also from the 17th century is quid, originally referring to a sovereign or guinea. It probably comes from the Latin word for ‘what’ (quid), which transmuted into a jocular sense of ‘the wherewithal’ at a time when Latin was widely known.
Cockney rhyming slang has given us several expressions. Bread is from bread and honey (= ‘money’). Five (‘£5’) produces beehive; a fiver is a lady (from Lady Godiva). Ten (‘£10’) gives us Big Ben as well as cock and hen. Eight (‘£8’) is a garden, thanks to garden gate. Amounts and numerals sometimes appear as back-slang: dunop, evif, nevis, yennep. The rhyming practice crossed the sea. In Australia we find Oscar Asche (an Australian actor of the early 20th century) for cash, Oxford scholar for dollar and bugs bunny for money. In South Africa, ‘money’ is sometimes called tom (from tomfoolery = ‘jewellery’). And new rhyming slang is still being coined. In the late 20th century, we find ayrton as a word for ‘£10’, Why? Racing driver Ayrton Senna = tenner.
The USA has a huge range of slang expressions, some widely known thanks to their regular use in films and television, such as (for dollars) bucks and greenbacks, and (for money in general) dough, potatoes, lettuce and cabbage (the last two from the green colour of the banknotes). The origin of some of the words is a real puzzle. There has been plenty of speculation, but no firm conclusion, over moolah and spondulicks (both occurring in various spellings). And if I offer you fifty smackers, is this because people often kissed banknotes or plonked them down on the table? Mazooma is from Yiddish. So is motza (also in various spellings), used chiefly in Australia.
New words continue to arrive. The 20th century brought lolly (probably from lollipop) and dosh (perhaps related to a doss, ‘a place to sleep in a common lodging-house’). A surprising development was archer for ‘£2,000’. It came from the court case involving British author Jeffrey Archer in which a bribe of this amount was alleged to have been used. It probably won’t be part of the language for long.
The vast majority of these words stay in their country of origin. We don’t find Americans describing dollars as quids or the British describing pounds as bucks. That’s why grand is so interesting. It’s one of the few money words to have travelled. First used in the USA in the early 1900s, meaning ‘$1,000’, it was very quickly shortened to G. The term then transferred to British usage, meaning ‘£1,000’. British people happily talk about something costing a grand. But the digital age seems to have pushed G out of fashion. During the 1980s K, influenced chiefly by kilobyte, became the abbreviation of choice for ‘thousand’ in business plans and job advertisements. No city gent seems to earn Gs any more.
Mega
prefix into word (20th century)
Mega- became a popular prefix towards the end of the 19th century. Scientists found it a useful way of expressing something that was very large or abnormally large. So, a relatively large bacterium was called a megabacterium. As a unit of measurement, it expressed a millionfold increase, as in megawatt. And in the 20th century, from around the 1960s, it came to mean anything of great size or excellence. In the city, takeover bids involving large sums of money were megabids. Large shopping complexes were megacentres. An extremely successful song or film was a megahit. People attended megafestivals.
With all this mega- about, the stage was set for the prefix to become an independent word. And in the late 1960s, we find it being used to mean ‘huge’ (Those are mega achievements), ‘excellent’ (That’s a mega idea) and ‘very successful’ (She’s mega in France). It could even be a sentence on its own. A reaction to a brilliant stage performance might simply be an awed Mega!
Quite a few prefixes have started a life of their own as words. Garments and vehicles have been called midis, minis and maxis. If someone proposes a course of action, we can be pro or anti (or con). We can weigh up the pros and cons. If you’re an ex, you’re a former something – usually a former husband or wife, though any previous office-holder or member of an organisation could in principle be called one.
The words can go in various directions. If we hold extreme views, especially in politics or religion, we might be called ultra, or labelled one of the ultras. But ultras are also people who have extreme tastes in fashion. And since the 1970s a long-distance run of great length, especially one that is much greater than a marathon, has been called an ultra.
Multi- is another prefix that has developed a wide range of meanings as an independent word. If we heard the sentence Multis are everywhere these days, the speaker could be referring to cinemas (multiplexes), yachts (multihulls), buildings (designed for several families – multi-family houses), fashions (multi-coloured), very rich people (multimillionaires), bridge players (making an opening bid of two diamonds – multi-purpose), international businesses (multinationals) or products that contain a range of vitamins (multivitamins). This is really quite an exceptional range of senses, and all came to be used in the second half of the 20th century. Multi, in short, has become mega.
Gotcha
a non-standard spelling (20th century)
When The Sun reported the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in 1982, the headline a
ttracted almost as much attention as the event itself: GOTCHA. And a generation on, it is the headline that has stayed in the popular mind. It was the non-standard spelling that caught the public imagination. The effect disappears when we re-spell it as GOT YOU.
Not everybody liked it. Gotcha has playful connotations. We say it when somebody is caught out in an argument or discovered in a game of hide-and-seek. Yet this was a story about war, with lives being lost. Many thought non-standard usage wasn’t an appropriate choice for such an event. But few headlines have had such staying power.
A surprising number of words appear in non-standard spelling in newspaper headlines, novels, advertisements, graffiti and other written genres. The Sun has many famous instances, such as its claim after the 1992 election, IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT. Often it’s a pun that motivates the spelling, such as the headline reporting cases of swine flu in Britain: PIGS ’ERE.
There comes a point when a non-standard spelling becomes so frequently used that it gets into the dictionaries as an ‘alternative’ (§61). We’ll find gotcha and gotcher in the Oxford English Dictionary, first recorded in 1932, as well as geddit? (‘get it?’, 1976), ya (‘you’, 1941), thanx (‘thanks’, 1936), gotta (‘got to’, 1924) and gonna (‘going to’, 1913). In the 19th century we find luv (‘love’, 1898), wanna (‘want to’, 1896), wiv (‘with’, 1898), dunno (‘don’t know’, 1842), wot (‘what’, 1829) and cos (‘because’, 1828). Sorta (‘sort of’) is recorded as early as 1790.
The Story of English in 100 Words Page 17