15 November 2018

Words we should enfeoff*

Language changes. In most cases it doesn't have to, because no-one thinks that Shakespeare was not capable of expressing himself perfectly well. However, there's a lot of Shakespearean language that we don't use today, (fardels, bodkins and so on). Sometimes that's to do so with changing circumstances, but just as often it is to do with fashion.

For example, the word 'heavy' in Elizabethan times could mean 'mournful', or 'painful' in the emotional sense. This is why we still do things with a heavy heart these days. Then that usage of the word was generally dropped until the nineteen sixties when 'heavy' was adopted by the flower-power generation. ('Man, that Ophelia death scene was heavy.')

We have lost many useful words like 'simular' which is somewhere between 'simulated' and 'counterfeit' - as in 'thy simular smile cozens me not'. And come to that how about 'cozen'? It means – used to mean – 'to deceive with smooth lies'. It would be great if, before throwing something at the TV screen, we still could yell, 'Politicians! Pah! Cozeners with intpinsed particoated lies, all of them!'

(Intpinsed: Impossible to untangle)
Particoated: covered with colourful fabric)

In an age when neologisms are popping up all the time, we should really start digging up some of the great words that we unaccountably abandoned a few centuries back. Go coddiwompling through a comprehensive dictionary, and you'll see what I mean.

*Place in our possession

15 September 2018

These are not the -oids you are looking for

One of the joys of working with English is that there's always something new to discover about the language. Recently I was discussing the use of the word 'factoid' which the BBC was using (perhaps more accurately than intended) to give extra details about a story.

The thing about words ending with '-oid' is that they resemble the thing described by the first part of the word, but they are not the same. So an 'asteroid' is a bright light in the sky, but it is not a star ('aster' in Latin). A planetoid is not a planet, and moving down to Earthly examples, opioids have the effect of opium, but are not opium. Your thyroid looks like a small version of an ancient Greek shield called a 'Thryus', but it isn't.

Likewise factoids are not facts. The word was coined by an American writer to describe things reported in the media that have been repeated so often that everyone believes them to be facts although they are not. Since the misuse of the word 'factoid' as 'an item of interesting trivia' was coined by the media, this second definition of 'factoid' is itself a factoid, which is deliciously recursive.

Once you get into it, it's rather fun finding out where '-oid' words come from. The ending itself comes from Greek 'oiedes' -'shape' or 'likeness'. So, for example, when a medical researcher came upon a substance in the body that resembled (but wasn't) sterol - the stuff that makes up cholesterol – the obvious name was 'steroid'. And so on.

And those droids you were looking for? Well, the Greek for 'man' is 'andros'. So a robot that looks like a man is an 'android'. The short form of android is 'droid'.

QED, or should I say C-3PO?

15 July 2018

The Graveyard of Languages

English has always been just one of the languages spoken in the United States. Apart from the many different languages spoken by the native peoples, every group of immigrants has brought their own language to the country. Sometimes, places which were not English-speaking such as Louisiana and New Mexico became part of the English-speaking United States as that country swallowed up much of the North American landmass.

In the 1910 census, there were 92 million Americans. Three million spoke German, half that number spoke Italian, and Polish, Yiddish, Spanish and over a dozen other languages had between a hundred thousand and half a million native speakers.

Yet a recent survey of the descendants of these Americans revealed that almost without exception, their first language, and usually their only language, was English. Basically, research has shown that the United States is where languages come to die. It has been shown that many immigrant Americans hyphenate themselves (Korean-American, Italian-American, and so on) for around three or four generations. However, by then they have lost their original language.

The reason is simple enough – the social and economic opportunities available to immigrants improve in direct proportion to their English ability. Therefore the parents tend to acquire English rapidly, and their American-born children start off with it. This is especially true in linguistically mixed marriages. It has been shown, for example, that in marriages between an English and a Spanish speaker in the USA, less than 2% of the children had Spanish as a first language.

This is not necessarily as good thing. Language diversity is worth hanging on to. Not only has US English been greatly enhanced my bleed-over from other languages (especially Italian and Yiddish) but it has been shown time and again that bilingual people have more flexible thought processes and a greater capacity to absorb new ideas.

The problem is that it is hard to convince the US-born children of immigrants of this. If you are the only kid in the playground who speaks Farsi, then there's a temptation to ditch the Farsi and concentrate of blending in with English, no matter how it outrages your parents.

15 May 2018

English place-names

Many places in England have Old English names. Once we know the roots of the name, the names themselves become much more descriptive. Some names are easy enough - Cambridge developed at the place where there was a bridge over the river Cam. Oxford was the place where an ox could ford the river. (As a further clue the city badge shows an ox standing in a river.)

Things get more interesting when we have to work harder. Consider the word 'ham'. Not the slice of smoked pig, but a word meaning something between 'hall' and 'estate'. A small village is a 'hamlet' because '-let' or '-ette' is a diminutive in English. (Think 'piglet', 'flatlet', 'cigarette'). Therefore we see that many places are named after the estate or place around which the town developed, such as Durham, 'the place on the hill'. ('Dun' means 'hill' or 'fort' because most forts were on hills.)

We also have '-ham' as a suffix in Buckingham from 'Bucca's Hall' or Cheltenham from 'Celtan's Hall' (who or what Centan was is uncertain). This has been combined with another old English word 'ton', which means 'clearing in a forest'. So you can work out for yourself the meaning of places such as 'Southampton'.

There are over three thousand places in the UK which end in '-ton', but sometimes the meaning is less clear than one might think. For example we might assume that 'Boston' (yes, the first Boston
was in England) was 'Bosca's clearing' just as Teddington was 'Tedda's clearing'. Some etymologists say that is the case, but it is more probable that the name comes from 'Botsca's (boundary-marker) stone'.

There's a reason most places ending in '-mouth' are on the coast. The 'mouth' in question is where the river meets the sea. So for example, Plymouth is the end of the river Plym. Dartmouth is the terminus for the river Dart, and so on.

One of the clearest signs of Saxon occupation comes from county names. The suffix '-sex' shows which bunch of Saxons were where. The south Saxons were in Sussex, the east Saxons were in Essex, and those in between were in Middlesex. So the name has actually nothing to do with sex. That said, I shall leave it to someone braver to explain the origins of the word 'Kent'.

15 March 2018

Fossil words

As we wend our way through March, spring is in the offing. I have an ulterior motive for saying so, and you are probably waiting with bated breath to hear what it is. Well I shall make short shrift of my explanation. This piece is about fossil words.

'Fossil words' are words which have dropped out of the language except for particular usages where they are too useful to abandon entirely. Consider that first sentence. These days we never 'wend' anywhere but 'our way'. Go back to the 14th century and 'wend' was used instead of 'go'. For some reason 'wend' was replaced in the present tense by 'go', but we still stick with 'went', the past tense of 'wend'.

Did you ever wonder about that 'offing' which things about to happen find themselves in? It's the deep ocean which can be seen from the land. So when a ship is 'in the offing' we know it will shortly be in port, and the metaphor has been extended from there.

Something 'bated' is restrained or taken off, which is why you can wait with bated breath to see if you will get a rebate on your taxes. The 'shrift' which is inevitably short these days, is a noun which originally meant confessing one's sins. Back in medieval times, a man in a hurry might pop into confession, and ask the priest to give him 'short shrift'.

Wandering through the history of such odd survivors of our linguistic past throws up some interesting details. Such as 'eke'.These days we 'eke' out something by using it sparingly, and always with 'out'. However, to eke was originally to add to or supplement with something, so you could eke your tea with sugar. You could also be given a supplementary name, which was your 'eke-name' which over time became corrupted to a 'nickname'.

There are many such fossil words in our everyday language - hue and cry, kith and kin, to and fro, that only survive with their companion words. A favourite of mine is 'riding roughshod' over something. In the past a 'roughshod' horse was one where the horseshoes were attached with protruding nails. These nails allowed the horse to get a good grip on a steep, muddy road, but anything ridden over roughshod was unlikely to benefit from the experience.