The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language

by Melvyn Bragg

The late Roy Porter, when Professor of the History of Medicine at the Wellcome Institute, was eloquent about this: Suddenly you find that there are thousands of plants and elements and stars and things that nobody quite knew what to call. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel discovered a new planet, he had to find a name. But what do you call a new planet? He wanted to call it “George’s Planet” after King George. That however was considered rather too vulgar . . . they worried that the French wouldn’t like it very much if a whole planet was called after England. So in the end they Latinised it and called it “Uranus” instead.... It was one of the great claims of so many nineteenth century scientists when they were naming the elements that they weren’t just scientists in the lab, but they were scholars of Greek or Latin. And therefore they were very proud of themselves when they thought of words like “paleolithic” instead of saying simply “dawn of time.” Paleolithic gave everything a higher status. . . . So when you found particular sorts of rocks in Mid-Wales, instead of calling them “slaty rocks” or “grey rocks” or “hard rocks” or “friable rocks,” you called them “Silurian.” Silurian was based on the Latin name of the tribes who’d lived there — a word taken from the writings of Caesar.