The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Benjamin Franklin spoke for many when he complained that if spelling were not reformed “our words will gradually cease to express Sounds, they will only stand for things, as the written words do in the Chinese Language”

Yet the movement lived fitfully on, most notably in the hands of George Bernard Shaw who wrote archly: “An intelligent child who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelled it with a b.” Shaw used a private shorthand in his own writing and insisted upon certain mostly small simplifications in the published texts of his own plays—turning can’t, won’t, and haven’t into cant, wont, and havnt, for example. At his death in 1950, he left the bulk of his estate to promote spelling reform. As it happened, death duties ate up almost everything, and the whole business would likely have been forgotten except that his play Pygmalion was transformed into the smash hit My Fair Lady and suddenly royalties poured in. But, as you won’t have failed to notice, this did not lead to any lasting change in the way the world spells English.

Eight may be a peculiar way of spelling the number that follows seven, but it certainly helps to distinguish it from the past tense of eat.

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like

It is one of the felicities of English that we can take pieces of words from all over and fuse them into new constructions—like trusteeship, which consists of a Nordic stem (trust), combined with a French affix (ee), married to an Old English root (ship). Other languages cannot do this. We should be proud of ourselves for our ingenuity and yet even now authorities commonly attack almost any new construction as ugly or barbaric.

No doubt the reason hopefully is not allowed is that somebody at The New York Times once had a boss who wouldn’t allow it because his professor had forbidden it, because his father thought it was ugly and inelegant, because he had been told so by his uncle who was a man of great learning . . . ​and so on.

Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the split infinitive.

Nothing illustrates the scope for prejudice in English better than the issue of the split infinitive. Some people feel ridiculously strongly about it. When the British Conservative politician Jock Bruce-Gardyne was economic secretary to the Treasury in the early 1980s, he returned unread any departmental correspondence containing a split infinitive. (It should perhaps be pointed out that a split infinitive is one in which an adverb comes between to and a verb, as in to quickly look.) I can think of two very good reasons for not splitting an infinitive. 1. Because you feel that the rules of English ought to conform to the grammatical precepts of a language that died a thousand years ago. 2. Because you wish to cling to a pointless affectation of usage that is without the support of any recognized authority of the last 200 years, even at the cost of composing sentences that are ambiguous, inelegant, and patently contorted. It is exceedingly difficult to find any authority who condemns the split infinitive—Theodore Bernstein, H. W. Fowler, Ernest Gowers, Eric Partridge, Rudolph Flesch, Wilson Follett, Roy H. Copperud, and others too tedious to enumerate here all agree that there is no logical reason not to split an infinitive. Otto Jespersen even suggests that, strictly speaking, it isn’t actually possible to split an infinitive. As he puts it: “ ‘To’ . . . ​is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling ‘the good man’ a split nominative” [Growth and Structure of the English Language, page 222].

A man of Shakespeare’s linguistic versatility must have possessed thousands of words that he never used because he didn’t like or require them.

A man of Shakespeare’s linguistic versatility must have possessed thousands of words that he never used because he didn’t like or require them. Not once in his plays can you find the words Bible, Trinity, or Holy Ghost, and yet that is not to suggest that he was not familiar with them.

“No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some are fading away.”

Unabridged dictionaries have about them a stern, immutable air, as if here the language has been captured once and for all, and yet from the day of publication they are inescapably out of date. Samuel Johnson recognized this when he wrote: “No dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some are fading away.” That, however, has never stopped anyone from trying, not least Johnson himself.

The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them.

The English-speaking world has the finest dictionaries, a somewhat curious fact when you consider that we have never formalized the business of compiling them. From the seventeenth century when Cardinal Richelieu founded the Académie Française, dictionary making has been earnest work indeed. In the English-speaking world, the early dictionaries were almost always the work of one man rather than a ponderous committee of academics, as was the pattern on the Continent. In a kind of instinctive recognition of the mongrel, independent, idiosyncratic genius of the English tongue, these dictionaries were often entrusted to people bearing those very characteristics themselves. Nowhere was this more gloriously true than in the person of the greatest lexicographer of them all, Samuel Johnson. Johnson, who lived from 1709 to 1784, was an odd candidate for genius. Blind in one eye, corpulent, incompletely educated, by all accounts coarse in manner, he was an obscure scribbler from an impoverished provincial background when he was given a contract by the London publisher Robert Dodsley to compile a dictionary of English. Johnson’s was by no means the first dictionary in English. From Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall in 1604 to his opus a century and a half later there were at least a dozen popular dictionaries, though many of these were either highly specialized or slight (Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall contained just 3,000 words and ran to barely a hundred pages). Many also had little claim to scholarship. Cawdrey’s, for all the credit it gets as the first dictionary, was a fairly sloppy enterprise. It gave the definition of aberration twice and failed to alphabetize correctly on other words. The first dictionary to aim for anything like comprehensiveness was the Universal Etymological Dictionary by Nathaniel Bailey, published in 1721, which anticipated Johnson’s classic volume by thirty-four years and actually defined more words. So why is it that Johnson’s dictionary is the one we remember? That’s harder to answer than you might think. His dictionary was full of shortcomings. He allowed many spelling inconsistencies to be perpetuated—deceit but receipt, deign but disdain, hark but hearken, convey but inveigh, moveable but immovable. He wrote downhil with one l, but uphill with two; install with two l’s, but reinstal with one; fancy with an f, but phantom with a ph. Generally he was aware of these inconsistencies, but felt that in many cases the inconsistent spellings were already too well established to tamper with. He did try to make spelling somewhat more sensible, institutionalizing the differences between flower and flour and between metal and mettle—but essentially he saw his job as recording English spelling as it stood in his day, not changing it. This was in sharp contrast to the attitude taken by the revisers of the Académie Française dictionary a decade or so later, who would revise almost a quarter of French spellings. There were holes in Johnson erudition. He professed a preference for what he conceived to be Saxon spellings for words like music, critic, and prosaic, and thus spelled them with a final k, when in fact they were all borrowed from Latin. He was given to flights of editorializing, as when he defined a patron as “one who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery” or oats as a grain that sustained horses in England and people in Scotland. His etymologies, according to Baugh and Cable, were “often ludicrous” and his proofreading sometimes strikingly careless. He defined a garret as a “room on the highest floor in the house” and a cockloft as “the room over the garret.” Elsewhere, he gave identical definitions to leeward and windward, even though they are quite obviously opposites. Even allowing for the inflated prose of his day, he had a tendency to write passages of remarkable denseness, as here: “The proverbial oracles of our parsimonious ancestors have informed us, that the fatal waste of our fortune is by small expenses, by the profusion of sums too little singly to alarm our caution, and which we never suffer ourselves to consider together.” Too little singly? I would wager good money that that sentence was as puzzling to his contemporaries as it is to us. And yet at least it has the virtue of relative brevity. Often Johnson constructed sentences that ran to 250 words or more, which sound today uncomfortably like the ramblings of a man who has sat up far too late and drunk rather too much port. Yet for all that, his Dictionary of the English Language, published in two volumes in June 1755, is a masterpiece, one of the landmarks of English literature. Its definitions are supremely concise, its erudition magnificent, if not entirely flawless. Without a nearby library to draw on, and with appallingly little financial backing (his publisher paid him a grand total of just £1,575, less than £200 a year, from which he had to pay his assistants), Johnson worked from a garret room off Fleet Street, where he defined some 43,000 words, illustrated with more than 114,000 supporting quotations drawn from every area of literature. It is little wonder that he made some errors and occasionally indulged himself with barbed definitions. He had achieved in under nine years what the forty members of the Académie Française could not do in less than forty. He captured the majesty of the English language and gave it a dignity that was long overdue. It was a monumental accomplishment and he well deserved his fame.

Where Samuel Johnson spent his free hours drinking and discoursing in the company of other great men, Webster was a charmless loner who criticized almost everyone but was himself not above stealing material from others, most notably from a spelling book called Aby-sel-pha by an Englishman named Thomas Dilworth.

This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually redubbed the Oxford English Dictionary.

In early February 1884, a slim paperback book bearing the title The New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, containing all the words in the language (obscenities apart) between A and ant was published in Britain at the steepish price of twelve shillings and six pence. This was the first of twelve volumes of the most masterly and ambitious philological exercise ever undertaken, eventually redubbed the Oxford English Dictionary.

No other language has anything even remotely approaching it in scope. Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.

The OED confirmed a paradox that Webster had brought to light decades earlier—namely, that although readers will appear to treat a dictionary with the utmost respect, they will generally ignore anything in it that doesn’t suit their tastes. The OED, for instance, has always insisted on -ize spellings for words such as characterize, itemize, and the like, and yet almost nowhere in England, apart from the pages of The Times newspaper (and not always there) are they observed. The British still spell almost all such words with -ise endings and thus enjoy a consistency with words such as advertise, merchandise, and surprise that we in America fail to achieve. But perhaps the most notable of all the OED’s minor quirks is its insistence that Shakespeare should be spelled Shakspere. After explaining at some length why this is the only correct spelling, it grudgingly acknowledges that the commonest spelling “is perh. Shakespeare.” (To which we might add, it cert. is.) In the spring of 1989, a second edition of the dictionary was issued, containing certain modifications, such as the use of the International Phonetic Alphabet instead of Murray’s own quirky system. It comprised the original twelve volumes, plus four vast supplements issued between 1972 and 1989. Now sprawling over twenty volumes, the updated dictionary is a third bigger than its predecessor, with 615,000 entries, 2,412,000 supporting quotations, almost 60 million words of exposition, and about 350 million keystrokes of text (or one for each native speaker of English in the world). No other language has anything even remotely approaching it in scope. Because of its existence, more is known about the history of English than any other language in the world.

The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language—a

The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language—a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather than runneth. Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as gotten.

Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress as a verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression), deck of cards (the English now say pack), slim in the sense of small (as in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy, trash for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for pig, mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the expression I guess.

Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this caviling—perhaps

Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this caviling—perhaps most surprisingly Benjamin Franklin. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized some of his Americanisms, Franklin meekly replied: “I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate and the colonize . . . ​I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault; The unshakable too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong. . . . ​I hope with you, that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will be so.” And yet he went right on introducing words: eventuate, demoralize, constitutionality. This servility persisted for a long time among some people. William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the leading journalists of the nineteenth century in America, refused to allow such useful words as lengthy and presidential into his paper simply because they had been dismissed as Americanisms a century earlier. Jefferson, more heroically, lamented the British tendency to raise “a hue and cry at every word he [Samuel Johnson] has not licensed.”

“If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is.”

More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity.

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is—well, we’ve covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary.

Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post.

In Yugoslavia they speak five languages. In not one of them does the word stop exist, yet every stop sign in the country says just that.

English is the most global of languages.

What is certain is that English is the most studied and emulated language in the world, its influence so enormous that it has even affected the syntax of other languages.

English words are everywhere.

The Japanese are particular masters at the art of seizing a foreign word and alternately beating it and aerating it until it sounds something like a native product.

President François Mitterrand declared in 1986, perhaps a trifle excessively: “France is engaged in a war with Anglo-Saxon.”

In many places English is widely resented as a symbol of colonialism.

Yet these countries are almost always determined to phase English out.

In India, where it is spoken by no more than 5 percent of the population at the very most, the constitution was written in English and English was adopted as a foreign language not out of admiration for its linguistic virtues but as a necessary expedient. In a country in which there are 1,652 languages and dialects, including 15 official ones, and in which no one language is spoken by more than 16 percent of the population, a neutral outside language has certain obvious practicalities. Much the same situation prevails in Malaysia, where the native languages include Tamil, Portuguese, Thai, Punjabi, twelve versions of Chinese, and about as many of Malay. Traditionally, Malay is spoken in the civil service, Chinese in business, and English in the professions and in education. Yet these countries are almost always determined to phase English out. India had hoped to eliminate it as an official language by 1980 and both Malaysia and Nigeria have been trying to do likewise since the 1970s.

The 1905 draft of a treaty between Russia and Japan, written in both French and English, treated the English control and French contrôler as synonyms when in fact the English form means “to dominate or hold power” while the French means simply “to inspect.” The treaty nearly fell apart as a result.

Rather more successful, and infinitely more sensible, has been Esperanto, devised in 1887 by a Pole named Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhoff, who lived in an area of Russia where four languages were commonly spoken.

Esperanto is considerably more polished and accessible than Volapük.

Esperanto has one inescapable shortcoming. For all its eight million claimed speakers, it is not widely used.

Perhaps the most promising of all such languages is Seaspeak, devised in Britain for the use of maritime authorities in busy sea lanes such as the English Channel.

Computers, with their lack of passion and admirable ability to process great streams of information, would seem to be ideal for performing translations, but in fact they are pretty hopeless at it, largely on account of their inability to come to terms with idiom, irony, and other quirks of language.

It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one’s face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.

Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement.

Of course, if we all spoke a common language things might work more smoothly, but there would be far less scope for amusement. In an article in Gentleman’s Quarterly in 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of the misunderstandings that have occurred during the dubbing or subtitling of American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to pull over, the Italian translator has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover). In another where a character asks if he can bring a date to the funeral, the Spanish subtitle has him asking if he can bring a fig to the funeral.

We in the English-speaking world have often been highly complacent in expecting others to learn English without our making anything like the same effort in return.

“If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me”

There is evidence to suggest that some members of Congress aren’t fully sympathetic with the necessity for a commercial nation to be multilingual. As one congressman quite seriously told Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages, “If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for me” [quoted in the Guardian, April 30, 1988].

The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names.

The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names. A glance through the British edition of Who’s Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P. G. Wodehouse novel: Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, Captain Allwyne Arthur Compton Farquaharson of Invercauld, Professor Valentine Mayneord, Sir Helenus Milmo, Lord Keith of Kinkel. Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfulry Plunkett-Ernel-Erle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The leading explorer in Britain today is Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Somewhere in Britain to this day there is an old family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich. In the realms of nomenclature clearly we are dealing here with giants.

They find particular pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them around until they become something altogether unique, so that Beaulieu becomes “bewley,” Beauchamp turns into “beecham,” Prideaux into “pridducks,” Devereux to “devrooks,” Cambois to “cammiss,” Hautbois to “hobbiss,” Belvoir somehow becomes “beaver,” and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into “belzer.”

The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonehaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: “feather-stun-haw,” “feerston-shaw,” “feston-haw,” “feeson-hay,” or (for those in a hurry) “fan-shaw.”

At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal.

“Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners-this is a basic requirement of most British institutions-and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal.”

However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names.

However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet Gum Head, Louisiana; Whynot, Mississippi; Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob, and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Scratch Ankle, Alabama; Fertile, Minnesota; Climax, Michigan; Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Breakabeen, New York; What Cheer, Iowa; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eighty-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; Cozy Corners, Wisconsin; Humptulips, Washington; Hog Heaven, Idaho; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Potato Neck, Maryland; Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie’s Nipples, Wyoming.

Among the Chinese, to be called a turtle is the worst possible taunt.

In French it is a grave insult to call someone a cow or a camel and the effect is considerably intensified if you precede it with espèce de (“kind of”) so that it is worse in French to be called a kind of a cow than to be called just a cow.

Often national terms of abuse are nonsensical, as in the German schweinehund, which means “pig-dog.”

Some cultures don’t swear at all.

Some cultures don’t swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2: 00 A.M., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means “in the restaurant.”

This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing.

This tendency to transform profanities into harmless expressions is a particular characteristic of English swearing. Most languages employ euphemism (from the Greek, meaning “to speak well of”) in some measure. Germans say the meaningless Potz blitz rather than Gottes Blitz and the French say par bleu for par Dieu and Ventre Saint Gris instead of Ventre Saint Christ. But no other language approaches English for the number of delicate expletives of the sort that you could safely say in front of a maiden aunt: darn, durn, drat, gosh, golly, goodness gracious, gee whiz, jeepers, shucks, and so on. We have scores, if not hundreds, of these terms. However, sometimes even these words are regarded as exceptionable, particularly when they are new. Blooming and blasted, originally devised as mild epithets, were in nineteenth-century England considered nearly as offensive as the more venerable expletives they were meant to replace.

Forbidden words are emotive because they are forbidden and they are forbidden because they are emotive.

But then of course the gravity of swear words in any language has little to do with the words themselves and much more to do with the fact that they are forbidden. It is a circular effect. Forbidden words are emotive because they are forbidden and they are forbidden because they are emotive.

Soon after Shakespeare’s death, Britain went through a period of prudery of the sort with which all countries are periodically seized. In 1623 an Act of Parliament was passed making it illegal to swear. People were fined for such mild oaths as “upon my life” and “by my troth”—mild utterances indeed compared with the “God’s poxes” and “fackins faiths” of a generation before. In 1649 the laws were tightened even further—to the extent that swearing at a parent became punishable by death.

It has sometimes been said that prudery reached such a height in the nineteenth century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion.

Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightforward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser’s devious mind.

Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightforward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser’s devious mind. British crosswords require you to realize that carthorse is an anagram of orchestra, that contaminated can be made into no admittance, that emigrants can be transformed into streaming, Cinerama into American, Old Testament into most talented, and World Cup team into (a stroke of genius, this one) talcum powder.