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by
Bill Bryson
Read between
July 23 - August 8, 2019
In this regard I must also thank Laurence Urdang for helping me (alas, so far without success) try to track down the person who passed off one of these articles as her own in at least three publications in Europe and America, including Mr. Urdang’s own esteemed quarterly, Verbatim. To all of these people I send thanks—except, of course, the elusive plagiarist, to whom I address one heartfelt raspberry.
while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob.
sang-froid,
Coolness under pressure.
Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.”
Ski-more-rocked
In Cantonese, hae means “yes.” But, with a fractional change of pitch, it also describes the female pudenda.
cwrw—an
Coo-roo
Welsh spellings are as nothing compared with Irish Gaelic, a language in which spelling and pronunciation give the impression of having been devised by separate committees, meeting in separate rooms, while implacably divided over some deep semantic issue. Try pronouncing geimhreadh, Gaelic for “winter,” and you will probably come up with something like “gem-reed-uh.” It is in fact “gyeeryee.” Beaudhchais (“thank you”) is “bekkas” and Ó Séaghda (“Oh-seeg-da?”) is simply “O’Shea.” Against this, the Welsh pronunciation of cwrw—“koo-roo”—begins to look positively self-evident.
Against this, however, there is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon. At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.” That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.
Every day we use countless words and expressions without thinking about them—often without having the faintest idea what they really describe or signify. What, for instance, is the hem in hem and haw, the shrift in short shrift, the fell in one fell swoop? When you are overwhelmed, where is the whelm that you are over, and what exactly does it look like? And why, come to that, can we be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but not semiwhelmed or—if our feelings are less pronounced—just whelmed?
Many authorities believe there is simply no connection between Basque and any other known language.
In Neo-Melanesian, an English-based creole of Papua New Guinea, the word for beard is gras bilong fes (literally “grass that belongs to the face”) and the word for a vein or artery is rop belong blut (“rope that belongs to the blood”). In African creoles you can find such arresting expressions as bak sit drayva (“back seat driver”), wesmata (“what’s the matter?”), and bottom-bottom wata waka (“submarine”). In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas is bad briz, while to pass gas is to pul bad briz.
Linear B script
Europe the degree of divergency is so great that only relatively recently have two languages, Albanian and Armenian, been identified as being Indo-European. Of all the Indo-European languages, Lithuanian is the one that has changed the least—so much so that it is sometimes said a Lithuanian can understand simple phrases in Sanskrit. At the very least, Lithuanian has preserved many more of the inflectional complexities of the original Indo-European language than others of the family.
The Romans had no word for gray. To them it was another shade of dark blue or dark green. Irish Gaelic possesses no equivalent of yes or no. They must resort to roundabout expressions such as “I think not” and “This is so.” Italians cannot distinguish between a niece and a granddaughter or between a nephew and a grandson. The Japanese have no definite or indefinite articles corresponding to the English a, an, or the, and they do not distinguish between singular and plural as we do with, say, ball/balls and child/children or as the French do with chateau/chateaux. This may seem strange until
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A common scene when people from southern Europe and northern Europe are conversing, as at a cocktail party, is for the latter to spend the entire conversation stealthily retreating, to try to gain some space, and for the former to keep advancing to close the gap. Neither speaker may even be aware of it.
English speakers dread silence. We are all familiar with the uncomfortable feeling that overcomes us when a conversation palls. Studies have shown that when a pause reaches four seconds, one or more of the conversationalists will invariably blurt something—a fatuous comment on the weather, a startled cry of “Gosh, is that the time?”—rather than let the silence extend to a fifth second.
Modern Greek has more than seventy common gestures, ranging from the chopping off the forearm gesture, which signifies extreme displeasure, to several highly elaborate ones, such as placing the left hand on the knee, closing one eye, looking with the other into the middle distance and wagging the free hand up and down, which means “I don’t want anything to do with it.”
Estimates of the number of languages in the world usually fix on a figure of about 2,700, though almost certainly no one has ever made a truly definitive count.
The rarest language as of 1984 was Oubykh, a highly complex Caucasian language with eighty-two consonants but only three vowels, once spoken by 50,000 people in the Crimea. But as of July 1984 there was just one living speaker remaining and he was eighty-two years old.
In Luxembourg, the inhabitants use French at school, German for reading newspapers, and Luxemburgish, a local Germanic dialect, at home. In Paraguay, people conduct business in Spanish, but tell their jokes in Guarani, the native Indian tongue.
It is difficult to conceive of the sense of indignity that the Celts must have felt at finding themselves overrun by primitive, unlettered warriors from the barbaric fringes of the Roman empire. For the Celts, without any doubt, were a sophisticated people. As Laird notes: “The native Celts had become civilized, law-abiding people, accustomed to government and reliable police, nearly as helpless before an invading host as most modern civilian populations would be.” Many of them enjoyed aspects of civilization—running water, central heating—that were quite unknown to the conquering hordes and
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curse tablets
Ancient curses, says against your neighbor for stealing your goat, written on lead, rolled and nailed and put in a place of power or energy.
Scip, bæð, bricg, and þæt might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations—respectively “ship,” “bath,” “bridge,” and “that”—have not altered in a thousand years. Indeed, if you take twenty minutes to familiarize yourself with the differences in Old English spelling and pronunciation—learning that i corresponds to the modern “ee” sound, that e sounds like “ay” and so on—you can begin to pick your way through a great deal of abstruse-looking text.
“People don’t always realise,” wrote Kenneth Clark [in Civilisation, page 18], “that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and copying that began under Charlemagne.”
Intermarrying between Normans and British contributed to the sense of Englishness. The children of these unions learned French from their fathers, but English from their mothers and nannies. Often they were more comfortable with English. The Normans, it must be said, were never hostile to English. William the Conqueror himself tried to learn it, though without success, and there was never any campaign to suppress it.
Under the long onslaught from the Scandinavians and Normans, Anglo-Saxon had taken a hammering. According to one estimate [Lincoln Barnett, page 97], about 85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on. They also include most of the short
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The common pattern in these changes was for the weak verbs to drive out the strong ones, but sometimes it worked the other way, so that today we have torn instead of teared and knew rather than knowed. Many of these have become regularized, but there are still 250 irregular verbs in English, and a surprising number of these are still fluid—so that even now most of us are not always sure whether we should say dived or dove, sneaked or snuck, hove or heaved, wove or weaved, strived or strove, swelled or swollen.
The process is called metanalysis. Thus a napron became an apron, a nauger became an auger, and an ekename became (over time) a nickname. By a similar process, the nicknames Ned, Nell, and Nan are thought to be corruptions of “mine Edward,” “mine Ellen,” and “mine Ann” [cited by Barber, page 183].
Today we have two demonstrative pronouns, this and that, but in Shakespeare’s day there was a third, yon (as in the Milton line “Him that yon soars on golden wing”), which suggested a further distance than that. You could talk about this hat, that hat, and yon hat. Today the word survives as a colloquial adjective, yonder, but our speech is fractionally impoverished for its loss.
And there’s a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis.
Lord this happens to me all the time!
If you harbor an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia. When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it’s a myoclonic jerk.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take velleity, which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn’t that seem a useful term? Or how about slubberdegullion, a seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or ugsome, a late medieval word meaning loathsome or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for horrid until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most unabridged dictionaries. Isn’t it a shame to let it slip away? Our dictionaries are
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No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly—so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need
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In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7½ pages to define or about 15,000 words of text—about as much as is contained in the first hundred pages of this book. Even when you strip out its obsolete senses, round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks like a wholly unseeming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun,
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Excise, meaning “to cut,” is quite distinct in origin from excise in the sense of a customs duty.
All though an excise tax will excise your money from you so...
Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a contronym. Sanction, for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done. Cleave can mean cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure, but a horse that has bolted has taken off. If you wind up a meeting you finish it; if you wind up a watch, you start it. To ravish
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Finally, erroneous words are sometimes introduced by respected users of the language who simply make a mistake. Shakespeare thought illustrious was the opposite of lustrous and thus for a time gave it a sense that wasn’t called for. Rather more alarmingly, the poet Robert Browning caused considerable consternation by including the word twat in one of his poems, thinking it an innocent term. The work was Pippa Passes, written in 1841 and now remembered for the line “God’s in His heaven, all’s right with the world.” But it also contains this disconcerting passage: Then owls and bats, Cowls and
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were. Quite a number of words that we’ve absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally “light of hand”), or R.S.V.P. for répondez s’il vous plaît. (Instead they write: “Prière de répondre.”) The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.
Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us: barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience.
Many new coinages didn’t last—often for obvious reasons. Jonson’s less-inspired efforts included ventositous and obstupefact. Shakespeare gave us the useful gloomy, but failed with barky and brisky (formed after the same pattern but somehow never catching on) and failed equally with conflux, vastidity, and tortive. Milton found no takers for inquisiturient, while, later still, Dickens tried to give the world vocular. The world didn’t want it.
Ventositous-flatulent. I had a coworker who embodied that word.
The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences.
Could be a kind of taffy.
4. WORDS CHANGE BY DOING NOTHING. That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice—as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm, which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was
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A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend,
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Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon “the unattractive exterior of Farfrae’s erection” or in Bleak House, where Dickens writes that “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.” [Taken from “Red Pants,” by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 1989 issue of Verbatim.] This drift of meaning can happen
Much to the delight of those with a school boy’s heart. I count myself there.
Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.
on the other hand, we possess a number of sounds that other languages find treacherous and daunting, most notably the “th” sound of the and think, which is remarkably rare in the world at large, or the “l” sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible. (I once worked with a Chinese fellow in England who when things went wrong would mutter darkly, “Bruddy hairo!” which I took to be some ancient Cantonese invective; it was not until many months later that I realized he was just saying, “Bloody hell.”)
But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.
Pronunciation
Ortho- epi. Or orthoipee
The irony is real...
All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling “i” can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small
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I bet learning Chinese is harder than learning English.
For the record, when bits are nicked off the front end of words it’s called aphesis, when off the back it’s called apocope, and when from the middle it’s syncope. A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to fo’c’sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was once day’s eye, good-bye was God-be-with-you, hello was (possibly) whole-be-thou, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight (a word curiously neglected in America) was fourteen-night.
Where the British will say howjado for “how do you do,” an American will say jeetjet for “have you taken sustenance recently?” and lesskweet for “in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.”
Shades of Jeff Foxworthy undercover linguist.
