The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously

Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines.

Afferbeck Lauder,

Indeed, a case is sometimes made that certain varieties are separate languages. A leading contender in this category is Scots, the variety of English used in the Lowlands of Scotland (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which really is a separate language). As evidence, its supporters point out that it has its own dictionary, The Concise Scots Dictionary, as well as its own body of literature, most notably the poems of Robert Burns, and it is full of words that would leave most other English speakers darkly baffled: swithering for hesitating, shuggle for shake, niffle-naffle for wasting time, gontrum niddles for a cry of joy, and countless others. Although Scots, or Lallans as it is sometimes also called, is clearly based on English, it is often all but incomprehensible to other English speakers.

puddin’-race!

A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English. Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why. Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world, dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest shred of personal liberty and dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose. Gullah itself is a blend of twenty-eight separate African tongues. So it is hardly surprising if at first glance such languages seem rudimentary and unrefined. As Robert Hendrickson notes in his absorbing book American Talk, “The syntactic structure, or underlying grammar, of Gullah is . . . ​extraordinarily economical, making the language quickly and readily accessible to new learners.” But although it is simple, it is not without subtlety. Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language.

Our letter A comes from the Semitic aleph, meaning “ox,” and originally was a rough depiction of an ox’s head. B comes from the Semitic bēth, meaning “house.”

It looks NOTHING like an OX. Unless it’s upside down. Why isn’t it reversed then?!

Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled. supercede conceed procede idiosyncracy concensus accomodate impressario irresistable rhythym opthalmologist diptheria anamoly afficianado caesarian grafitti In fact, they all are. So was misspelled at the end of the preceeding paragraph. So was preceding just there. I’m sorry, I’ll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.

In Hungarian, for instance, tőke means capital, but töke means testicles. Szár means stem, but take away the accent and it becomes the sort of word you say when you hit your thumb with a hammer.

English spelling has caused problems for about as long as there have been English words to spell. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate in the sixth century, they took their alphabet from the Romans, but quickly realized that they had three sounds for which the Romans had no letters. These they supplied by taking three symbols from their old runic alphabet: w, þ, and ð. The first, literally double u, represented the sound “w” as it is pronounced today. The other two represented the “th” sound: þ (called thorn) and ð (called eth and still used in Ireland). The first Norman scribes came to England and began grappling with what to them was a wholly foreign tongue—a fact clearly evident in many of the spellings from the Domesday Book. In just one small parish in Yorkshire, Hanlith was recorded as Hagenlith, Malham as Malgham, and Calton as Colton—all spellings that were probably never used locally. Many such errors can be attributed to carelessness and unfamiliarity, but others clearly reflect Norman orthographic preferences. The Normans certainly did not hesitate to introduce changes they felt more comfortable with, such as substituting qu for cw. Had William the Conqueror been turned back at Hastings, we would spell queen as cwene. The letters z and g were introduced and the Old English ð and v were phased out.

People were even casual about their names. More than eighty spellings of Shakespeare’s name have been found, among them Shagspeare, Shakspere, and even Shakestaffe. Shakespeare himself did not spell the name the same way twice in any of his six known signatures and even spelled it two ways on one document, his will, which he signed Shakspere in one place and Shakspeare in another. Curiously, the one spelling he never seemed to use himself was Shakespeare. Much is often made of all this, but a moment’s reflection should persuade us that a person’s signature, whether he be an Elizabethan playwright or a modern orthodontist, is about the least reliable way of determining how he spells his name. Many people scrawl their signatures, and Shakespeare was certainly one of history’s scrawlers. In any case, whether he used the spelling himself or not, Shakespeare is how his name appears on most of the surviving legal documents concerning him, as well as on the title pages of his sonnets and on twenty-two of the twenty-four original quarto editions of his plays.

wether,

Castrated ram

If we insisted on strictly phonetic renderings, girl would be gurl in most of America (though perhaps goil in New York), gel in London and Sydney, gull in Ireland, gill in South Africa, gairull in Scotland. Written communications between nations, and even parts of nations, would become practically impossible. And that, as we shall see in the next chapter, is a problem enough already.

grammatical precepts only by bending the

range of sentences forming statements, commands, questions and exclamations cause us to draw on a more sophisticated battery of orderings and arrangements.” (Robert

“causes.” “The prevalence of incorrect instances of

So if there are no officially appointed guardians for the English language, who sets down all those rules that we all know about from childhood—the idea that we must never end a sentence with a preposition or begin one with a conjunction, that we must use each other for two things and one another for more than two, and that we must never use hopefully in an absolute sense, such as “Hopefully it will not rain tomorrow”? The answer, surprisingly often, is that no one does, that when you look into the background of these “rules” there is often little basis for them. Consider the curiously persistent notion that sentences should not end with a preposition. The source of this stricture, and several other equally dubious ones, was one Robert Lowth, an eighteenth-century clergyman and amateur grammarian whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, enjoyed a long and distressingly influential life both in his native England and abroad. It is to Lowth we can trace many a pedant’s most treasured notions: the belief that you must say different from rather than different to or different than, the idea that two negatives make a positive, the rule that you must not say “the heaviest of the two objects,” but rather “the heavier,” the distinction between shall and will, and the clearly nonsensical belief that between can apply only to two things and among to more than two.

Perhaps the most remarkable and curiously enduring of Lowth’s many beliefs was the conviction that sentences ought not to end with a preposition. But even he was not didactic about it. He recognized that ending a sentence with a preposition was idiomatic and common in both speech and informal writing. He suggested only that he thought it generally better and more graceful, not crucial, to place the preposition before its relative “in solemn and elevated” writing. Within a hundred years this had been converted from a piece of questionable advice into an immutable rule. In a remarkable outburst of literal-mindedness, nineteenth-century academics took it as read that the very name pre-position meant it must come before something—anything. But then this was a period of the most resplendent silliness, when grammarians and scholars seemed to be climbing over one another (or each other; it doesn’t really matter) in a mad scramble to come up with fresh absurdities. This was the age when, it was gravely insisted, Shakespeare’s laughable ought to be changed to laugh-at-able and reliable should be made into relionable. Dozens of seemingly unexceptionable words—lengthy, standpoint, international, colonial, brash—were attacked with venom because of some supposed etymological deficiency or other. Thomas de Quincey, in between bouts of opium taking, found time to attack the expression what on earth. Some people wrote mooned for lunatic and foresayer for prophet on the grounds that the ne...

Other authorities, in both Britain and America, continue to deride the absolute use of hopefully. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage flatly forbids it. Its writers must not say, “Hopefully the sun will come out soon,” but rather are instructed to resort to a clumsily passive and periphrastic construction such as “It is to be hoped that the sun will come out soon.” The reason? The authorities maintain that hopefully in the first sentence is a misplaced modal auxiliary—that it doesn’t belong to any other part of the sentence. Yet they raise no objection to dozens of other words being used in precisely the same unattached way—admittedly, mercifully, happily, curiously, and so on. 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.

More mysterious things from the NYT

Until the eighteenth century it was correct to say “you was” if you were referring to one person. It sounds odd today, but the logic is impeccable. Was is a singular verb and were a plural one. Why should you take a plural verb when the sense is clearly singular? The answer—surprise, surprise—is that Robert Lowth didn’t like it. “I’m hurrying, are I not?” is hopelessly ungrammatical, but “I’m hurrying, aren’t I?”—merely a contraction of the same words—is perfect English. Many is almost always a plural (as in “Many people were there”), but not when it is followed by a, as in “Many a man was there.” There’s no inherent reason why these things should be so. They are not defensible in terms of grammar. They are because they are.

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.

A perennial argument with dictionary makers is whether they should be prescriptive (that is, whether they should prescribe how language should be used) or descriptive (that is, merely describe how it is used without taking a position).

words. But what really excited outrage was its remarkable contention that ain’t was “used orally in most parts of the U.S. by many cultivated speakers.” So disgusted was The New York Times with the new dictionary that it announced it would not use it but would continue with the 1934 edition, prompting the language authority Bergen Evans to write: “Anyone who solemnly announces in the year 1962 that he will be guided in matters of English usage by a dictionary published in 1934 is talking ignorant and pretentious nonsense,” and he pointed out that the issue of the Times announcing the decision contained nineteen words condemned by the Second International.

English is changing all the time and at an increasingly dizzy pace. At the turn of the century words were being added at the rate of about 1,000 a year. Now, according to a report in The New York Times [April 3, 1989], the increase is closer to 15,000 to 20,000 a year. In 1987, when Random House produced the second edition of its masterly twelve-pound unabridged dictionary, it included over 50,000 words that had not existed twenty-one years earlier and 75,000 new definitions of old words. Of its 315,000 entries, 210,000 had to be revised. That is a phenomenal amount of change in just two decades. The new entries included preppy, quark, flexitime, chairperson, sunblocker, and the names of 800 foods that had not existed or been generally heard of in 1966—tofu, piña colada, chapati, sushi, and even crêpes.

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.”

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.

and he well deserved his fame. But its ambitious sweep was soon to be exceeded by a persnickety schoolteacher/lawyer half a world away in Connecticut. Noah Webster (1758–1843) was by all accounts a severe, correct, humorless, religious, temperate man who was not easy to like, even by other severe, religious, temperate, humorless people.

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. In the marvelously deadpan phrase of H. L. Mencken, Webster was “sufficiently convinced of its merits to imitate it, even to the extent of lifting whole passages.”

Webster was responsible also for the American aluminum in favor of the British aluminium. His choice has the fractional advantage of brevity, but defaults in terms of consistency. Aluminium at least follows the pattern set by other chemical elements—potassium, radium, and the like.

Bastard! It should be the British way!

the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguably America’s single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective (“Lunch was O.K.”), verb (“Can you O.K. this for me?”), noun (“I need your O.K. on this”), interjection (“O.K., I hear you”), and adverb (“We did O.K.”). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent (“Shall we go?” “O.K.”), to great enthusiasm (“O.K.!”), to lukewarm endorsement (“The party was O.K.”), to a more or less meaningless filler of space (“O.K., can I have your attention please?”). It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The many theories break down into three main camps: 1. It comes from someone’s or something’s initials—a Sac Indian chief called Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President Martin Van Buren’s nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall crackers, which were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these theories the initials were stamped or scribbled on documents or crates and gradually came to be synonymous with quality or reliability. 2. It is ada...

People who didn’t blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They were given names that denigrated their backgrounds: wop from the Italian guappo (a strutting fellow), kraut (from the supposed German fondness for sauerkraut), yid (for Yiddish speakers), dago from the Spanish Diego, kike (from the -ki and -ky endings on many Jewish names), bohunk from Bohemian-Hungarian, micks and paddies for the Irish. As we shall see in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated—to the point of being unable to speak their parents’ language.

Occasionally physical isolation, as with the Cajuns in Louisiana or the Gullah speakers on the Sea Islands off the East Coast, enabled people to be more resistant to change. It has often been said that if you want to hear what the speech of Elizabethan England sounded like, you should go to the hills of Appalachia or the Ozarks, where you can find isolated communities of people still speaking the English of Shakespeare. To be sure, many of the words and expressions that we think of today as “hillbilly” words—afeared, tetchy, consarn it, yourn (for yours), hisn (for his), et (for ate), sassy (for saucy), jined (for joined), and scores of others—do indeed reflect the speech of Elizabethan London.

Something of the spirit of the age was captured in Samuel Johnson’s observation in 1769 that Americans were “a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging”

As often as not, these sneerers showed themselves to be not only gratuitously offensive but also etymologically underinformed because the objects of their animus were invariably British in origin. Johnson disparaged glee, jeopardy, and smolder, little realizing that they had existed in England for centuries. To antagonize, coined by John Quincy Adams, was strenuously attacked. So was progress as a verb, even though it had been used by both Bacon and Shakespeare.

The stylebook of the Times of London sniffily instructs its staff members that “normalcy should be left to the Americans who coined it. The English [italics mine] is normality.” In point of fact normalcy is a British coinage. As Baugh and Cable put it, “The English attitude toward Americanisms is still quite frankly hostile.”

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 simply because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression “I’ll knock you up in the morning,” which means “I’ll knock on your door in the morning.” To keep your pecker up is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously, pecker has the same slang meaning there), but to be stuffed is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, “I couldn’t eat another thing; I’m stuffed,” an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.) Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone’s fanny; in England it means a woman’s pudenda.

When a Japanese says “Kangae sasete kudasai” (“Let me think about it”) or “Zensho shimasu” (“I will do my best”) he actually means “no.”

Having said all that, we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [February 18, 1985], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an “involuntary conversion of a 727.” It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to the London Times, has taken to describing a death as “a negative patient-care outcome.” The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as “wooden interdental stimulators” and tents as “frame-supported tension structures.” Here is an extract from the Pentagon’s Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: “The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711. . . . ​The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance.” And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).

But of course it works the other way. A Braniff Airlines ad that intended to tell Spanish-speaking fliers that they could enjoy sitting in leather (en cuero) seats, told them that they could fly encuero—without clothes on.

In 1977, President Carter, on a trip to Poland, wanted to tell the people, “I wish to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future,” but his interpreter made it come out as “I desire the Poles carnally.” The interpreter also had the president telling the Poles that he had “abandoned” the United States that day, instead of leaving it. After a couple of hours of such gaffes, the president wisely abandoned the interpreter.

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].

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. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.

The origins of other names are not immediately apparent because they come from non-English sources. Russell was from the medieval French roussell, “red-haired,” while Morgan is Welsh for white-haired. Sometimes strange literal meanings are hidden in innocuous-sounding names. Kennedy, means “ugly head” in Gaelic, Boyd means “yellow-faced or sickly,” Campbell means “crooked mouth.” The same is equally true of other languages. As Mario Pei notes, Gorky means “bitter,” Tolstoy means “fat,” and Machiavelli means “bad nails.” Cicero is Roman slang for a wart on the nose (it means literally “chickpea”).

Among the Chinese, to be called a turtle is the worst possible taunt. In Norwegian, devil is highly taboo—roughly equivalent to our fuck. Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative possible remark is hlebeshako—“your mother’s ears.” 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. The worst insult among Australian aborigines is to suggest that the target have intercourse with his mother. Incest is in fact so serious in many cultures that often it need be implied in only the vaguest terms, as with tu madre in Spanish and your mama among blacks in America. Often national terms of abuse are nonsensical, as in the German schweinehund, which means “pig-dog.”

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.”

Most cultures have two levels of swearing—relatively mild and highly profane. Ashley Montagu, in The Anatomy of Swearing, cites a study of swearing among the Wik Monkan natives of the Cape York Peninsula. They have many insults which are generally regarded as harmless teasing—big head, long nose, skinny arms—and a whole body of very much more serious ones, which are uttered only in circumstances of high emotion. Among the latter are big penis, plenty urine, and vagina woman mad.

Most of our swear words have considerable antiquity. Modern English contains few words that would be unhesitatingly understood by an Anglo-Saxon peasant of, say, the tenth century A.D. but tits is one of them. So is fart, believe it or not. The Anglo-Saxons used the word scītan, which became shite by the 1300s and shit by the 1500s. Shite is used as a variant of shit in England to this day. Fuck, it has been suggested, may have sprung from the Latin futuo, the French foutre, or the German ficken, all of which have the same meaning. According to Montagu the word first appears in print in 1503 in a poem by the Scottish poet William Dunbar. Although fuck has been around for centuries, possibly millennia, for a long period it fell out of general use. Before 1503, the vulgar word for sex was to swive.

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.

I would have had a hell of a time!!

In fact, almost a century before she reigned Samuel Johnson was congratulated by a woman for leaving indecent words out of his dictionary. To which he devastatingly replied: “So you’ve been looking for them, have you, Madam?”