The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

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.

It was an age in which the most innocuous words became unacceptable at a rate that must have been dizzying. Stomach became a euphemism for belly and in its turn was considered too graphic and was replaced by tummy, midriff, and even breadbasket. The conventional terms for the parts of a chicken, such as breast, leg, and thigh, caused particular anxiety and had to be replaced with terms like drumstick, first joint, and white meat. The names for male animals, such as buck and stallion, were never used in mixed company. Bulls were called sires, male animals, and, in a truly inspired burst of ridiculousness, gentleman cows. But it didn’t stop there. Euphemisms had to be devised for any word that had cock in it—haycock became haystack, cockerel became rooster—and for the better part of a century people with cock in their names, such as Hitchcock or Peacock, suffered unspeakable embarrassment when they were required to make introductions. Americans were rather more squeamish in these matters than the British, going so far as to change the old English titbit to tidbit.

The British are relatively broad-minded about language, even in their advertisements. In 1989 Epson, the printer company, ran a lighthearted ad in British newspapers about the history of printing, which contained the statement that “a Chinese eunuch called Cai Lun, with no balls but one hell of an imagination, invented paper.”

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. (How did anyone ever think of that?) To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue “An important city in Czechoslovakia” instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. “A seed you put in the garage” is caraway, while “HIJKLMNO” is water because it is H-to-O or H2O. Some clues are cryptic in the extreme. The answer to “Sweetheart could take Non-Commissioned Officer to dance” is flame. Why? Well, a noncommissioned officer is an NCO. Another word for sweetheart is flame. If you add NCO to flame you get flamenco, a kind of dance. Get it? It is a wonder to me that anyone ever completes them. And yet many Britons take inordinate pride not just in completing them but in completing them quickly. A provost at Eton once boasted that he could do The Times crossword in the time it took his morning egg to boil, prompting one wag to sugges...

I am gobsmacked. And apparently destined to never to do a London Times puzzle.

The Times of London held out until January 1930, when it finally produced its first crossword (devised by a Norfolk farmer who had never previously solved one, much less constructed one). To salve its conscience at succumbing to a frivolous game, The Times printed occasional crosswords in Latin. Its namesake in New York held out for another decade and did not produce its first crossword until 1942.

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children’s riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?” The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

Now they are so much a thing of the past that a publicity woman at American Safety Razor, the company that now owns the Burma-Shave name, had never even heard of them.

That is just ignorant. What is she 12 years old?!

At one Hollywood high school, on parents’ night every speech had to be translated from English into Korean, Spanish, and Armenian. As

Consider for a moment President George H. W. Bush explaining why he would not support a ban on semiautomatic weapons: “But I also want to have—be the President that protects the rights of, of people to, to have arms. And that—so you don’t go so far that the legitimate rights on some legislation are, are, you know, impinged on.” As Tom Wicker noted in an article in The New York Times [February 24, 1988] critically anatomizing the president’s speaking abilities, “could he not express himself at least in, like, maybe, you know, sixth- or seventh-grade English, rather than speaking as if he were Dan Quayle trying to explain the Holocaust?” But compared with the vice president, Mr. Bush is an extemporaneous speaker of the first mark. Here is Vice President Quayle speaking off the cuff at a Thanksgiving festival in Charles City, Virginia: “I suppose three important things certainly come to my mind that we want to say thank you. The first would be our family. Your family, my family—which is composed of an immediate family of a wife and three children, a larger family with grandparents and aunts and uncles. We all have our family, whichever that may be” [quoted in the Des Moines Register, November 23, 1988]. And they said oratory was dead.