The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

In 1982, a gold medallion about the size of an American fifty-cent piece was found in a field in Suffolk. It had been dropped or buried by one of the very earliest of the intruders, sometime between A.D. 450 and 480. The medallion bears a runic inscription that says (or at least is thought to say): “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman.” Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. It is, in other words, the first sentence in English.

A tantalizing glimpse into the daily life and cosmopolitan nature of Roman Britain surfaced in 1987 with the discovery of a hoard of curse tablets in Bath near a spring once dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva. It was the practice of aggrieved citizens at that time to scratch a curse on a lead tablet and toss it with a muttered plea for vengeance into the spring. The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: “Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes.”

No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language. He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him. Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remembrance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in one sentence, as in Hamlet’s observation: “Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.” He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.”

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, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

The most famous of these perhaps is dord, which appeared in the 1934 Merriam-Webster International Dictionary as another word for density. In fact, it was a misreading of the scribbled “D or d,” meaning that “density” could be abbreviated either to a capital or lowercase letter.

Browning had apparently somewhere come across the word twat—which meant precisely the same then as it does now—but pronounced it with a flat a and somehow took it to mean a piece of headgear for nuns. The verse became a source of twittering amusement for generations of schoolboys and a perennial embarrassment to their elders, but the word was never altered and Browning was allowed to live out his life in wholesome ignorance because no one could think of a suitably delicate way of explaining his mistake to him.

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.

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.

And all of this isn’t even to begin to mention Wales where you can find towns and villages with names that look like Scrabble leftovers, among them Bwlchtocyn, Llwynddyrys, Cwmtwrch, Mwnt, Pwllheli, which are pronounced respectively—oh, to hell with it.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.