The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

this warning to motorists in Tokyo: “When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.”

when a person says to you, “How do you do?” he will be taken aback if you reply, with impeccable logic, “How do I do what?”

When companies from four European countries—France, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland—formed a joint truck-making venture called Iveco in 1977, they chose English as their working language because, as one of the founders wryly observed, “It puts us all at an equal disadvantage.”

When you learn that muscatel in Italian means “wine with flies in it,” you may conclude that the Italians are gastronomically out to lunch, so to speak, but really their names for foodstuffs are no more disgusting than our hot dogs or those old English favorites, toad-in-the-hole, spotted dick, and faggots in gravy.

In Cantonese, hae means “yes.” But, with a fractional change of pitch, it also describes the female pudenda. The resulting scope for confusion can be safely left to the imagination.

In Japanese, the word for foreigner means “stinking of foreign hair.” To the Czechs a Hungarian is “a pimple.” Germans call cockroaches “Frenchmen,” while the French call lice “Spaniards.”

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.

In Krio, spoken in Sierra Leone, stomach gas is bad briz, while to pass gas is to pul bad briz.

Almost all languages change. A rare exception is written Icelandic, which has changed so little that modern Icelanders can read sagas written a thousand years ago, and if Leif Ericson appeared on the streets of Reykjavik he could find his way around, allowing for certain difficulties over terms like airport and quarter-pound cheeseburger.

If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia. There is a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there’s a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis. 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.

we have a large number of negative words—inept, disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt—for which the positive form is missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, “She’s so sheveled,” or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert.

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn’t have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary.

Sometimes words are made up for a specific purpose. The U.S. Army in 1974 devised a food called funistrada as a test word during a survey of soldiers’ dietary preferences. Although no such food existed, funistrada ranked higher in the survey than lima beans and eggplant (which seems about right to me, at least as far as the lima beans go).

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.”

If a standard Western typewriter keyboard were expanded to take in every Chinese ideograph it would have to be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide—about the size of two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.

The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code.

Noah Webster not only pushed for simplified spelling, but lobbied Congress to make it a legal requirement—turning America into the only country in history where deviant spelling would be a punishable offense.

Major Walter Clopton Wingfield, an Englishman, invented an outdoor game that he called sphairistike. It only caught on when his friend Arthur Balfour, the future prime minister, suggested he call it lawn tennis.

The day after he was elected president in 1988, George Bush told a television reporter he couldn’t believe the enormity of what had happened. Had President-elect Bush known that the primary meaning of enormity is wickedness or evilness, he would doubtless have selected a more apt term.

Even the most liberal descriptivist would accept that there must be some conventions of usage. We must agree to spell cat c-a-t and not e-l-e-p-h-a-n-t, and we must agree that by that word we mean a small furry quadruped that goes meow and sits comfortably on one’s lap and not a large lumbering beast that grows tusks and is exceedingly difficult to housebreak.

Many scholars have taken the trouble (or more probably compelled their graduate students to take the trouble) of counting the number of words used by various authors, on the assumption, one supposes, that that tells us something about human vocabulary. Mostly what it tells us is that academics aren’t very good at counting.

One glaring problem with even the most scrupulous tabulation is that the total number of words used by an author doesn’t begin to tell us the true size of his vocabulary. I know the meanings of frangible, spiffing, and cutesy-poo, but have never had occasion to write them before now.

In Hong Kong you can find a place called the Plastic Bacon Factory. In Naples, according to the London Observer, there is a sports shop called Snoopy’s Dribbling. (The name becomes fractionally less alarming when you know that dribbling is the European term for moving a soccer ball down the field), while in Brussels there is a men’s clothing store called Big Nuts, where on my last visit to the city it had a sign saying: SWEAT—690 FRANCS. (Closer inspection revealed this to be a sweatshirt.)

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. An oft-cited example is the computer that was instructed to translate the expression out of sight, out of mind out of English and back in again and came up with blind insanity.

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.

Just in the City of London, an area of one square mile, you can find Pope’s Head Alley, Mincing Lane, Garlick Hill, Crutched Friars, Threadneedle Street, Bleeding Heart Yard, Seething Lane. In the same compact area you can find churches named St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Sepulchre Without Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St. Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe.

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.

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”).

Sometimes people took the opportunity to get rid of undesirable surnames which had been imposed on their ancestors during periods of subjugation. Often these were offensive—either because the giver had a wayward sense of humor or because he hoped to be bribed into making it something less embarrassing. For instance, the Greek name Kolokotronis translates as “bullet in the ass.” But others kept their names—for instance, the Goldwaters, even though that name was long a synonym for urine.

As with family names, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British have such distinctive place-names not because they just accidentally evolved, but rather because the British secretly like living in places with names like Lower Slaughter and Great Snoring.

a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son’s birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rather less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.

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.”

But the greatest outburst of prudery came in the nineteenth century when it swept through the world like a fever. It was an age when sensibilities grew so delicate that one lady was reported to have dressed her goldfish in miniature suits for the sake of propriety and a certain Madame de la Bresse left her fortune to provide clothing for the snowmen of Paris.

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?”

Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that’s right, 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in King Henry IV, Part I, the father of Hotspur learns of his son’s tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur.

Lewis Carroll, an obsessive deviser and player of wordgames, once sat up all night trying to make an anagram of William Ewart Gladstone before settling on “Wild agitator, means well.”

Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It manages in just seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” That is simply inspired. Others that have the virtue of making at least some kind of sense: Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron. Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw? Too far, Edna, we wander afoot. Madam, I’m Adam. Sex at noon taxes. Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era? Able was I ere I saw Elba. Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus. Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.

William Safire cites the American grandmother who thought that the line in the Beatles’ song about “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” was “the girl with colitis goes by,” which would seem to offer rich potential to budding holorimistes.