The Secret Life of Words Quotes

“Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning ‘forced labour’, to signify a new type of ‘artificial’ being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future’s potential. The”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“is possible, too, that OK has its origins in the Wolof waw kay. That said, the expression has also been claimed as Greek, Finnish, Gaelic, Choctaw and French; as an abbreviation of the faintly humorous misspelling Orl Korrect or of Obediah Kelly, the name of a freight agent who initialled documents he’d checked; and as an inversion of the boxing term KO (knock-out), used because a boxer who hadn’t been knocked out was considered to be … well, OK.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“On loof, literally ‘on rudder’, was a Dutch phrase spoken by the captain of a vessel when he wanted to steer a course away from a hazard such as a reef. It became aloof, a word that extended this idea of avoidance and evasion.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The Western impression of Africa and Asia was that they were hazardous and uncivilized, full of gargantuan lizards, men with the heads of dogs, eels many hundreds of feet long, and creatures like the monoceros, which was alleged to have a stag’s head, the body of a horse, and feet like an elephant’s. The”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“In Fernand Braudel’s chastening phrase, ‘Europe is an Asian peninsula.’3 It is a given that Europeans underestimate the scale and resources and history of Asia – and do so recklessly. By looking at English’s Arabic connection, we can begin to correct this. Sugar”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The noun algorithm has become quite common in an age of computerized calculations, although it did not make its first appearance until 1957. Previously the word had been algorism, which was a corruption of the final part of the name of a ninth-century mathematician, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi: the Latin algoritmi was an approximation of al-Khwarizmi, which meant ‘the man from Chorasmia’ (today the Khorezm province of Uzbekistan).”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The nineteenth-century clergyman William Barnes preferred wheelsaddle to bicycle and folkwain to omnibus. By the same token forceps would be nipperlings, and pathology would be painlore. Some of his new words recalled the language of Old English poetry: he proposed glee-mote in place of concert, and the wonderful cellar-thane instead of butler.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Of the approximately 27,000 words identified in the OED as having first been used between 1250 and 1450, more than a fifth have French origins, and more than three-quarters of these are nouns.43 About half of all words in common use are nouns, and the introduction of new nouns – so many of them material – marks the discovery of new things, new experiences, new attitudes. Nouns”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Among more recent innovators was the Russian-born Vladimir Nabokov, whose novel Bend Sinister is trophied with delightful oddities like kwazinka (‘a slit between the folding parts of a screen’) and shchekotiki (which is ‘half-tingle, half-tickle’).6”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“We owe pandemonium to Milton’s Paradise Lost (where it is ‘the high Capital of Satan and his Peers’), diplomacy to Edmund Burke, and pessimism to Samuel Taylor Coleridge.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Tradition has it that Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, preferred to speak French to diplomats, Italian to ladies, German to stable boys and Spanish to God. English he seems to have used sparingly – to talk to geese.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“These many and very different Sources of our Language may be the cause, why it so deficient in Regularity … Yet we have this advantage to compensate the defect, that what we want in Elegance, we gain in Copiousness.’2 These”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Language is a social energy, and our capacity for articulate speech is the key factor that makes us different from other species. We are not as fast as cheetahs – or even as horses. Nor are we as strong as bulls or as adaptable as bacteria. But our brains are equipped with the facility to produce and process speech, and we are capable of abstract thought. A bee may dance to show other bees the location of a source of food, a green monkey may deliver sophisticated vocal signals, and a sparrow may manage as many as thirteen different types of song, but an animal's system of communication has a limited repertoire; ours, on the other hand, is 'open', and its mechanisms permit a potentially infinite variety of utterances.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Often we have three terms for the same thing--one Anglo-Saxon, one French, and one clearly absorbed from Latin or Greek. The Anglo-Saxon word is typically a neutral one; the French word connotes sophistication; and the Latin or Greek word, learnt from a written text rather than from human contact, is comparatively abstract and conveys a more scientific notion.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“for facts to be assiduously distinguished from opinions in a way apparently striking and bizarre to a speaker of, say, Arabic, Swedish or Polish. ‘I think’, ‘to the best of my knowledge’, ‘as far as I can tell’: such formulae are apt to bemuse speakers of these and many other languages. The notion of ‘hard facts’ is peculiar to English, and so, it seems, are many of our elaborate linguistic mechanisms for avoiding telling people what to do – our modes of inviting and offering and suggesting, which so strenuously avoid impinging on the autonomy of those we are addressing, and which can seem archaic or just plain weird to foreigners.30”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Karel apek used robota, a Czech noun related to the German noun Arbeit and meaning ‘forced labour’, to signify a new type of ‘artificial’ being, assembled like a car and programmed to be of service to humans.14 This choice of word was inspired by a conversation with his brother Josef, a painter of the cubist school. It would become an emblem of the future’s potential. The”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The dachshund, so strongly associated with Germany, became a ‘liberty pup’ during the First World War, and after it the increasingly popular German Shepherds were renamed Alsatians in light of persisting anti-German feeling. During the same period frankfurters and sauerkraut were relabelled as ‘hot dogs’ and ‘liberty cabbage’.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The style of bathing suit we now know as the bikini existed before then, but got its name only when the designer Louis Réard chose to use it to draw attention to a collection he was showing a few days after the bomb test. Bikini, we might argue, should have become a word to sum up the devastation that a nuclear weapon can cause; instead it became a word for a skimpy piece of beach attire. One”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“In a truly dreadful moment of lexical perversion, the US military’s deployment of troops on the island of Grenada in October 1983 was presented as a ‘pre-dawn vertical insertion’.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“the linguist David Dalby suggests that the use of bad and wicked to convey positive rather than negative feelings originates in African languages such as Bambara, where there are ‘frequent uses of negative terms … to describe positive extremes’. Dalby traces the habit of saying uh-huh to the same source.6 Another”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Xhosa has also indirectly contributed the more familiar gnu and – a calque of umkhaya – homeboy. One”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The almost as familiar chutzpah has been drolly defined as ‘the quality shown by the man who murders his mother and father, then asks the judge to forgive a poor orphan”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The well-known kosher has come to mean ‘legitimate’ or ‘good quality’, although it of course retains the fastidious sense ‘acceptable according to the rules of Jewish dietary law as executed under rabbinical supervision’.26”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“The best example is boondocks. Originally in Tagalog it signified a mountain, but, when poor natives explained that they came from mountainous areas, outsiders imagined the word was a general term for any slummy or primitive place.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Thus many terms to do with ranching are Hispanic in origin; for instance, the legendary ten-gallon hat takes it name from galon, the Spanish word for a band used to decorate one’s headgear.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“(The pidgin English exclamation chop chop replicates the Chinese kwai kwai.)”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Chinese porcelain was popular, too. The word comes from the Italian for a cowrie shell; literally, porcellana was a ‘little pig’, and the connection seems grounded in the glossy shell’s resemblance either to a pig’s back or to a sow’s glisteningly crinkled vagina.35”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“in fact foppery looks to have German origins, while fond, still then commonly used as a somewhat poetic equivalent for ‘silly’, may be from the Norse, related for instance to the modern Icelandic fáni, which means someone who emptily swaggers. Another”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“Naïveté was in fact warmly embraced. It proved a useful alternative to describing an action or statement as ingenuous, an adjective which contemporary users were apt to confuse with ingenious.19”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

“For another 300 years lawyers would continue to do a great deal of their writing and thinking in French, and they would supplement it with generous helpings of Latin – words like affidavit and subpoena – which conveyed an air of precision and authority unavailable to English. To this day the language of the law proves prolix, repetitious, archaic and theatrical, as indeed do many of its quite mystifying processes and practitioners.”
― Henry Hitchings, The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English