The Nineteenth Century and After

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The Nineteenth Century and After

211. Influences Affecting the Language

The events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting the English-speaking countries have been of great political and social importance, but in their effect on the language they have not been revolutionary. The success of the British on the sea in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in Nelson’s famous victory at Trafalgar in 1805, left England in a position of undisputed naval supremacy and gave it control over most of the world’s commerce. The war against Russia in the Crimea (1854–1856) and the contests with princes in India had the effect of again turning English attention to the East. The great reform measures the reorganization of parliament, the revision of the penal code and the poor laws, the restrictions placed on child labor, and the other industrial reforms were important factors in establishing English society on a more democratic basis.

They lessened the distance between the upper and the lower classes and greatly increased the opportunities for the mass of the population to share in the economic and cultural advantages that became available in the course of the century. The establishment of the first cheap newspaper (1816) and of cheap postage (1840) and the improved means of travel and communication brought about by the railroad, the steamboat, and the telegraph had the effect of uniting more closely the different parts of Britain and of spreading the influence of the standard speech.

During the first half of the twentieth century the world wars and the troubled periods following them affected the life of almost everyone and left their mark on the language. At the same time, the growth in importance of some of England’s larger colonies, their eventual in-dependence, and the rapid development of the United States have given increased significance to the forms of English spoken in these territories and have led their populations to the belief that their use of the language is as entitled to be considered a standard as that of Great Britain.

Some of these events and changes are reflected in the English vocabulary. But more influential in this respect are the great developments in science and the rapid progress that has been made in every field of intellectual activity in the last 200 years. Periods of great enterprise and activity seem generally to be accompanied by a corresponding increase in new words. This is the more true when all classes of the people participate in such activity, both in work and play, and share in its benefits. Accordingly, the great developments in industry, the increased public interest in sports and amusements, and the many improvements in the mode of living, in which even the humblest worker has shared, have all contributed to the vocabulary. The last two centuries offer an excellent opportunity to observe the relation between a civilization and the language which is an expression of it.

212. The Growth of Science.

The most striking thing about our present-day civilization is probably the part that science has played in bringing it to pass. We have only to think of the progress that has been made in medicine and the sciences auxiliary to it, such as bacteriology, biochemistry, and the like, to realize the difference that marks off our own day from that of only a few generations ago in the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and cure of disease. Or we may pause to reflect upon the relatively short period that separates the Wright brothers, making history’s first powered and controlled airplane flight, from the landings of astronauts on the moon, the operation of a space shuttle, and the voyages of spacecraft past the outer planets of the solar system. In every field of science, pure and applied, there has been need in the last two centuries for thousands of new terms. The great majority of these are technical words known only to the specialist, but a certain number of them in time become familiar to the layperson and pass into general use. In the field of medicine this is particularly apparent.

We speak familiarly of anemia, appendicitis, arteriosclerosis, difficult as the word is, of bronchitis, diphtheria, and numerous other diseases and ailments. We use with some sense of their meaning words like bacteriology, immunology, orthodontics, and the acronym AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome). We maintain clinics, administer an antitoxin or an anesthetic, and vaccinate for smallpox. We have learned the names of drugs like aspirin, iodine, insulin, morphine, and we acquire without effort the names of antibiotics, such as penicillin, streptomycin, and a whole family of sulfa compounds. We speak of adenoids, endocrine glands, and hormones and know the uses of the stethoscope, the EKG (electrocardiogram), and the CAT scan (computerized axial tomography).

We refer to the combustion of food in the body as metabolism, distinguish between proteins and carbohydrates, know that a dog can digest bones because he has certain enzymes or digestive fluids in his stomach, and say that a person who has the idiosyncrasy of being made ill by certain foods has an allergy. Cholesterol is now a part of everyone’s vocabulary, and there is an awareness that some fats are polyunsaturated. All of these words have come into use during the nineteenth and, in some cases, the twentieth century.

In almost every other field of science the same story could be told. In the field of

electricity words like dynamo, commutator, alternating current, arc light have been in the language since about 1870. Physics has made us familiar with terms like calorie, electron, ionization, ultraviolet rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity, though we don’t always have an exact idea of what they mean.

The development of atomic energy and nuclear weapons has given us radioactive, hydrogen bomb, chain reaction, fallout, and meltdown. In recent years laser, superconducting supercollider, quasar, and pulsar have come into common use; and black holes, quarks, the big bang model, and superstrings have captured the popular imagination. Chemistry has contributed so many common words that it is difficult to make a selection—alkali, benzine, creosote, cyanide, formaldehyde, nitroglycerine, radium, to say nothing of such terms as biochemical, petrochemical, and the like. The psychologist has taught us to speak of schizophrenia, extrovert and introvert, behaviorism, inhibition, defense mechanism, inferiority complex, bonding, and psychoanalysis.

Originally scientific words and expressions such as ozone, natural selection, stratosphere, DNA (for deoxyribonudeic acid) became familiar through the popularity of certain books or scientific reports in magazines and newspapers. Among the most publicized events since the 1960s have been the achievements of space and engineering in the exploration of space. In addition to astronaut and cosmonaut, space science has given us dozens of new words, especially compounds like spacecraft, space shuttle, launch pad, countdown, blast off, flyby, command module. Consciously or unconsciously, we have become scientifically minded in the last few generations, and our vocabularies reflect this extension of our consciousness and interest.

213. Automobile, Film, Broadcasting, Computer.

Scientific discoveries and inventions do not always influence the language in proportion to their importance. It is doubtful whether the radio and motion pictures are more important than the telephone, but they have brought more new words into general use. Such additions to the vocabulary depend more upon the degree to which the discovery or invention enters into the life of the community. This can be seen especially in the many new words or new uses of old words that have re-sulted from the popularity of the automobile and the numerous activities associated with it. Many an old word is now used in a special sense.

Thus we park a car, and the verb to park scarcely suggests to the average driver anything except leaving his or her car along the side of a street or road or in a parking space. But the word is an old one, used as a military term (to park cannon) and later in reference to carriages. The word automobile is new, but such words as sedan (saloon in Britain) and coupe are terms adapted from earlier types of vehicles. The American truck is the British lorry to which we may attach a trailer. We have learned new words or new meanings in carburetor, spark plug (British sparking plug), choke, clutch, gearshift (British gear lever), piston rings, differential, universal, steering wheel, shock absorber, radiator, hood (British bonnet), windshield (in Britain windscreen), bumper, chassis, hubcap, power steering, automatic transmission, and turbocharger. We engage cruise control, have a blowout, use radial tires, carry a spare, drive a convertible or station wagon (British estate car), and put the car in a garage. We may tune up the engine or stall it, or we may skid, cut in, sideswipe another car and be fined for speeding or running a traffic light. We must buy gas in America and petrol in Britain.  

The same principle might be illustrated by film, radio, and television. The words cinema and moving picture date from 1899, whereas the alternative motion picture is somewhat later. Screen, reel, film, scenario, projector, close up, fade-out are now common, and although the popularity of three-D (or 3-D) as a cinematic effect was short lived, the word is still used. The word radio in the sense of a receiving station dates from about 1925, and we get the first hint of television as early as 1904. It is not surprising to find a common vocabulary of broadcasting that includes broadcast itself, aerial, antenna, lead-in, loudspeaker, stand by, and solid-state. Words like announcer, reception, microphone, and transmitter have acquired special meanings sometimes more common than their more general senses. The abbreviations FM (for frequency modulation) and AM (for amplitude modulation) serve regularly in radio broadcasting for the identification of stations, while terms associated with television include cable TV, teleprompter, videotape, VCR, and DVD. The related development of increasingly refined equipment for the recording of sound since Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 has made the general consumer aware of stereo and stereophonic, quad and quadraphonic, tweeter, woofer, tape deck, reel-to-reel, and compact disc or CD.

The first electronic digital computers date from Word War II, and a few terms have been in general use since then. New meanings of program, language, memory, and hardware are familiar to people who have never used a computer. With the widespread manufacturing and marketing of personal computers during the 1980s, a much larger number of English speakers found the need for computer terms in their daily work: PC itself, RAM (random-access memory), ROM (read-only memory), DOS (disk operating system), microprocessor, byte, cursor, modem, software, hacker, hard-wired, download, and new meanings of read, write, mouse, terminal, chip, network, workstation, windows, and virus. The use of bug for a problem in running a computer program is sometimes traced in computer lore to an actual moth residing in the Mark II at Harvard in 1945. It was discovered by Grace Hopper and is taped in the logbook for September 9, 1945. As it turns out, however, the 1972 Supplement to the OED records bug for a problem in technology as early as 1889, by Thomas Edison working on his phonograph. Admiral Hopper may have a stronger claim to the first use of debug.

214. The World Wars.

As another example of how great developments or events leave their mark upon language we may observe some of the words that came into English between 1914 and 1918 as a direct consequence of World War I. Some of these were military terms representing new methods of warfare, such as air raid, antiaircraft gun, tank, and blimp. Gas mask and liaison officer were new combinations with a military significance. Camouflage was borrowed from French, where it had formerly been a term of the scene-painter’s craft, but it caught the popular fancy and was soon used half facetiously for various forms of disguise or misrepresentation. Old words were in some cases adapted to new uses. Sector was used in the sense of a specific portion of the fighting line; barrage, originally an artificial barrier like a dam in a river, designated a protective screen of heavy artillery or machine-gun fire; dud, a general word for any counterfeit thing, was specifically applied to a shell that did not explode; and ace acquired the meaning of a crack airman, especially one who had brought down five of the enemy’s planes. In a number of cases a word that had had only limited circulation in the language now came into general use.

Blighty was a popular bit of British army slang, derived from India and signifying Britain or home, and was often applied to a wound that sent a man back to Britain. Other expressions such as slacker, trench foot, cootie, and war bride were either struck off in the heat of the moment or acquired a poignant significance from the circumstances under which they were used. It would seem that World War II was less productive of memorable words, as it was of memorable songs. Nevertheless it made its contribution to the language in the form of certain new words, new meanings, or an increased currency for expressions that had been used before.    

215. Language as a Mirror of Progress

Words, being but symbols by which people express their ideas, are an accurate measure of the range of their thoughts at any given time. Words obviously designate the things a culture knows, and just as obviously the vocabulary of a language must keep pace with the advance of the culture’s knowledge.

The date when a new word enters the language is in general the date when the object, experience, observation, or whatever it is that calls it forth has entered public consciousness. Thus with a work like the OED, which furnishes us with dated quotations showing when the different meanings of every word have arisen and when new words first appear in the language, we could almost write the history of civilization merely from linguistic evidence. When in the early part of the nineteenth century we find growing up a word like horsepower or lithograph, we may depend upon it that some form of mechanical power that needs to be measured in familiar terms or a new process of engraving has been devised.

The appearance in the language of words like railway, locomotive, turntable about 1835 tells us that steam railways were then coming in. In 1839 the words photograph and photography first appear, and a beginning is made toward a considerable vocabulary of special words or senses of words such as camera, film, enlargement, emulsion, focus, shutter, light meter. Concrete in the sense of a mixture of crushed stone and cement dates from 1834, but reinforced concrete is an expression called forth only in the twentieth century. The word cable occurs but a few years before the laying of the first Atlantic cable in 1857–1858. Refrigerator is first found in English in an American quotation of 1841.  

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century an interesting story of progress is told by new words or new meanings such as typewriter, telephone, apartment house, twist drill, drop-forging, blueprint, oilfield, motorcycle, feminist, fundamentalist, marathon (introduced in 1896 as a result of the revival of the Olympic games at Athens in that year), battery and bunt, the last two indicating the growing popularity of professional baseball in America.

The twentieth century permits us to see the process of vocabulary growth going on under our eyes, sometimes, it would seem, at an accelerated rate. At the turn of the century we get the word questionnaire, and in 1906 suffragette. Dictaphone, raincoat, and Thermos became a part of the recorded vocabulary in 1907 and free verse in 1908.

This is the period when many of the terms of aviation came in, some still current, some reflecting the aeronautics of the time—airplane, aircraft, airman, monoplane, biplane, hydroplane, dirigible. Nose-dive belongs to the period of the war. About 1910 we began talking about the futurist and the postimpressionist in art, and the Freudian in psychology. Intelligentsia as a designation for the class to which superior culture is attributed, and bolshevik for a holder of revolutionary political views were originally applied at the time of World War I to groups in Russia. At this time profiteer gained a specialized meaning. Meanwhile foot fault, fairway, fox trot, and contract bridge were indicative of popular interest in certain games and pastimes. The 1933 supplement to the OED records Cellophane (1921) and rayon (1924), but not nylon, deep-freeze, air conditioned, or transistor; and it is not until the first volume of the new supplement in 1972 that the OED includes credit card, ecosystem, existentialism (1941, though in German a century earlier), freeze-dried, convenience foods, bionics, electronic computer, automation, cybernetics, bikini, discotheque. Only yesterday witnessed the birth of biofeedback, power lunch, fractal, chaos theory, and cyberspace. Tomorrow will witness others as the exigencies of the hour call them into being.

216. Sources of the New Words: Borrowings.

Most of the new words coming into the language since 1800 have been derived from the same sources or created by the same methods as those that have long been familiar, but it will be convenient to examine them here as an illustration of the processes by which a language extends its vocabulary.  

As is to be expected in the light of the English disposition to borrow words from other languages in the past, many of the new words have been taken over ready-made from the people from whom the idea or the thing designated has been obtained. The cosmopolitan character of the English vocabulary, already pointed out, is thus being maintained, and we shall see in the next chapter that America has added many other foreign words, particularly from Spanish and the languages of the Native Americans.

217. Self-explaining Compounds.

A second source of new words is represented in the practice of making self-explaining compounds, one of the oldest methods of word formation in the language. In earlier editions of this book such words as fingerprint (in its technical sense), fire extinguisher, hitchhike, jet propulsion, the colloquial know-how, lipstick, steamroller, steam shovel, and streamline were mentioned as being rather new. They have now passed into such common use that they no longer carry any sense of novelty. This will probably happen, indeed has already happened, to some of the more recent formations that can be noted, such as skydiving, jet lag, house sitter, lifestyle, hatchback, greenhouse effect, acid rain, roller blades, junk food, e-mail, and the metaphorical glass ceiling. Many of these betray their newness by being written with a hyphen or as separate words, or by preserving a rather strong accent on each element. They give unmistakable testimony to the fact that the power to combine existing words into new ones expressing a single concept, a power that was so prominent a feature of Old English, still remains with us.

218. Compounds Formed from Greek and Latin Elements.

The same method may be employed in forming words from elements derived from Latin and Greek. The large classical element already in the English vb makes such formations seem quite congenial to the language, and this method has long been a favorite source of scientific terms. Thus eugenics is formed from two Greek roots, — meaning well, and —meaning to be born. The word therefore means well-born and is applied to the efforts to bring about well-born offspring by the selection of healthy parents. The same root enters into genetics, the experimental study of heredity and allied topics. In the words stethoscope, bronchoscope, fluoroscope, and the like we have -scope, which appears in telescope. It is a Greek word σκoπóς meaning a watcher. Just as in Greek means far and enters into such words as telephone, telescope, television, and the like, so we have stethoscope with the first element from Greek (breast or chest), bronchoscope from Greek ßρóγχoς (windpipe), and fluoroscope with the same first element as in fluorine (from Latin fluere, to flow). Panchromatic comes from the Greek words παv- (all) and χρωματικóς (relating to color), and is thus used in photography to describe a plate or film that is sensitive to all colors. An automobile is something that moves of itself (Greek ‘self’+Latin mobilis ‘movable’). Orthodontia is from Greek ‘straight’ and ‘tooth’, and thus describes the branch of dentistry that endeavors to straighten irregular teeth. A few minutes spent in looking up recent scientific words in any dictionary will supply abundant illustrations of this common method of English word formation.

219. Prefixes and Suffixes.

Another method of enlarging the vocabulary is by appending familiar prefixes and

suffixes to existing words on the pattern of similar words in the language. Several of the Latin prefixes seem to lend themselves readily to new combinations. Thus in the period under discussion we have formed transoceanic, transcontinental, trans-Siberian, transliterate, transformer, and several more or less technical terms such as transfinite, transmarine, transpontine, etc. We speak of postimpressionists in art, postprandial oratory, the postclassical period, and postgraduate study. In the same way we use pre- in such words as prenatal, preschool age, prehistoric, pre-Raphaelite, preregistration; we may preheat or precool in certain technical processes; and passengers who need more time may preboard. In film parlance we may have a preview, a prerelease, or even a prequel. From World War I came counterattack and from World War II counterintelligence. In his Man and Superman Bernard Shaw coined the word superman to translate the German Übermensch of Nietzschian philosophy. We subirrigate and build a subcellar, and foreign movies sometimes come to us with subtitles. We can decode a message, defrost a refrigerator, deflate the currency, and we may debunk a statement, debug a machine, and decaffeinate coffee. It is so also with suffixes. Twentieth-century popular creations on old patterns are stardom,filmdom,fandom, gangster, pollster, profiteer, racketeer. Familiar endings like -some, -ful, -less can be freely added in accordance with longstanding habits in the language.

220. Coinages.

A considerable number of new words must be attributed to deliberate invention or

coinage. There has probably never been a time when the creative impulse has not spent itself occasionally in inventing new words, but their chances of general adoption are nowadays often increased by a campaign of advertising as deliberate as the effort that created them. They are mostly the product of ingenuity and imitation, the two being blended in variable proportions. Thus the trademark Kodak, which seems to be pure invention, was popularly used for years to refer to cameras of any brand, and Victrola and Frigidaire enjoyed something of the same currency as synonyms for phonograph and refrigerator. Kleenex and Xerox are trade terms that are often treated as common nouns, and Zipper, a word coined by the B.F. Goodrich Company and registered in 1925 as the name for a boot fitted with a slide fastener, has become the universal name for the fastener itself.

Words formed by combining the initial or first few letters of two or more words are known as acronyms. Radar (radio detecting and ranging) is an example, as are scuba (self-contained underwater breathing apparatus) and OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries).1 In deliberate coinages there is often an analogy with some other word or words in the language. This is felt, consciously or unconsciously, to be desirable. It permits the meaning more easily to be guessed at, reveals a mild degree of ingenuity on the part of the inventor, and focuses the attention on the distinctive syllable or syllables.  

Sometimes a Latin formative element is used and the new word has a rather specious classical air, as in novocaine from Latin novus (new) grafted upon the English word cocaine. 1 More than 520,000 other examples have been collected in Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary, ed. Jennifer Mossman (16th ed., Detroit, 1992). Words such as electrocute or travelogue are often called portmanteau words, or better, blends.2 In them two words are, as it were, telescoped into one. This was a favorite pastime of the author of Alice in Wonderland, and to him we owe the words chortle, a blending of snort and chuckle, and snark (snake+shark). Similarly, the tunnel beneath the English Channel is called the Chunnel.

221. Common Words from Proper Names.

Another source from which many English words have been derived in the past is the names of persons and places. For example, sandwich owes its use to the fact that the earl of Sandwich on one occasion put slices of meat between pieces of bread. Like other processes of English word derivation this can be well illustrated in the nineteenth century and later. Thus we get the word for tabasco sauce from the name of the Tabasco River in Mexico. Camembert comes from the village in France from which cheese of this type was originally exported. A limousine is so called from the name of a province in France, and during the 1920s the American city Charleston gave its name to a dance. The word colt for a certain kind of firearm is merely the name of the inventor. Wistaria, the vine whose most common variety is now known as wisteria, is named after Caspar Wistar, an American anatomist of the mid-1800s. In 1880 Captain Boycott, the agent of an Irish landowner, refused to accept rents at the figure set by the tenants. His life was threatened, his servants were forced to leave, and his figure was burnt in effigy. Hence from Ireland came the use of the verb to boycott, meaning to coerce a person by refusing to have, and preventing others from having, dealings with him. Similarly, lynch law owes its origin to Captain William Lynch of Virginia, about 1776, and in the early nineteenth century we find the verb to lynch. Shrapnel is from the name of the British general who invented the type of missile. More than 500 common words in English have been traced to proper names, and they must be considered as illustrating one of the sources from which new words are still being derived.

222. Old Words with New Meanings.

The resources of the vocabulary are sometimes extended from within by employment of an old word in a new sense. We have already seen many examples of this in some of the paragraphs preceding, especially many of the words now applied to the automobile and the computer. But the process can be widely illustrated, for it is one of the commonest phenomena in language. Skyline formerly meant the horizon, but it is now more common in such an expression as the New York skyline. Broadcast originally had reference to seed, but its application to radio seems entirely appropriate. A record may be many other things than a phonograph disc, and radiator was used for anything.

Many people still object to the use of contact as a verb, and impact has drawn similar criticism (as in “The needs of industry have impacted the university’s graduate program”). The shift in transitivity of verbs often meets with resistance: transform as intransitive (“He transformed into a hero”) or commit as intransitive (“The player wouldn’t commit to the team”). It is well to remember that Swift objected to behave without the reflexive pronoun. Time will decide the fate of these

words, but whether or not the new uses establish themselves in the language, they must be considered as exemplifying a well-recognized phenomenon in the behavior of words.

223. The Influence of Journalism.

In the introduction and popularizing of new words journalism has been a factor of

steadily increasing importance. Newspapers and popular magazines not only play a large part in spreading new locutions among the people but are themselves fertile producers of new words.

Reporters necessarily write under pressure and have not long to search for the right word. In the heat of the moment they are likely as not to strike off a new expression or wrench the language to fit their ideas. In their effort to be interesting and racy they adopt an informal and colloquial style, and many of the colloquialisms current in popular speech find their way into writing first in the magazine and the newspaper.

Many an expression originating in the sports page has found its way into general use. We owe neck and neck and out of the running to the race track, and sidestep, down and out, straight from the shoulder, and many other expressions to boxing. In America we owe caught napping and off base to baseball. If some of these locutions are older than the newspaper, there can be no question but that today much similar slang is given currency through this medium. Several magazines make the use of verbal novelties a feature of their style with puns, rhymes, coinages, strings of hyphenated words.  

224. Changes of Meaning.

It is necessary to say something about the way in which words gradually change their meaning. That words do undergo such change is a fact readily perceived, and it can be illustrated from any period of the language. That we should choose to illustrate it by more or less recent examples is a matter merely of convenience.

Differences of meaning are more readily perceived when they affect current use. It should be clearly recognized, however, that the tendencies here discussed are universal in their application and are not confined to the twentieth century or to the English language. They will be found at work in every language and at all times. The branch of linguistic study that concerns itself with the meanings of words and the way meanings develop is known as semantics.

The opposite tendency is for a word gradually to acquire a more restricted sense, or to be chiefly used in one special connection. A classic example of this practice is the word doctor. There are doctors (i.e., learned men and women) in theology, law, and many other fields beside medicine, but nowadays when we send for the doctor we mean a member of only one profession.   

Degeneration of meaning may take several forms. It may take the form of the gradual extension to so many senses that any particular meaning which a word may have had is completely lost. This is one form of generalization already illustrated in the words lovely and great.3 Awful and terrible have undergone a similar deterioration. In other cases a word has retained a very specific meaning but a less favorable one than it originally had.

Phillips in his New World of Words (1658) defines garble as “to purifie, to sort out the bad from the good, an expression borrowed from Grocers, who are said to garble their Spices, i.e. to purifie them from the dross and dirt.” The word was still used in this sense down through the eighteenth century and even beyond. But in the time of Johnson it occasionally carried the implication of selecting in an unfair or dishonest way, and as used today it always signifies the intentional or unintentional mutilation of a statement so that a different meaning is conveyed from that intended. Smug was originally a good word, meaning neat or trim; its present suggestion of objectionable self-satisfaction seems to have grown up during the nineteenth century.  

Changing attitudes toward this part of the vocabulary may halt the process of degeneration and give a longer life to those terms currently in use. If words sometimes go downhill, they also undergo the opposite process, known as regeneration.  

225. Slang. (vulgar)

All the types of semantic change discussed in the preceding paragraph could be illustrated from that part of the vocabulary which at any given time is considered slang. It is necessary to say “at any given time” not only because slang is fleeting and the life of a slang expression likely to be short, but also because what is slang today may have been in good use yesterday and may be accepted in the standard speech of tomorrow.

Slang has been aptly described as “a peculiar kind of vagabond language, always hanging on the outskirts of legitimate speech, but continually straying or forcing its way into the most respectable company.” Yet it is a part of language and cannot be ignored. One of the developments that must certainly be credited to the nineteenth century is the growth of a more objective and scientific attitude toward this feature of language. The word slang does not occur in Johnson’s Dictionary. It first occurs a few years later and in its early use always has a derogatory force. Webster in 1828 defines it as “low, vulgar, unmeaning language.” But the definition in the Oxford Dictionary, expressing the attitude of 1911, is very different: “Language of a highly colloquial type, below the level of standard educated speech, and consisting either of new words, or of current words employed in some special sense.” Here slang goes from being “unmeaning language” to having a “special sense,” and it is treated frankly as a scientific fact.

It is dangerous to generalize about the relative prominence of slang in this and former times. But it would seem as though the role it plays today is greater than it has been at certain times in the past, say in the Elizabethan age or the eighteenth century, to judge by the conversation of plays and popular fiction. The cultivation of slang has become a feature of certain types of popular writing. We think of men like George Ade, who wrote Fables in Slang, or Ring Lardner or O.Henry. They are not only the creators of locutions that have become part of the slang of the day, but they have popularized this outer fringe of the colloquial and given it greater currency. It would certainly be an incomplete picture of the language of today that failed to include slang as a present feature and a source from which English will doubtless continue to be fed in the future.

226. Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties.

The discussion of slang has clearly indicated that there is more than one type of speech. Within the limits of any linguistic unity there are as many language levels as there are groups of people thrown together by propinquity and common interests. Beyond the limits of the general language there are local and class dialects, technical and occupational vocabularies, slang, and other forms of speech.  The common language from which these are diverging forms it is possible to distinguish at least three broad types.

Occupying a sort of middle ground is the spoken standard. It is the language heard in the conversation of educated people. It is marked by conformity to the rules of grammar and to certain considerations of taste that are not easily defined but are present in the minds of those who are conscious of their speech. Whatever its dialectal coloring or qualities varying with the particular circumstances involved, it is free from features that are regarded as substandard in the region. To one side of this spoken standard lies the domain of the written standard. This is the language of books, and it ranges from the somewhat elevated style of poetry to that of simple but cultivated prose. It may differ both in vocabulary and idiom from the spoken standard, although the two frequently overlap. When we say big time and write to a superlative degree we are making a conscious choice between these two functional varieties. In the other direction we pass from one cultural level to another, from the spoken standard to the region of popular or illiterate speech. This is the language of those who are ignorant of or indifferent to the ideals of correctness by which the educated are governed. It is especially sympathetic to all sorts of neologisms and generally is rich in slang.

While the three types:

1. the literary standard,
2. the spoken standard
3. popular speech 

 .

It is necessary to recognize that from a linguistic point of view each of the varieties whether of cultural level or degree of formality 

The difference between the spoken standard and popular speech is in their association with broadly different classes. As Bernard Shaw once remarked, “People know very well that certain sorts of speech cut off a person for ever from getting more than three or four pounds a week all their life long sorts of speech which make them entirely impossible in certain professions.” Statements such as Shaw’s reporting a bias against certain ways of speaking and the practical economic effect of that bias have been made by enlightened linguists who do not share the bias at all and who aim to remedy its practical effect.  

227. The Standard Speech.

The spoken standard or, as it is called in Britain, Received Pronunciation, often abbreviated RP, is something that varies in different parts of the English-speaking world. In Britain it is a type of English perhaps best exemplified in the speech of those educated in the great public schools but spoken also with a fair degree of uniformity by cultivated people in all parts of the country. It is a class rather than a regional dialect. This is not the same as the spoken standard of the United States or Canada or Australia. The spread of English to many parts of the world has changed our conception of what constitutes Standard English. The growth of countries like the United States and Canada and the political independence of countries that were once British colonies force us to admit that the educated speech of these vast areas is just as “standard” as that of London or Oxford. It is perhaps inevitable that people will feel a preference for the pronunciation and forms of expression that they are accustomed to, but to criticize the British for omitting many of their r’s or the Americans for pronouncing them betrays an equally unscientific provincialism irrespective of which side of the Atlantic indulges in the criticism. The hope is sometimes expressed that we might have a world standard to which all parts of the English-speaking world would try to conform. So far as the spoken language is concerned it is too much to expect that the marked differences of pronunciation that distinguish the speech of, let us say, Britain, Australia, India, and the United States will ever be reduced to one uniform mode. We must recognize that in the last 200 years English has become a cosmopolitan tongue and must cultivate a cosmopolitan attitude toward its various standard forms.

228. English Dialects.

In addition to the educated standard in each major division of the English-speaking world there are local forms of the language known as regional dialects. In the newer countries where English has spread in modern times these are not so numerous or so pronounced in their individuality as they are in the British Isles. The English introduced into the colonies was a mixture of dialects in which the peculiarities of each were fused in a common speech. Except perhaps in the United States, there has scarcely been time for new regional differences to grow up, and although one region is sometimes separated from another by the breadth of a continent, the improvements in transportation and communication have tended to keep down differences that might otherwise have arisen.  

The dialect of southern Scotland has claims to special consideration on historical and literary grounds. In origin it is a variety of Northern English, but down to the sixteenth century it occupied a position both in speech and in writing on a plane with English. The most important factor, however, was probably the growing importance of England and the role of London as the center of the English-speaking world.  

Here we see some of the characteristic differences of pronunciation, wha, whase, sae, weel, neebour, guid, etc. These could easily be extended from others of his songs and poems, which all the world knows, and the list would include not only words differently pronounced but many an old word no longer in use south of the Tweed. Familiar examples are ain (own), auld (old), lang (long), bairn (child), bonnie (beautiful), braw (handsome), dinna (do not), fash (trouble oneself), icker (ear of grain), maist (almost), muckle (much, great), syne (since), unco (very). Irish

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Irish authors, especially Douglas Hyde (1860–1940), J.M.Synge (1871–1909), and W.B.Yeats (1865–1939), used selected features to give an Irish flavor to their works. In the twentieth century there has been a more realistic tradition, including the work of Sean O’Casey (1880–1964) and Brendan Behan (1923–1964) and the use by James Joyce (1882–1941) of carefully collected dialect phrases in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

Syntactic structures in Hiberno-English often reflect the patterns of the Irish language. The present perfect and past perfect tenses of English (have got, had got), which have no equivalents in Irish, can be expressed using after, the verb to be, and the present participle: He said that he knew that I was after getting lost (“…that I had got lost”). Irish also does not have the equivalent of indirect questions introduced by if and whether; instead of the declarative word order of Standard English, these sentences have the interrogative word order that is found in other varieties of English, including African American Vernacular English (see § 250): He wanted to see would he get something to eat. The influence of the Irish prepositional system upon Hiberno-English is evident in the use of with instead of for meaning “for the duration of”: He’s dead now with many a year; He didn’t come back with twenty-eight years. The lack of an expression for no one in Irish, explains why anyone is used where no one is expected in Standard English: Anyone doesn’t go to mass there.

229. English World-Wide.

In the various parts of the former British Empire, as in the United States, the English language has developed differences that distinguish it from the language of England. In Australia, Africa, South Asia, and Canada, peculiarities of pronunciation and vocabulary have grown up that mark off national and areal varieties from the dialect of the mother country and from one another. These peculiarities are partly such as arise in communities separated by time and space, and are partly due to the influence of a new environment.

In some countries the most striking changes are the result of imperfect learning and systematic adaptations by speakers of other languages. Differences of nature

and material civilization, and generally contact with some foreign tongue, are clearly reflected in the vocabulary.

230. Pidgins and Creoles.

 Of the varieties of English discussed in the preceding section, those of West and East Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Rim coexist and interact with well-established English-based pidgins and creoles.

The linguistic and sociological issues that are raised by these varieties of language in daily contact have already been suggested with respect to Jamaican English. The theoretical interest to linguists, however, goes even deeper, because the study of pidgin and creole languages may give clues to a better understanding of a number of interrelated problems: the analyticsynthetic distinction, which we have considered in the development of Middle English; the idea of a “continuum” among varieties of a single language and between closely related languages; the acquisition of language by children; the language-processing abilities of the human brain; and the origin of language. Because English-based creoles are so numerous and so widespread, the study of present-day English in all its worldwide varieties is useful not only in itself but also in the illumination that it gives to some of these most basic issues in language and cognition.   

The lexical impoverishment of pidgin and creole language often results in periphrastic and metaphorical expressions to designate things and events which in established language are signified by unrelated morphemes.  

The other side of lexical impoverishment is the visibility and richness of certain aspectual distinctions, some never explicitly marked in the verb phrase of historical

English.   

The regularity of such scales in pidgin and creole languages world-wide leads to yet another interesting problem: the order of acquisition of the scaled features in the process of learning a language. Typically the standard features near the basilectal end of the implicational scale are learned first, and those near the acrolectal end are learned later if at all.  

231. Spelling Reform.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century renewed interest was manifested in the problem of English spelling, and the question of reform was vigorously agitated. For nearly 400 years the English have struggled with their spelling. It was one of the chief problems that seemed to confront the language in the time of Shakespeare, and it continued to be an issue throughout the seventeenth and to some extent in the eighteenth century.

The publication in 1837 of a system of shorthand by Isaac Pitman led to his proposal of several plans of phonetic spelling for general use. In these schemes Pitman was assisted by Alexander J.Ellis, a much greater scholar. They were promoted during the 1840s by the publication of a periodical called the Phonotypic Journal, later changed to the Phonetic Journal.

Their first practical step was to publish a list of 300 words for which different spellings were in use (judgement—judgment, mediaeval—medieval, etc.) and to recommend the simpler form. This was a very moderate proposal and met with some favor. Theodore Roosevelt endorsed it. But it also met with opposition, and subsequent lists that went further were not well received. Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers continued to use the  traditional orthography, and though the Simplified Spelling Board continued to issue from time to time its publication, Spelling, until 1931, its accomplishment was slight, and it eventually went out of existence.

The history of spelling reform makes it clear that in opposing radical change he was expressing the attitude of the majority of people. It is probably safe to say that if our spelling is ever to be reformed, it must be reformed gradually and with as Little disruption to the existing system as is consistent with the attainment of a reasonable end.

232. Purist Efforts.

Conservatives in matters of language, as in politics, are hardy perennials 

Thomas De Quincey argued at length against the use of implicit in such expressions as implicit faith or confidence, wishing to restrict the word to a sense the opposite of explicit. The American philologist

George P.Marsh spoke against “the vulgarism of the phrase in our midst” and objected to a certain adjectival use of the participle. “There is at present,” he says, “an inclination in England to increase the number of active, in America, of passive participles, employed with the syntax of the adjective.   

Dean Alford, the author of The Queen’s English (1864), a curious composite of platitude and prejudice with occasional flashes of unexpected liberality, a book that was reprinted many times, finds much to object to, especially in the English of journalism.   

Sir Walter Raleigh, Oxford Professor of English Literature, and Logan Pearsall Smith, a well-known literary man. The moving spirit was Bridges. In their proposals they stated their aim to be “to agree upon a modest and practical scheme for informing popular taste on sound principles, for guiding educational authorities, and for introducing into practice certain slight modifications and advantageous changes. 

233. Gender Issues and Linguistic Change.

The course of the history of English since the Renaissance has seen numerous conscious attempts to reform the language in one way or another: to prohibit or encourage borrowings, to prescribe matters of grammatical usage, to change the established spellings of words, to found an academy with goals like these.

More often than not the reforms have failed and the language has developed in a seemingly inexorable way, especially in the later periods when the efforts of any one person or group of persons appear powerless against the language’s very vastness in geographical extent and number of speakers.

Since the 1970s the efforts to eliminate sexism from English, though having met with resistance, have been more successful than most attempts at reform. Published works from just a few years earlier now seem oddly dated in their use of what is now seen as sexist language. Among the most obvious instances of the earlier usage are the noun man and the masculine pronoun he, sometimes with man as the antecedent, both words referring to men and women. Such usage was normal in the English language for two centuries, although one interesting result of recent research is the demonstration that grammarians since the eighteenth century, mostly male, have helped to bring about and reinforce a usage that is socially biased and grammatically illogical.

Writers at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century have generally found it easy to substitute people, person, or human beings for man and mankind, though the problem of the pronoun has proved thornier. In the sentence, “Everybody should button their coat,” males and females are treated equally, but the plural pronoun their has as its antecedent the singular noun everybody. English does not have a gender-neutral, or epicene, pronoun for persons. For more than a century proposals have been suggested to remedy this lack including thon; e, es, em; heshe, hes, hem; shey, shem, sheir, and many others.

The closed class of personal pronouns is much more resistant to additions and substitutions than the open classes of nouns and adjectives. We have seen during the late medieval period the plural pronouns in h- (hie, hem, hir) replaced by borrowings from Old Norse (Present-day they, them, their) and the rise ofanalogical its during the Renaissance. However, most of the changes in pronouns have simply been losses in number and case, and it would be unprecedented for a consciously constructed pronoun to come into general use.

Other nouns, adjectives, and forms of address have supplanted sexist language so

naturally that it is sometimes hard to imagine the resistance with which they originally met. Ms is a happy replacement in many contexts for the uncertainties that often attend a choice of Miss or Mrs., putting the female form of address on the same footing as Mr., for which indications of marital status have always been considered irrelevant. 

234. The Oxford English Dictionary.

In the more enlightened attitude of the Society for Pure English, as distinguished from most purist efforts in the past, it is impossible not to see the influence of a great work that came into being in the latter half of the nineteenth century.  

THE EDITORS OF THE NEW (OXFORD) ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Herbert Coleridge

Frederick James Furnivall

Sir James A.H.Murray

Henry Bradley

Sir William A.Craigie

The first editor appointed to deal with the mass of material being assembled was Herbert Coleridge, already mentioned. Upon his sudden death in 1861 at the age of thirtyone, he was succeeded by Furnivall, then in his thirty-sixth year. For a time work went forward with reasonable speed, but then it gradually slowed down, partly because of Furnivall’s increasing absorption in other interests. Meanwhile James A.H.Murray, a Scottish schoolmaster with philological tastes, had been approached by certain publishers to edit a dictionary to rival those of Webster and Worcester. After the abandonment of this project Murray was drawn into the Philological Society’s enterprise, and in 1879 a formal agreement was entered into with the Oxford University Press whereby this important publishing house was to finance and publish the society’s dictionary and Murray was to be its editor.

Finally, in1914, Charles T.Onions, who had been working with Dr. Murray since 1895, was appointed the fourth member of the editorial staff. Two of the editors were knighted in recognition of their services to linguistic scholarship, Murray in 1908 and Craigie in 1928. But the list of editors does not tell the story of the large number of skillful and devoted workers who sifted the material and did much preliminary work on it. Nor would the enterprise have been possible at all without the generous support of the Oxford University Press and the voluntary help of thousands who furnished quotations.

Thedictionary was originally known by the name A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED), although in 1895 the title The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was added and has since become the standard designation. The completed work fills ten large volumes, occupies 15,487 pages, and treats 240,165 main words. In 1933 a supplementary volume was published, containing additions and corrections accumulated during the forty-four years over which the publication of the original work extended.

A four-volume Supplement that absorbed the 1933 Supplement was published under the editorship of R.W. Burchfield between 1972 and 1986. A second edition by J.A.Simpson and E.S.C.Weiner in 1989 amalgamated the first edition, the Burchfield Supplement, and approximately 5,000 new words, or new senses of existing words, in twenty volumes.

The second edition contains about 290,500 main entries, or about 38,000 more than the first edition with its 1933 Supplement. In the 1970s a micrographic reproduction of the first edition in two volumes made the dictionary available to many who could not afford it in its original format, and the availability of the second edition online has opened up new possibilities for the use of computer technology. In preparation for the third edition Oxford University Press is publishing supplements to the entries of the second edition and completely new entries under the title Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series. Three volumes were published between 1993 and 1997.

235. Grammatical Tendencies.

The several factors already discussed as giving stability to English grammar the printing press, popular education, improvements in travel and communication, social consciousness have been particularly effective during the past two centuries. Very few changes in grammatical forms and conventions are to be observed. There has been some school mastering of the language.  

Some tendency toward loss of inflection, although we have but little to lose, is noticeable in informal speech. The nonstandard he don’t represents an attempt to eliminate the ending of the third person singular and reduce this verb in the negative to a uniform do in the present tense. Likewise the widespread practice of disregarding the objective case form whom in the interrogative (Who do you want?) illus-trates the same impulse.

Occasionally a new grammatical convention may be seen springing up. The get passive (he got hurt) is largely a nineteenth-century development, called into being

because he is hurt is too static, he became hurt too formal.   One other tendency is sufficiently important to be noticed separately, the extension of verb-adverb combinations discussed in the following paragraph. An important characteristic of the modern vocabulary is the large number of expressions like set out, gather up, put off, bring in, made up of a common verb, often of one syllable, combined with an adverb. They suggest comparison with verbs having separable prefixes in German, and to a smaller extent with English verbs like withstand and overcome.

Another is the extensive use, especially in colloquial speech, of these verb-adverb combinations as nouns: blowout, cave-in, holdup, runaway.

Everyone in America will recognize the familiar meaning that attaches to these expressions in colloquial speech. Opposition is sometimes expressed toward the extensive growth of these verb-adverb combinations, and not only toward the less accepted ones. Even among those that are universally accepted in both the spoken and written language there are many in which the adverb is, strictly speaking, redundant. Others, to which this objection cannot be made,

are thought to discourage the use of more formal or exact verbs by which the same idea could be conveyed. But it is doubtful whether the objection is well founded.  

237. A Liberal Creed.

In closing this chapter on the language of our own day it may not be inappropriate to suggest what should be an enlightened modern attitude toward linguistic questions. It has often been necessary in the course of this book to chronicle the efforts of well-meaning but misguided persons who hoped to make over the language in accordance with their individually conceived pattern.

And we will find all too often provincialism and prejudice masquerading as scientific truth in discussions of language by men and women who would blush to betray an equal intolerance of the music or furniture or social conventions of other parts of the world than their own. Doubtless the best safeguard against prejudice is knowledge, and some knowledge of the history of English in the past is necessary to an enlightened judgment in matters affecting present use.

1. List some new vocabulary words to increment in science, technology, radio, television, film and computer en the nineteenth century and after.

2.  What were some consequences of the first and second war changed the meaning a few words?

3. In that journalism degree influenced the introduction of new vocabulary?

4. Write the three types of cultural levels

5. Write the names of the editors of the new (OXFORD) ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Rocio del Carmen V.