10
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:
- the literary standard,
- the spoken standard
- 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.
- List some new vocabulary words to increment in science, technology,
radio, television, film and computer en the nineteenth century and after.
- What were some consequences
of the first and second war changed the meaning a few words?
- In that journalism degree influenced the introduction of new
vocabulary?
- Write the three types of cultural levels
- Write the names of the editors of the new (OXFORD) ENGLISH
DICTIONARY
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