The Mother Tongue (12 page)

Many new coinages didn't last—often for obvious reasons. Jonson's less-inspired efforts included
ventositous
and
obstupefact.
Shakespeare gave us the useful
gloomy,
but failed with
barky
and
brisky
(formed after the same pattern but somehow never catching on) and failed equally with
conflux, vastidity,
and
tortive.
Milton found no takers for
inquisiturient,
while, later still, Dickens tried to give the world
vocular.
The world didn't want it.

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

According to Mary Helen Dohan, in her absorbing book
Our Own Words,
the military vehicle the tank got its name because during its secretive experimental phase people were encouraged to think it was a storage receptacle—hence a tank. The curiously nautical terminology for its various features—
hatch, turret, hull, deck
—arises from the fact that it was developed by the British Admiralty rather than the army.

4.
WORDS CHANGE BY DOING NOTHING.
That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it.
Counterfeit
once meant a legitimate copy.
Brave
once implied cowardice—as indeed
bravado
still does. (Both come from the same source as
depraved.
)
Crafty,
now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while
enthusiasm,
which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse.
Zeal
has lost its original pejorative sense, but
zealot
curiously has not.
Garble
once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A
harlot
was once a boy, and a
girl
in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female.
Manufacture,
from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite.
Politician
was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thought, it still is), while
obsequious
and
notorious
simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

This drift of meaning, technically called
catachresis,
is as widespread as it is curious.
Egregious
once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in
Cymbeline
) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.

According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is
nice,
which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and—by 1769—pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, “You scold me so much in a nice long letter . . . ​which I have received from you.”

Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in
The Mayor of Casterbridge,
where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon “the unattractive exterior of Farfrae's erection” or in
Bleak House,
where Dickens writes that “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates.” [Taken from “Red Pants,” by Robert M. Sebastian, in the Winter 1989 issue of
Verbatim.
]

This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to drift around the body. This is particularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at different rates and now often signify quite separate things. An American going into a London department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. Our vest is their waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don't need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don't need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings. Is that clear?)

Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression.
Neck
was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression “neck of the woods.”
Tell
once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression
bank teller
and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a
fossil.
Other examples of fossils are the italicized words in the following list:

short
shrift

hem
and
haw

rank
and
file

raring
to go

not a
whit

out of
kilter

new
fangled

at
bay

spick-and-span

to and
fro

kith
and kin

Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule.” Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how
can
an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of
prove
was to test (a meaning preserved in
proving ground
) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible—the exception tests the rule. A similar misapprehension is often attached to the statement “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

Sometimes words change by becoming more specific.
Starve
originally meant to die before it took on the more particular sense of to die by hunger. A deer was once any animal (it still is in the German
tier
) and meat was any food (the sense is preserved in “meat and drink” and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it). A forest was any area of countryside set aside for hunting, whether or not it was covered with trees. (In England to this day, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire is largely treeless, as are large stretches of the New Forest in Hampshire.) And
worm
was a term for any crawling creature, including snakes.

5.
WORDS ARE CREATED BY ADDING OR SUBTRACTING SOMETHING.
English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes— -
able, -ness, -ment, pre-, dis-, anti
-, and so on—and with these it can form and reform words with a facility that yet again sets it apart from other tongues. For example, we can take the French word
mutin
(rebellion) and turn it into
mutiny, mutinous, mutinously, mutineer,
and many others, while the French have still just the one form,
mutin.

We are astonishingly indiscriminate in how we form our compounds, sometimes adding an Anglo-Saxon prefix or suffix to a Greek or Latin root (
plainness, sympathizer
), and sometimes vice versa (
readable, disbelieve
). [Examples cited by Burchfield,
The English Language,
page 112.] This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word
incomprehensibility,
which consists of the root
-hen-
and eight affixes and infixes:
in, -com-, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it
-, and
-y.
Even more melodic is the musical term
quasihemidemisemiquaver,
which describes a note that is equal to 128th of a semibreve.

As well as showing flexibility it also promotes confusion. We have six ways of making
labyrinth
into an adjective:
labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, labyrinthic,
and
labyrinthical.
We have at least eight ways of expressing negation with prefixes:
a-, anti-, in-, il-, im-, ir-, un
-, and
non
-. It is arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible, but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but impossible. Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word.
In
-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with
invaluable,
while
-less
is equally negative, as a rule, but not with
priceless.
Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing:
flammable
and
inflammable, iterate
and
reiterate, ebriate
and
inebriate, habitable
and
inhabitable, durable
and
perdurable, fervid
and
perfervid, gather
and
forgather, ravel
and
unravel.

Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of
angry
and
hungry,
you might conclude that
-gry
is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in no other common words in English. Similarly
-dous
appears in only
stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, hazardous,
and
jeopardous,
while
-lock
survives only in
wedlock
and
warlock
and
-red
only in
hatred
and
kindred. Forgiveness
is the only example of a verb +
-ness
form. Equally some common-seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of
forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake,
and
forswear,
you might think that
for-
is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others. Why certain forms like
-ish, -ness, -ful,
and
-some
should continue to thrive while others like
-lock
and
-gry
that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.

Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix
-dom
was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like
kingdom,
but it underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving us such useful locutions as
officialdom
and
boredom
and later more contrived forms like
bestsellerdom.
The ending
-en
is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (
harden, loosen, sweeten,
etc.) and yet almost all such words are less than 300 years old.

Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a particular affix attaches itself to a particular word or why some creations have thrived while others have died of neglect. Why, for instance, should we have kept
disagree
but lost
disadorn,
retained
impede
but banished
expede,
kept
inhibit
but rejected
cohibit
[cited by Baugh and Cable, page 225]?

The process is still perhaps the most prolific way of forming new words and often the simplest. For centuries we had the word
political,
but by loading the single letter
a
onto the front of it, a new word,
apolitical,
joined the language in 1952.

Still other words are formed by lopping off their ends.
Mob,
for example, is a shortened form of
mobile vulgus
(fickle crowd).
Exam, gym,
and
lab
are similar truncations, all of them dating only from the last century when syllabic amputations were the rage. Yet the impulse to shorten words is an ancient one.