The Story of English in 100 Words (16 page)

It’s often said that no single book has had greater influence on the vocabulary of the English language than the Bible. I don’t dispute that, as long as by ‘Bible’ we mean all the English translations that have been made, starting with John Wycliffe’s manuscript version in about 1382 and ending with the King James Bible of 1611. The King James text is usually cited as the main influence, and in a way it was, as its official status meant that it would be heard and read by more people in Britain than any previous translation. But its main role was to popularise. Most of the words and phrases that would become part of everyday English had already been introduced by earlier translations – and by Tyndale, in particular. Think of
let there be light
,
am I my brother’s keeper?
,
let my people go
,
the powers that be
,
the signs of the times
and
eat, drink and be merry.
These are all Tyndale.

In vocabulary he was extremely conservative, as were most Bible translators. He wanted his translation to be understood by the ordinary person rather than the theologian, so he went in for everyday words, and hardly ever coined words himself. Only 120 entries in the
Oxford English Dictionary
have a first recorded use attributed to him. They include several compound words, such as
busybody
,
castaway
,
broken-hearted
,
long-suffering
and
stumbling-block
, as well as
childishness
,
excommunicate
,
ungodliness
– and
matrix
.

Matrix
has had an interesting history. It originates in the Latin word for ‘mother’,
mater
. Tyndale uses
it to mean a ‘womb’, which was one of its meanings in Latin. By the 16th century the sense had broadened to mean a place where something begins; by the 18th century, the structure or material in which something is embedded; and by the 19th century, the elements which make up that something, seen as a network. People started applying the term to social networks, talking about a
political matrix
, for example. And in the mid-20th century it started to be used in the business world: an organisation in which communication operates through a web of relationships was said to illustrate
matrix management
.

Meanwhile, various technologies had adopted the term. Dentists used it to describe the material which serves as a temporary wall for a cavity when filling a tooth. Photographers used it as part of their printing process. Printers used it to describe the mould in which a piece of metal type was cast. Electronic engineers used it to talk about a type of circuit. And in 1990s’ computing,
the matrix
became a popular term for the global network of electronic communication.

The stage was set for Keanu Reeves. Here we have a word which at one level means an organisational network and at another level means the electronic network that makes up cyberspace. It was only a matter of time before it would be picked up by the science-fiction world. And
time
is the relevant word, as the first recorded use of
matrix
in this genre is in a 1976 episode of
Dr Who
.

Alphabet

talking about writing (16th century)

When it comes to talking about the English language, no word holds a more central place in the popular mind than
alphabet
. Although speech long preceded writing in the history of language, and children learn to speak years before they learn to write, we find we can talk about letters more easily than we can talk about sounds. Letters are nice distinct shapes, and each shape has a simple name which we probably learned at our mother’s knee – A, B, C … Sounds are not so easy to identify, and – unless we’ve learned to transcribe them using a phonetic alphabet – not so easy to name.

So it can come as a bit of a surprise to learn that the word
alphabet
arrives in English quite late – almost a thousand years after the language was first written down. It’s first used during the 16th century, at a time when thousands of new words were being borrowed from Latin and Greek to make the language, as the historian William Camden put it, ‘beautified and enriched’. And many of these new words allowed people to talk more efficiently about what they were doing when they were speaking and writing. Think of all the words we have today to describe punctuation marks, for example, such as
comma
and
full stop
. Most were first used during the 1500s. And
alphabet
was one of them, first recorded in a 1580 dictionary.

We’re so used to the idea of an alphabet nowadays that it’s difficult to imagine a time when the
notion wasn’t a routine part of everyday life. Once we’ve learned to read, we don’t think twice about putting things into alphabetical order, and we expect words to be in order when we look them up in telephone directories, indexes and so on. But in 1604, when Robert Cawdrey published the first English dictionary, he felt it was such a new idea that he had to explain in his introduction how his ‘Table Alphabeticall’ should be used:

If thou be desirous (gentle Reader) rightly and readily to understand, and to profit by this Table, and such like, then thou must learn the alphabet, to wit, the order of the Letters as they stand, perfectly without book, and where every Letter standeth: as
b
near the beginning,
n
about the middest, and
t
toward the end.

In Shakespeare’s time, children had a hornbook to help them learn their letters. This was a handheld device looking a bit like a long-handled mirror, but displaying a sheet on which was printed the alphabet in large and small letters, along with a small selection of other reading material. The sheet was usually covered by a thin layer of translucent horn, hence its name.

By the 18th century, alphabet books were arriving in schools, and soon they were all the rage. The writers looked for new ways of making the learning of letters appeal to a young readership. Authors and illustrators began to play with the language, using alliteration and rhyme. Stories were told about Angry Alice, Timid Tabitha and a host of other characters.

8. A typical children’s hornbook from the 16th century.

Alphabet games appealed to the adult reader too. The most famous one was written by a journalist, Alaric Watts, which first appeared in the
Trifler
magazine in 1817. It has been reprinted thousands of times, often with variations.

An Austrian army, awfully arrayed,
Boldly by battery besieged Belgrade.
Cossack commanders cannonading come,
Dealing destruction’s devastating doom.
Every endeavour engineers essay,
For fame, for fortune fighting – furious fray!
Generals ’gainst generals grapple – gracious God!
How honours Heaven heroic hardihood!
Infuriate, indiscriminate in ill,
Kindred kill kinsmen, kinsmen kindred kill.
Labour low levels longest, loftiest lines;
Men march ’mid mounds, ’mid moles, ’mid murderous mines;
Now noxious, noisy numbers nothing, naught
Of outward obstacles, opposing ought;
Poor patriots, partly purchased, partly pressed,
Quite quaking, quickly ‘Quarter! Quarter!’ quest.
Reason returns, religious right redounds,
Suwarrow stops such sanguinary sounds.
Truce to thee, Turkey! Triumph to thy train,
Unwise, unjust, unmerciful Ukraine!
Vanish vain victory! vanish, victory vain!
Why wish we warfare? Wherefore welcome were
Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier?
Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell!
Zeus’, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal,
Attracting all, arms against acts appeal!

Suwarrow, incidentally, was the name of a Russian general. And did you notice that there was no line for
J
? This was because
J
was seen as a variant of
I
.

Alphabet
achieved new heights in the 20th century, when its use was extended by computer scientists to include numerals and other characters. It also became one of the few words which we could literally eat. Around 1900, food manufacturers introduced a clear soup containing tiny pieces of pasta or biscuit shaped like individual letters. They called it
alphabet soup
. And not long after there was
alphabetti spaghetti
.

Potato

a European import (16th century)

Something very noticeable happened to English vocabulary during the 16th and 17th centuries. It began to look different. Loanwords from French had already started the process in the early Middle Ages. New French words meant new French spellings. But the revival of learning known as the Renaissance brought a fresh encounter with the countries of Europe, and as the people of Britain learned about the latest thing in such areas as science, architecture, cuisine and the arts, so they found themselves faced with an array of new words and spellings that must have seemed bizarre.

Bizarre
was one.
Grotesque
was another. These
were from French. So were
moustache
,
colonel
,
vogue
and
naive
. Even less familiar would have been the way words were ending with sounded vowels. English had long had a ‘silent
e
’, usually marking a long vowel earlier in a word (
house
,
time
,
sore
…), but a sounded final
-ee
in a word of several syllables was a novelty, as in
devotee
,
referee
and
repartee
.

A final
-o
in these new loanwords must have felt really strange. Italian imports included
cameo, concerto, portico, soprano
and
volcano
. Spanish or Portuguese arrivals included
bravado, desperado, mosquito, tobacco
and
potato
. Some of these words originated in the Indian languages of South or Central America.
Potato
is one of them, thought to be from a Haitian language, and introduced to Spain by Christopher Columbus.

Words like
potato
presented a number of linguistic problems. People were evidently uncomfortable with the
-o
ending, for a popular early spelling was
potatoe
. And then, how should they turn it into a plural? Simply ‘adding an
s
’, which is the usual English way, would give
potatos
, and that
-os
ending didn’t well reflect the long vowel.
Potatoes
, as we now know, became the standard spelling. But in the 16th century, there was an alternative solution: use an apostrophe. We find
potato’s
– one of the earliest examples of what today some people call the ‘green-grocer’s apostrophe’. The problem didn’t go away. English speakers have never felt comfortable with the spelling of words ending in sounded vowels,
which is why forms such as
potato’s
and
tomato’s
are still widely seen.

Spelling aside,
potato
has been quite a linguistic success story. Few vegetables have acquired such a wide range of meanings. In the 18th century, unimportant or worthless things or people began to be called
potatoes
. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once famously described the London literati as
little potatoes
. American English began to use the phrase
small potatoes
for something unimportant. Then there was a curious development:
potato
developed the opposite sense. Now it meant something or someone was right, correct, excellent.
That’s the potato!
In Australian English we find
clean potato
being used for a first-rate or honest person. And American slang gave us a sense of ‘money’:
Got the potatoes to buy it?