The Story of English in 100 Words (26 page)

By the turn of the century, anyone who stood out in a crowd was being called a dude. In small-group settings, such as school classrooms, street gangs and jazz clubs, it became a term of approval. Eventually any group of people hanging out together would refer to themselves as dudes. It became one of a large number of ‘cool’ slang terms for people, such as
cat
(in the jazz world) and
geek
(in the computer world).

By the 1970s
dude
had become a chatty term of address for both men and women, especially popular in American university campuses and often heard in high school and college movies.
Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
(1989) contained such famous lines as ‘All we are is dust in the wind, dude!’ and ‘How’s it goin’, royal ugly dudes?’ Bill and Ted’s teacher, Mr Ryan, is unimpressed by the usage.

Mr Ryan: So Bill, what you’re telling me, essentially, is that Napoleon was a short, dead dude.

Bill: Well, yeah.

Ted (to Bill): You totally blew it, dude.

Brunch

a portmanteau word (19th century)

We know the year that
brunch
entered the English language. According to the satirical magazine
Punch
, it was 1895. This is what a writer in August 1896 had to say about it:

To be fashionable nowadays we must ‘brunch’. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year, by Mr. Guy Beringer, in the now defunct
Hunter’s Weekly
, and indicating a combined breakfast and lunch.

Indeed he did. Beringer’s article, ‘Brunch: A Plea’, proposed an alternative to the Sunday ‘postchurch ordeal of heavy meats and savoury pies’. Brunch, said Beringer, ‘puts you in a good temper, it makes you satisfied with yourself and your fellow beings, it sweeps away the worries and cobwebs of the week’.

There certainly is a quirky freshness about the name, which is still with us. It caught on, and by the 1930s the noun was also being used as a verb: ‘I brunched with Jim’, someone might say. We also find it being used to make compound words, such as
brunch-style
and
brunch box
. In the 1940s, a type of women’s short house-coat was called a
brunch coat
. By the 1960s a new kind of eating-house had emerged: the
brunch-bar
. And Cadbury used that name for a chocolate-covered cereal bar.

The
Punch
writer called
brunch
a portmanteau word. A
portmanteau
, as its French origin suggests, was a small case which a horse-rider could use to carry (
porter
= ‘to carry’) a cloak (
manteau
) or other clothes or belongings. But it changed its meaning in the late 19th century, after Lewis Carroll used it in
Through the Looking-Glass
(1871) to explain his coinages in ‘Jabberwocky’.
Slithy
, says Humpty Dumpty, ‘means
lithe
and
slimy
… it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word’. Today, linguists tend to call such words
blends
– but there is something rather appealing about Lewis Carroll’s usage which has kept the older term in vogue.

The meaning of a portmanteau word is different
from the sum of its parts.
Brunch
isn’t two meals – breakfast and lunch – but a meal that is different from either. And this is the pattern we find in all portmanteau words. A
spork
is neither a spoon nor a fork, but a new device that mixes properties of both. A
motorcade
is not a motor car nor a cavalcade, but a new kind of procession.

Portmanteaus have been part of the English language for centuries.
Tragicomedy
dates from the 16th century;
Oxbridge
from the 19th. But blending became one of the most popular ways of coining new words during the 20th century.
Spork
is first recorded in 1909 and
motorcade
in 1913, and hundreds of others followed – such as
gasohol, internet, interpol, motel, chocoholic, docusoap
and
guestimate
. Informal English has a special liking for them –
fantabulous, ginormous, happenstance
. The process is especially popular today (
§98
).

Some of the most unusual blends appear in house-names – if Derek and Susan set up house together, they might call their place
Dersan
or
Suerek
. And the tabloid media love to join the names of famous couples together in a personal portmanteau. Who was/were
Brangelina
? Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. And who was/were
Bennifer
? Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. Whether the whole is different from the sum of the parts, in such cases, is a moot point.

Dinkum

a word from Australia (19th century)

On 29 April 1770, Captain Cook arrived in Australia. Two months later he writes in his journal: ‘One of the Men saw an Animal something less than a greyhound; it was of a Mouse Colour, very slender made, and swift of Foot.’ They soon learned its local name. Cook writes on 4th August: ‘called by the Natives Kangooroo, or Kanguru’. It was the first of many words that would eventually become a feature of Australian English.

The aboriginal languages of the region supplied some of the most distinctive items. Local animals, landscape and culture are reflected in
billabong, dingo, koala, wombat, budgerigar, kookaburra
and
boomerang
, Less distinctive, but more numerous, were words from British English used in new ways. A
paddock
in Britain was a small animal enclosure; now it described a vast tract of rural land.
Swag
was a slang word for a thief’s booty; it came to mean a bundle of personal belongings carried by a traveller in the bush. A
footpath
is paved in Australia – what in Britain would be a
pavement
and in the USA a
sidewalk
.

Bush
itself was one of these changes of sense, referring to the huge expanse of natural countryside that formed inland Australia. It became the basis of a wide range of expressions, such as
bush mouse
and
bush turkey
,
bush cucumber
and
bush tomato
,
bush ballad
and
bush medicine
. Few have travelled outside
Australia. An exception is
bush telegraph
, meaning the rapid spread of news or rumours.

Words from British regional dialects often underlie an Australian usage.
Dinkum
is a case in point. This is one of the best-known Australianisms, especially in the phrase
fair dinkum
. It appears in the 19th century in Britain, and is recorded by Joseph Wright in his
English Dialect Dictionary
. He found
dinkum
in Derbyshire and
fair dinkum
in Lincolnshire.
Dinkum
meant ‘hard work’, and
fair dinkum
was your ‘fair share of work’.

These senses travelled to Australia, but soon developed more general meanings of ‘honest, genuine’ and ‘good, excellent’, which is how the word is used today. Its popularity is suggested by the way it developed alternative forms, shortening to
dink
and lengthening to
dinki-di
. The origin of the word isn’t known. There are other uses, such as
dink
meaning ‘finely dressed’ and
dinky
meaning ‘neat, small’, all with a history in British dialects, but it’s difficult to see how they relate to the Australian use.

Thanks to the international popularity of Australian films and TV programmes, the English-speaking world has come to be familiar with
dinkum
and other informal expressions such as
cobber
(‘mate’),
pom
(‘British person’),
sheila
(‘woman’),
tucker
(‘food’) and
g’day
(as a greeting), as well as abbreviated forms such as
beaut
(as a term of praise) and
arvo
(‘afternoon’). Just occasionally, a colloquialism becomes part of international informal English.
Barbies
(‘barbecues’) have been with us since the 1970s.

The down side of media presence is that it often paints an exaggerated picture of Australian English. Outsiders hear colourful phrases and assume that everyone talks in the same way. Books of Australianisms have collected such expressions as
miserable as a bandicoot
,
flat out like a lizard drinking
and
he couldn’t find a grand piano in a one-roomed house
, but it’s debatable just how many people have actually ever used them.

Mipela

pidgin English (19th century)

You won’t find
mipela
or
mifela
in a dictionary of standard English, but these words belong to the language nonetheless – used in different varieties of pidgin English.
Mipela
is one of the pronouns used in the pidgin language of Papua New Guinea called Tok Pisin (‘Pidgin Talk’). People generally have a low opinion of pidgin languages. They think of them as primitive compared with standard English, with little or no grammar and a tiny vocabulary.

In fact, a pidgin like Tok Pisin is startlingly sophisticated. Its vocabulary is large enough to cope with translations of the Bible and Shakespeare. And sometimes its expression is more subtle than standard English. The standard pronoun system is pretty simple, really. We have first person
I
(for singular) and
we
(for plural). Second person is
you
for both singular and plural. Third person is
he
,
she
or
it
(for singular) and
they
(for plural). It’s not the best of systems.
You
, in particular, is ambiguous. If I say
I’m talking to you
, it’s not possible to tell whether I’m addressing one person or several.

14. A sign in Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea. It reads: ‘Beware of cattle’, literally ‘look out’ + ‘for’ + ‘bull and cow’. Long is a general-purpose preposition with functions expressing such notions as ‘in’, ‘of’, and ‘on’. It’s a shortened form of belong. When Prince Charles visited Papua New Guinea in 1966 he was described locally as
nambawan pikinini bilong misis kwin
(‘the number one child of Mrs Queen’). Princess Anne, correspondingly, was the
nambawan gel
(‘girl’)
pikinini bilong misis kwin.