The Story of English in 100 Words (31 page)

which pretends to communicate, but really doesn’t. It is language which tries to make the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, or the unpleasant seem attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility …

The important point to stress is that this kind of language isn’t the result of lazy thinking. Rather, it’s the product of very clear thinking on someone’s part. Doublespeak has been carefully selected in order to mislead.

A factory reports that they have had a leak of
biosolids
from their plant. They mean ‘sewage’. An army reports a
surgical strike
on a town. They mean a ‘military attack’. One company says it is
rightsizing
. It means people are being sacked. Another says it is offering
job flexibility
. It means there are no permanent contracts. There is the hint in these cases that the new situation is a good thing.
Bio-
suggests life.
Surgery
suggests cure. Words like
right
and
flexibility
put a positive spin on a bad situation.
Job seekers
sounds better than
unemployed
,
ethnic cleansing
better than
genocide
.

It all depends on your point of view, of course. If an army is on your side, it
intervenes
in another country; if it isn’t, it
invades
. If an armed group is on your side, their members are
freedom fighters
; if not, they’re
terrorists
. People can lapse into doublespeak for the best of intentions, believing they are really helping a cause. When a country is at war, few would doubt the importance of positive spin in maintaining national morale. When a company is worried about its share prices, it will do what it can to present itself in the best possible light.

But there comes a point when the public feels that the spin has gone too far, and several of the phrases highlighted by doublespeak campaigns – not only in the USA – have become so famous that they have lost their obscuring force. Everyone now knows what
friendly fire
means: you’ve killed your own men. And only the most hidebound of press officers would
these days say
collateral damage
(for a raid in which bystanders are killed or injured) without embarrassment, because every journalist present would know exactly what was meant.

The Doublespeak Committee decided to give annual awards for the worst examples. In 2008 it gave the award to the phrase
aspirational goal
– as used, for instance, when talking about setting a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq or for reducing carbon emissions. The Committee observed:

Aspirations and goals are the same thing; and yet when the terms are combined, the effect is to undermine them both, producing a phrase that means, in effect, ‘a goal to which one does not aspire
all that much
’.

In other words: nobody has done anything about this yet.

How to reduce doublespeak? One way is to praise linguistic honesty; and the Committee does give Orwell Awards for good practice. Satire also helps. I especially like the report of a chess match in which one of the players proudly reports that he came second.

Doobry

useful nonsense (20th century)

Or
doobery
,
dooberry
,
doobrie
,
doobrey
… It’s never obvious how to spell the invented forms we use to talk about an object whose name we don’t know. Fortunately it isn’t a problem, most of the time, because these nonsense words are usually used only when we speak. ‘Where’s the doobry?’ someone might say, looking for the gadget which controls the television.

Doobry
is the latest in a series of
doo-
forms that appeared during the 20th century. It’s first recorded in British English in the 1970s. In earlier decades people used such forms as
doodah
,
doofer
,
doodad
,
doings
and
dooshanks
.
Doodah
seems to have been the first, recorded in 1928.
Doofer
came soon after, in the 1930s – probably derived from the phrase
do for
, as used in such sentences as
that’ll do for now
. Workmen used to describe half a cigarette as a
doofer
. It became popular in Australia, where it also appeared as
doover
and
doovah
. In American English, the favoured forms, from early in the century, were
doohickey
and
doojigger
, and both are still used.
Doodad
also developed a more specific meaning in the USA, referring to fancy ornaments or articles of dress. There might be all kinds of doodads on a Xmas tree, for instance.

Nonsense words are a hugely useful feature of speech. They help us out when we’re searching for a word and don’t want to stop ourselves in mid-flow.
They’re a lifeline in cases where we don’t know what to call something, or have forgotten its name. And they’re available when we feel that something is not worth a precise mention or we want to be deliberately vague. Their importance is illustrated by the remarkable number of these words that have been coined over the centuries.

The oldest ones, recorded in writing since the 16th century, and likely to be much older in speech, are based on the word
what
. In their full form they appear as
what do you call it/him/’em
…, but they turn up in a wide range of contracted forms, such as
whatdicall’um
,
whatchicalt
and
whatd’ecalt
. Shakespeare uses one, when Touchstone addresses Jacques: ‘Good even, good Mr what ye cal’t’ (
As You Like It
, III.iii.74). He’s avoiding the pronunciation of the name
Jacques
, which would have sounded like ‘jakes’ in Elizabethan English – and
jakes
was a slang word for a toilet. Today the commonest forms are
whatchacallit
and
whatchamacallit
(from ‘what-you-may-call-it’).

The curious forms
giggombob
,
jiggembob
and
kickumbob
all appear in the early 17th century – usually in plays – but seem to have fallen out of use a century later. They were probably overtaken by forms based on
thing
.
Thingum
and
thingam
are both recorded in the 17th century, especially in American English, and there was a reduplicated form too:
thingum-thangum
(
§56
). Then, in the 18th century, when sensitivities about using unfashionable or inelegant words reached new heights, we find a raft of new creations:
thingy, thingummy, thingamerry, thingamajig, thingamabob, thingummytite, thingumty, thingumtitoy
.

Nonsense words go in and out of fashion. Does anyone still use
jigamaree
or
whigmaleerie
nowadays? And what has happened to
oojah
? An issue of the
Washington Post
in July 1917 refers to new British army slang, and mentions
oojah
as coming from the East – from Arabic or Persian, perhaps. It was very common in forces slang during the Second World War, when it developed into such forms as
oojamaflop
. My Uncle Bill, ex-RAF, used that one all the time. But I don’t think I’ve ever used it myself, except in articles like this one.

Blurb

a moment of arrival (20th century)

Is it ever possible to say exactly when a word was invented? Yes, if someone keeps a record (
§65
,
66
). But more often we find new words known by the date the public got to know about them.

In 1906, the Huebsch company published a book by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, which sold very well. The next year, at a publishing trade association dinner, free copies were given out of a limited edition, printed – as was the association’s custom – in a special dust jacket. Burgess had devised a jacket which showed a charming lady, Miss Belinda Blurb, ‘in the act of blurbing’ – shouting out the title of the book and the name of its author. ‘YES, this is a “BLURB”!’ said the headline. The accompanying text was full of unbelievable praise: ‘When you’ve
READ
this masterpiece, you’ll know what a BOOK is’.

17. The book jacket which introduced the word blurb into the English language in 1906.

The word caught on. Any testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a
blurb
. In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, Burgess defined his own term:

A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.

And the word has been with us ever since. There is a blurb on the back of this book.

We don’t know the exact moment that Burgess invented the word, but we do know that it began to circulate after that dinner. The same thing happened to the first artificial earth satellite, Sputnik 1, launched by the Russians on 4 October 1957. Before that, the word
sputnik
(translated as ‘travelling companion’) would have been known only to a small group in the Soviet Union. After the launch, it was everywhere.

The publication of a literary work has been the usual means of establishing the year in which a new word is introduced to the world.
Catch-22
arrived in 1961, following the publication of Joseph Heller’s novel of that name.
Nymphet
, in the sense of a sexually attractive young girl, came in 1955 with Vladimir
Nabokov’s
Lolita
.
Chortle
appeared first in Lewis Carroll’s
Through the Looking-Glass
in 1871.

Cases of this kind are the closest we can get to the origins of a word. Usually all we can say is that the word appeared ‘in the early 1960s’ or ‘in the late 14th century’. But the internet is changing everything (
§49
). If I activate the appropriate software, it is possible for the date, hour, minute and second at which I create a text to be time-stamped. And if that text happens to contain a new word, or a word in a new sense, its birthday will be known for ever.

Strine