The Story of English in 100 Words (34 page)

Problems grew when some PC activists took their linguistic case too far. Opposition to the word
black
in a racial context was one thing. Reading in racial prejudice behind all uses of the word
black
(as in
blackboards
and
black sheep
) was another. Stories circulated of authorities falling over backwards to avoid a word in case someone found it offensive. Some of the stories were true; some were myths reported by the media. It became difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. How many nursery school teachers heard the story that it was wrong to sing the nursery rhyme
‘Baa baa black sheep’, and that some other colour-word should be used instead? It probably started out as an urban myth (the ‘rainbow sheep myth’), but I know teachers who have indeed changed the words, worried in case the parents of the one black child in their class might complain.

Fact or fiction, the political right focused on such stories as a means of discrediting the progressives who were trying to get a better deal for disadvantaged groups. Politicians always exaggerate the perceived weaknesses of the other side, and in the case of PC, numerous accusations were made about how excessive deference was being given to some groups at the expense of others. Insults flew. Those who drew attention to ‘incorrect vocabulary’ were charged with being ‘thought police’. Moderate reformers found themselves grouped along with extremists.

Today, few people would describe themselves as being PC. Rather they admit, rather self-consciously but with a certain pride, to being ‘non-PC’. They say such things as ‘I know this is politically incorrect, but …’ and then they say what they have in mind. The PC movement has evidently had an effect, in that it has made them more conscious of the issues than they were before. But some disadvantaged groups might well be wondering what all the fuss has been about, for their situation hasn’t changed a jot.

Bagonise

a nonce-word (20th century)

People love the opportunity to create new words. Newspapers and magazines hold competitions for ‘words that should be in the language but aren’t’. In the 1980s in the USA, comedian Rich Hall coined the term
sniglets
for his inventive lexical contributions to the show
Not Necessarily the News
. It was hugely popular; fans sent in their own ideas, and several collections were published.

I can personally confirm the popularity of the game, as I devoted one of the programmes in my BBC Radio 4 series
English Now
to it, and set listeners a competition. I got over a thousand proposals – far more entries than we received for any other competition.
Bagonise
was one of the winners. It means ‘to anxiously wait for your suitcase to appear on the baggage claim carousel at an airport’. Another was
potspot
, ‘that part of a toilet seat which causes the phone to ring the moment you sit on it’.

Sometimes the creativity lies in using old words in a new way. In the UK, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd published the best-selling
The Meaning of Liff
in 1983, in which place-names were given new meanings.
Goole
, for example, was ‘the puddle on the bar into which the barman puts your change’.
Nantucket
was ‘the secret pocket which eats your train ticket’.

These coinages are sometimes spontaneous, sometimes the result of a lot of thought; but they
all have one thing in common. They are
nonce-words
– usages made up ‘for the nonce’. The expression is from Middle English (
nonce
= ‘once’), and in language study it refers to a word or phrase invented to meet the needs of a particular occasion. Nobody ever expects it to be used again.

Authors often invent a word in this way: there are hundreds in James Joyce, for example, such as
twingty to twangty too
(in
Finnegans Wake
: for ‘twenty to twenty-two’). Lewis Carroll’s coinages in ‘Jabberwocky’ (
§67
), such as
brillig
and
toves
, are nonce-words. In the film
Mary Poppins
, there is the amazing
supercalifragilisticexpialidocious
. It’s a feature of everyday conversation, too. In recent days I’ve heard someone say that a female bishop is a
bishopess
and a cake was
chocalicious
.

Sometimes a nonce-word catches on. When Joyce introduced
quark
into his novel, he could not have imagined that one day it would be adopted as the name of a subatomic particle in physics. And it only takes a famous person to use a nonce-word, consciously or unconsciously, and it can make headlines: in 2010, US politician Sarah Palin said
refudiate
– a blend of
refute
and
repudiate
– and was widely criticised for doing so. But, as she said in her defence, it’s the sort of thing Shakespeare did. And indeed, if she – or George W. Bush – had said
compulsative
for
compulsory
or
irregulous
for
unruly
, they would have been condemned. But both are Shakespeare’s.

Some people feel so strongly about the value to the human race of their coinages that they use them as much as possible in the hope that one day they will get into the dictionary. The words that are most likely to have this happen are those which are invented several times independently.
Bag
+
agonise
is a fairly obvious combination, and as the circumstance is repeated millions of times every day it has probably been repeatedly coined. It’s therefore only a matter of time before the word begins to appear in print. It already appears in the online Travel Industry Dictionary, labelled as ‘slang’. That’s a start. And in 2011 it had over 600 hits on Google. It’s bound to become standard English one day.

Webzine

an internet compound (20th century)

In 1998, the American Dialect Society named
e-
the ‘Word of the Year’, the one ‘most useful and most likely to succeed’ (
§95
). It wasn’t really a word, but they were right about its future. Thousands of e-coinages have since appeared, and many look set to be a permanent feature of the language, such as
e-books, e-conferences, e-voting, e-cards, e-money
and
e-zines
.
Web
was another success story, producing such phrases as
web design, web address, web page
and
web publishing
, as well as such compound words as
webcam, webcast, webmaster
and
webzine
. The proliferation began soon after the World Wide Web became public knowledge in 1991.

Webzine
, for example, is recorded in 1994 – the latest in a line of other
-zines
, such as
e-zines
,
fanzines
,
cyberzines
and
amazines
(‘amateur magazines’). You can find them in
zinestores
and celebrate them at
zinefests
. If you are a regular reader, you are a
zinester
, and you may engage in
zineswapping
.

New compound words are one of the most noticeable features of internet vocabulary. Popular forms include
click
(
clickthrough rate, cost-per-click
,
double-click
),
net
(
netspeak, netiquette, netnews
),
ware
(
firmware, freeware, shareware
),
cyber
(
cyberspace
,
cyberculture
,
cybersex
) and
bot
(
§78
). Even the symbol
@
has been made to do extra duty in word creation, both as a symbol and spelled out as a word (
@-address, atcommand
). Some very strange compounds have been created. If you look names up in a remote database, the usual instruction is
whois
. If you want to find a person’s e-address by entering a name and location, you type in
whowhere
.

The internet has also favoured a previously rare phenomenon called
bicapitalisation
(the use of a capital in the middle as well as at the beginning of a word), notably in company names. We find
Alta-Vista
, not
Altavista
– and similarly,
AskJeeves, CompuServe, DreamWorks
and
GeoCities
. Three capitals occur in
QuarkXPress
and
aRMadillo Online
. Sometimes just a middle capital is used, as in the
i
-prefix usages which have produced
iMap, iPhone, iMac, iPad
and other innovations – a pattern which has been picked up and used in a wide range of contexts, such
as
iDrugs, iDosing, iForms, i-Routes, iSense
and hundreds more.

Domain names are likely to turn the world of lexicography upside down. Virtually every word in everyday English has now been bought, to be used as a domain name. Familiar compounds have gone the same way. To invent a new domain name these days you have to be really ingenious and play with spelling or unusual sequences, such as
inventinganewword.com
. These are all proper names, of course, so they don’t really count when it comes to vocabulary. But an unknown (and, I suspect, large) number will eventually develop general uses, in much the way that place-names have (
§80
). Do you wiki? Are you in a Mac-forum? Have you been Amazoned yet?

App

a killer abb (20th century)

In 1985 a writer in the trade newspaper
Information World
, describing a new kind of on-screen menu, used an abbreviation – and then felt he had better explain it: ‘apps’, he wrote, adding ‘for applications’.

Most people would have needed an explanation at the time. The idea of an
application
– a computer function designed to meet a specific user requirement – had been around for over twenty years, but shortening it to
app
was a novelty. The word had never been abbreviated in that way before. It immediately caught on. There was something phonetically appealing about the short, perky syllable, which seemed to suit the exciting quickfire developments in digital communication of the time. And soon after, the idea of a
killer app
arrived – a function which, in the dreams of the multimedia industry, would be so appealing or superior that people wouldn’t be able to do without it. If any word should achieve the status of a killer abb(reviation), it is this one.

There’s nothing new about abbreviations, of course. They’ve been in English since its earliest days (
§3
). But the Anglo-Saxon scribes could hardly have predicted the extraordinary increase in shortened words and names that has taken place over the past century or so. One collection (
§79
) has over half a million abbreviations, with new editions adding thousands more each year. And no wordbook should ignore the way that electronic media generally, and the internet in particular, have become one of the most fruitful sources of present-day growth, especially in abbreviations consisting only of initial letters (
acronyms
) –
GPS
(‘global positioning system’),
SMS
(‘short messaging service’),
FAQs
(‘frequently asked questions’) and so on. Most are short – three letters is the norm. Just occasionally we encounter longer sequences, such as
WYSIWYG
(‘what you see is what you get’), or some of the humorous strings found in text-messaging, such as ROTFLMAO (‘rolling on the floor laughing my ass off’).