The Story of English in 100 Words (36 page)

Sudoku

a modern loan (21st century)

Sudoku
has been in Japanese at least since the 1980s, when the game was first devised, but it didn’t appear as a loanword in English until 2000, one of the first borrowings of the new millennium. It continued a trend to take words from Japanese that had been building up in the second half of the 20th century.

Karaoke
seems to have been with us for ever, but its first recorded use in English is only 1979. And since 1950 increased tourism and international business has brought hundreds of words into English from Japanese, many quite specialised. If you’re into
sumo
wrestling, for example, your loanwords will be quite extensive, such as
yokozuna
(‘highest rank of wrestler’),
dohyo
(‘the sumo ring’),
okuridashi
(‘a pushing technique’) and
torikumi
(‘a bout’). The business world will make you familiar with
shoshas
(‘trading houses’),
kanban
(‘a just-in-time production method’),
kaizen
(‘improvements in practice’) and
zaitech
(‘financial engineering’).

Gardeners will know
bonsai
(‘dwarf plants’). Film buffs will know
anime
(‘animated films’). Artists will know
shunga
(‘erotic art’). Those who practise alternative medicine will know
shiatsu
(‘a finger-pressure therapy’). Martial arts practitioners will know
shuriken
(‘a type of weapon’) and, of course,
karate
. Cooks will know
dashi
(‘cooking stock’),
tamari
(‘soy sauce’) and
teriyaki
(‘a type of fish or meat dish’).
Tourists will have travelled on the
Shinkansen
train and perhaps stayed in a
ryokan
(‘a traditional inn’). Hopefully they will not have encountered a
yakuza
(‘gangster’). At home they may still have a rusting
Betamax
– a name often thought to be a Greek coinage, but in fact from Japanese
beta
‘all over’ +
max
(
imum
).

However, the trend seems to be slowing down. Very few 21st-century new words in English have so far been borrowings.
Vuvuzela
is a South African example from 2010, but it took an event of World Cup proportions to introduce it. Does this reflect a new national concern over identity?

Muggle

a fiction word (21st century)

Much of the new vocabulary in 21st-century English reflects the major social changes and events that have taken place in the real world. New editions of dictionaries in the 2000s have included such expressions as
social media, congestion charge, designer baby, flash mob, toxic debt, quantitative easing, geoengineering, WMDs
(‘weapons of mass destruction’) and
wardrobe malfunction
. More interesting, because more unexpected, are the words that have come from the world of fiction.

J. K. Rowling coined
muggle
in her first
Harry Potter
novel (1997) for a person who possesses no magical powers – adapting the associations of
mug
in the sense of ‘foolish or incompetent person’ and somehow neatly bypassing its earlier senses. Nobody would have linked it to the 13th-century use of
muggle
meaning ‘fish-like tail’ or the 17th-century use meaning ‘sweetheart’, but I’m surprised it survived the sense of ‘marijuana’ in American street slang, which had been around for most of the 20th century. Marijuana addicts were
mugglers
. It didn’t seem to matter, as the power of the
Harry Potter
series grew.

By the turn of the millennium, the word had travelled well beyond the books and films. A
muggle
in the 2000s is any person thought to lack a particular skill. Some people use it in the same way as its source word,
mug
, and there are similarities too with the way
muppet
(a term popularised in the 1970s by Jim Henson) has left puppetry behind to mean – usually as an affectionate tease – an ‘idiotic or inept person’.

An unexpected development arose in the high-tech treasure-hunting game known as
geocaching
, devised in 2000, where people who don’t know the game or who interfere with it in some way are described as
muggles
. Adventurers equipped with a GPS system try to locate hidden containers (
geocaches
) around the world, using geographic co-ordinates registered on the geocaching web site. If a geocache has been vandalised or stolen, it’s said to have been
muggled
.

Films have introduced hundreds of catch-phrases into English, such as
Make my day!
and
May the Force
be with you
. Only occasionally, as we saw with
matrix
(
§37
), have they also provided new words, or new senses of old words.
Muggle
is one of those cases. And since 2000 we should also give due recognition to
Winnie-the-Pooh
, which has popularised
tiggerish
(‘very lively, cheerily energetic’),
Austin Powers
, which has introduced us to
mini-me
(‘a person closely resembling a smaller version of another’) and
Meet the Fockers
, for
fockerise
(‘to introduce comedic chaos of the kind displayed in the film’).

Television advertising has also been a rich source of catch-phrases and the occasional new word or sense, though these rarely travel outside the countries where an ad is shown.
Pinta
(‘pint of milk’) entered British English in the late 1950s because of its use in the television jingle
Drinka pinta milka day
. And in the 2000s we find
va-va-voom
, used as an expression of admiration since the 1950s, but not widely known until it became the theme of a series of UK television commercials for Renault cars, starring footballer Thierry Henry, in which he tried to track down its real meaning. ‘Look,’ he says apologetically in one of the ads, ‘I don’t make the words.’ But without him, I doubt if we would now have its latest meaning: ‘the quality of being exciting, vigorous or attractive’.

Chillax

a fashionable blend (21st century)

This combination of
chill
(in its ‘calm down’ sense) and
relax
arrived in the early 2000s – a coinage which has come to be loved and hated in about equal proportions. By 2010 it had become a newsworthy headline. A piece by Simon Hoggart in
The Independent
for 23rd February began: ‘
Chillax man – or Gordon will get you
’ – apparently referring to the then prime minister’s use of the word while telling his advisers not to panic. If Gordon had been really cool, of course, he would have used the derived expression:
Chillax to the max
.

This is one of the latest blends, or portmanteau words – a technique of word creation (
§67
) that has become extremely popular in the 21st century.
Chillax
is gradually building up a word family of its own: already we have
chillaxing
and
chillaxed
.
Podcast
– a blend of
iPod
and
broadcast
– is even more productive: first used in 2004, it’s now found as a noun (
a podcast
), a verb (
to podcast
), an adjective (
a podcast experience
) and in several derived forms (
podcasting, podcasters, a podcasted show
).

Dozens of new blends are around now: have you seen a
threequel
(a ‘second sequel’), eaten
turducken
(‘a combination of roast chicken, duck and turkey’), read about a
bromance
(‘affection between two men’), taken a
staycation
(‘vacation staying at home, or in one’s home country’) or
daycation
(‘a day-long
holiday’) or used a
freemium
(‘an internet business model in which basic features are free but advanced features are not’)? You may have
frenemies
(‘people with whom you remain friendly, despite some sort of dislike’). You will certainly know some
screenagers
(‘teens who have an aptitude for computers and the internet’).

And what about
jeggings
? These are leggings designed to look like tight-fitting jeans, a blend of
jeans
+
leggings
, and one of the most fashionable clothing developments of 2010. The word family here is growing:
meggings
(‘men + leggings’),
treggings
(‘trousers + leggings’). It seems to be a trend within the fashion industry to mix different types of clothing, and the language is desperately trying to keep up. Have you worn a
coatigan
(‘coat + cardigan’),
shacket
(‘shirt + jacket’),
skorts
(‘skirt + shorts’) or
tankini
(‘tank top + bikini’)? Or a
mankini
(‘man + bikini’, male skimpy swimwear such as that used by the film character Borat)? Then there are
blurts
(‘blouse + skirt’),
cardigowns
(‘cardigan + dressing gown’),
mackets
(‘mac + jacket’),
shoots
(‘shoe + boot’) and
skousers
(‘skirt + trousers’). I sometimes wonder which came first – the design or the word?

Unfriend

a new age (21st century)

In 2009 the
New Oxford American Dictionary
chose
unfriend
as its ‘Word of the Year’. It meant ‘to remove someone from a list of contacts on a social networking site such as Facebook’. A minor controversy followed. Some argued that the verb should be
defriend
. But the use of
un-
was already well established in the terminology of reversing computer actions, with
undo, unerase, undelete, unbold
and many more. As a
New York Times
article said in 2009 (15th September), we are living in an ‘Age of Undoing’.

Unfriend
also probably appealed because it feels more English, as evidenced by a history of earlier uses dating from the 16th century (
§44
). Antonio describes Sebastian as ‘unguided and unfriended’ in
Twelfth Night
(III.iii.10). A noun (
an unfriend
) occurs as early as the 13th century. And in the 19th century, a member of the Society of Friends (the Quakers) could describe a non-member as an
unfriend
.
Defriend
, by contrast, had no such history, so it has been slower to take root. But both
unfriend
and
defriend
are found in the social networking world now, with
unfriend
almost twice as popular in 2011.