Authors: Bill Bryson
No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language.
He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave 64
THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS
us countless phrases. As a phrasemaker there has never been any-one to match him. Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind's eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remem-brance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on. And on. He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in one sentence, as in Hamlet's observation: "Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the obser-vance." He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: "Or to take arms against a sea of troubles."
It is terrifying to think that had not two faithful followers, the actors John Hemming and Henry Condell, taken the considerable trouble of assembling an anthology of his work, the famous First Folio, in 1623, seven years after his death, sixteen of his plays would very probably have been lost to us forever. As it is two have been:
Cardenio
and
Love's Labour's Won.
Not a single Shakespeare manuscript survives, so, as with Chau-cer, we cannot be sure how closely the work we know is really Shakespeare's. Hemming and Condell consulted any number of sources to produce their folio—printers' manuscripts, actors'
promptbooks, even the memories of other actors. But from what happened to the work of other authors it is probable that they have been changed a lot. One of Shakespeare's publishers was Richard Field and it is known from extant manuscripts that when Field published the work of the poet John Harrington he made more than a thousand changes to the spelling and phrasing. It is unlikely that he did less with Shakespeare, particularly since Shakespeare himself seemed singularly unconcerned with what became of his work after his death. As far as is known, he did not bother to save any of his poems and plays—a fact that is sometimes taken as evidence that he didn't write them.
There have been many other more subtle changes in English since Shakespeare's day. One has been the rise of the progressive
THE MOTHER TONGUE
verb form. Where we would say, "What are you reading?, Shake-speare could only say, "What do you read?" He would have had difficulty expressing the distinctions contained in "I am going," "I was going," "I have been going," and "I will (or shall) be going."
The passive-progressive construction, as in "The house is being built," was quite unknown to him. Yet it goes without saying that this scarcely slowed him down.
Even in its greatest flowering English was still considered in many respects a second-rate language. Newton's
Principia
and Ba-con's
Novum Organum
were both published in Latin. Sir Thomas More wrote
Utopia
in Latin. William Harvey wrote his treatise on the circulation of blood (written in 1616, the year of Shakespeare's death) in Latin. Edward Gibbon wrote his histories in French and then translated them into English. As Baugh and Cable note,
"The use of English for purposes of scholarship was frankly ex-perimental."
Moreover in Shakespeare's day English had yet to conquer the whole of the British Isles. It was the language of England and lowland Scotland, but it had barely penetrated into Wales, Ireland, and the Scottish Highlands and islands—and would not for some time. (As recently as this century Britain was able to elect a prime minister whose native tongue was not English: to wit, the Welsh-speaking David Lloyd George.) In 1582, the scholar Richard Mul-caster noted glumly: "The English tongue is of small account, stretching no further than this island of ours, nay not there over all."
He had no way of knowing that within less than a generation English would be transported to the New World, where it would begin its inexorable rise to becoming the foremost language of the world.
5.
WHE E WO 1' DS
COMB FROM
I F YOU HAVE A MORBID FEAR OF PEA-
nut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it:
arachibutyrophobia.
There is a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity. And there's a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought:
aposiopesis.
If you harbor an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition:
crytoscopophilia.
When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it's a
myoclonic jerk.
If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, with-out saying flat out that is has a circumflex there, there is a word for it:
properispomenon.
There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and a substantive working together. It is a
hendiadys.
(But of course.) In English, in short, there are words for almost everything.
Some of these words deserve to be better known. Take
velleity,
which describes a mild desire, a wish or urge too slight to lead to action. Doesn't that seem a useful term? Or how about
slub-
berdegullion, a
seventeenth-century word signifying a worthless or slovenly fellow? Or
ugsome, a
late medieval word meaning loath-some or disgusting? It has lasted half a millennium in English, was a common synonym for
horrid
until well into the last century, and can still be found tucked away forgotten at the back of most un-abridged dictionaries. Isn't it a shame to let it slip away? Our dictionaries are full of such words—words describing the most 67
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specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions.
And yet there are odd gaps. We have no word for coolness corresponding to warmth. We are strangely lacking in middling terms—words to describe with some precision the middle ground between hard and soft, near and far, big and little. We have a possessive impersonal pronoun
its
to place alongside
his,
her,
and
their,
but no equivalent impersonal pronoun to con-trast with the personal
whose.
Thus we have to rely on inele-gant constructions such as "The house whose roof" or resort to periphrasis. We have a word to describe all the work you find waiting for you when you return from vacation,
backlog,
but none to describe all the work you have to do before you go.
Why not
forelog?
And we have a large number of negative words—inept,
disheveled, incorrigible, ruthless, unkempt—for
which the positive form is missing. English would be richer if we could say admiringly of a tidy person, "She's
so
sheveled,"
or praise a capable person for being full of ept or an energetic one for having heaps of ert. Many of these words did once have positive forms.
Ruthless
was companioned by
ruth,
meaning compassion. One of Milton's poems contains the well-known line "Look homeward, Angel, now, and melt with ruth." But, as with many such words, one form died and another lived. Why this should be is beyond explanation. Why should we have lost
demit
(send away) but saved
commit?
Why should
impede
have survived while the once equally common and seemingly just as useful
expede
expired? No one can say.
Despite these gaps and casualties, English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. We can distinguish between house and home
(as,
for instance, the French cannot), between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation, informant and informer. For almost every word we have a multiplicity of syn-onyms. Something is not just big, it is large, immense, vast, capa-68
WHERE WORDS COME FROM
cious, bulky, massive, whopping, humongous. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly—so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or as-cend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need
fictile
as a synonym for
moldable, glabrous
for
hairless, sternutation
for
sneez-
ing?
Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvan-taged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expres-sions that say the same thing twice:
beck and call, law and order,
assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and fore-
most, trials and tribulations, hem and haw, spick-and-span, kith
and
kin,
dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, vim and
vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let
or hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.
Despite this bounty of terms, we have a strange—and to for-eigners it must seem maddening—tendency to load a single word with a whole galaxy of meanings.
Fine;
for instance, has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb. In the
Oxford English Dictionary
it fills two full pages and takes 5,000
words of description. We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine, fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite sep-arate things. The condition of having many meanings
is
known as
polysemy,
and it is very common.
Sound
is another polysemic word. Its vast repertory of meanings can suggest an audible noise, a state of healthiness (sound mind), an outburst (sound off), an inquiry (sound out), a body of water (Puget Sound), or financial 69
THE MOTHER TONGUE
stability (sound economy), among many others. And then there's
round.
In the
OED, round
alone (that is without variants like
rounded
and
roundup)
takes 7V2 pages to define or about 15,0oo words of text—about as much as is contained in the first hundred pages of this book. Even when you strip out its obsolete senses,
round
still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be
set.
Superficially it looks a wholly unseeming monosylla-ble, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and io as a participial adjective.
Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the
OED
6o,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know
set
is to know English.
Generally polysemy happens because one word sprouts a variety of meanings, but sometimes it is the other way around—similar but quite separate words evolve identical spellings.
Boil in
the sense of heating a pan of water and
boil in
the sense of an irruption of the skin are two unrelated words that simply happen to be spelled the same way. So are
policy
in the sense of a strategy or plan and the
policy in
a life insurance policy.
Excise,
meaning "to cut," is quite distinct in origin from
excise in
the sense of a customs duty.
Sometimes, just to heighten the confusion, the same word ends up with contradictory meanings. This kind of word is called a
con-
tronym. Sanction,
for instance, can either signify permission to do something or a measure forbidding it to be done.
Cleave can mean
cut in half or stick together. A sanguine person is either hotheaded and bloodthirsty or calm and cheerful. Something that is fast is either stuck firmly or moving quickly. A door that is bolted is secure, but a horse that has bolted has taken off. If you wind up a meeting you finish it; if you wind up a watch, you start it. To ravish means to rape or to enrapture.
Quinquennial
describes something that lasts for five years or happens only once in five years. Trying one's best is a good thing, but trying one's patience is a bad thing.
A blunt instrument is dull, but a blunt remark is pointed. Occa-sionally when this happens the dictionary makers give us different 70
WHERE WORDS COME FROM
spellings to differentiate the two meanings—as with flour and
flower, discrete
and
discreet—but
such orthological thoughtfulness is rare.
So where do all these words come from? According to the great Danish linguist Otto Jespersen words are for the most part formed in one of four ways: by adding to them, by subtracting from them, by making them up, and by doing nothing to them. Neat as that formula is, I would venture to suggest that it overlooks two other prolific sources of new words: borrowing them from other lan-guages and creating them by mistake. Let us look at each in turn.
1. WORDS ARE CREATED BY
ERROR. One kind of these is called ghost words. The most famous of these perhaps is
dord,
which appeared in the 1934
Merriam-Webster International Dictionary
as
another word for density. In fact, it was a misreading of the scribbled "D or d," meaning that "density" could be abbreviated either to a capital or lowercase letter. The people at Merriam- Webster quickly removed it, but not before it found its way into other dictionaries. Such occurrences are more common than you might suppose. According to the First Supplement of the
OED,
there are at least 350 words in English dictionaries that owe their existence to typographical errors or other misrenderings. For the most part they are fairly obscure. One such is
messuage, a
legal term used to describe a house, its land, and buildings. It is thought to be simply a careless transcription of the French
menage.