Authors: Bill Bryson
According to one story on how it began (and there are several to choose from)two sets of brothers, the Duffs and the Burgers,-were sitting around the Anytime Saloon in Boonville one day in 1892
when they decided for reasons of amusement to devise a private language based partly on their common Scottish-Irish heritage, partly on words from the Porno Indians living nearby, but mostly on their own gift for coming up with colorful secret words. The idea was that no one would be able to understand what they were talking about, but as far as that went the plan was a failure because soonpretty well everyone in town was talking Boontling, or harpin boont asthey put it locally, and for at least forty years it became the common linguistic currency in the isolated town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. It became so much a part of the local culture that some people sometimes found it took them a minute or two to readjust to the English-speaking world when they ventured out of their valley. With time, the languagerew to take in about
1,200
words, a good many of them salacious, as you might expect with a private language.
s
Many expressions were taken from local characters. Coffee was called
zeese
after the initials of a camp cook named Zachariah Clif-ton who made coffee you could stand a spoon up in. A hardworking
THE MOTHER TONGUE
German named Otto inspired the term
otting
for diligent work. A goatee became a
billy ryan.
A kerosene lantern was
a floyd hutsell.
Pie
was called
charlie brown
because a local of that name always ate his pie before he ate the rest of his meal. A prostitute was a madge .
was a
shoveltooth
on account of the protruding teeth of an early GP. Other words were based on contractions-
forbs
for four bits,
toobs
for two bits,
hairk
for a haircut, mulch for small change. Others contained literary or biblical allusions. Thus an illegitimate child was a bulrusher. Still others were metaphor-
' ical. A heavy rain was a
trashlifter
and a really heavy rain was a
loglifter.
But many of the most memorable terms were onomato-poeic, notably one of the terms for
ricky chow,
said to be the noise be springs m e w en presse into urgent service. A great many of the words had sexual provenance, such as
burlapping, a
euphemism for the sexual act, based on a local an-ecdote involving a young couple found passing an hour in that time-honored fashion on a stack of old gunny sacks at the back of the general store.
Although some people can still speak B00ntling, it is not as widely used as it once was. In much better shape is cockney rhym-ing slang,
as
spoken in the East End of London. Rhyming slang isn't a separate language, but simply a liberal peppering of myste-rious and often venerable slang words.
Cockneys are among the most artful users of English in the world.
A true cockney (the word
comes from Middle English slang for a townsperson) is said to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells—these being the famous (and fa-mously noisy) bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church on Cheapside in the City of London. However, for a generation or so no one has been born within their sound for the elemental reason that they were destroyed by German bombs in World War II. In any case, the rise of the City of London as the capital's financial district meant that cockneys had long since been dispersed to more out-lying districts of the East End where the bells of Bow rang out exceedingly faintly, if at all.
The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they've taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French
WORDPLAY
Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of to-day. Many others have come from their own eye-opening experi-ences overseas during the period of empire and two world wars.
Shufti, for "have a look at," and
buckshee,
for "something that is free," both come from India. "Let's have a paryy oo" (meaning "a chat") comes obviously from the French parlez-vous. Les s obvious is the East End expression
san
fairy
ann,
don't mention it, no problem," which is a corruption of the French "ca ne fait rien." The cockneys have also devised hundreds of terms of their own. "Hang about" means "wait a minute." "Leave it out" means
"stop, don't keep on at me." "Straight up" means "honestly, that's the truth." Someone who is misbehaving is "out of order" or "tak-ing liberties."
But without a doubt their most singular contribution to English has been rhyming slang. No one knows when cockney rhyming slang began, but it has certainly been popular since the mid-nineteenth century. As with general slang, some of the terms exist only for a short while before dying out, while others live on for scores of years, sometimes moving out into the wider world where their low origins and true meanings are often mercifully unappre-ciated.
The two most often cited examples of rhyming slang are
apples
and pears = stairs
and
trouble and strife = wife.
In point of fact, you could live a lifetime on the Mile End Road and not once hear those terms. But there are scores of others that are used daily, such as "use yer loaf" (short for
loaf of bread = head),
"have a butch-er's" (short for
butcher's hook = look),
or "how you doin', my old china?" (short for
china plate = mate).
A complicating factor is that the word that rhymes is almost always dropped, and thus the etymology is obscure.
Titfer
means "hat"; originally it was
tit-
for-tat = hat. Tom
means "jewelry." It's short for
tom-
foolery = jewelry.
There's a technical term for this process as well:
hemiteleia.
A further complication is that cockney pronunciation is often considerably at variance with conventional British pronunciation, as evidenced by
rabbit
(to chatter mindlessly) coming from
rabbit
and pork = talk.
In the East End both
pork
and
talk
rhyme (more 237
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or less) with
soak.
(Something of the flavor of cockney pronuncia-tion is found in the old supposed cockney spelling of the London district of Ealing: "E for èaven, A for what òrses eat, L for where you're going, I for me, N for what lays eggs, and G for God's sake keep yer ears open.")
Sometimes these words spawn further rhymes.
Bottle,
for in-stance, has long meant "ass" (from
bottle and glass = ass).
But at some point that in turn spawned
Aristotle,
often shortened to Aris'
(as in "Oo, I just fell on my Aris"') and that in turn spawned
plaster
(from plaster of Paris). So you have this convoluted genealogy:
plaster = plaster of
Paris =
Aris = Aristotle = bottle = bottle
and glass = ass.
(I have Americanized the spelling; the last word is actually
arse,
pronounced "ahss" to rhyme with "glahss.") Several cockney rhyming slang terms have taken residence in America. In nineteenth-century London,
dukes
meant "hands"
(from
Duke of Yorks = forks = hand),
but in America it came to mean "fist," and lives on in the expression "put up your dukes."
Bread
as a slang synonym for
money
comes from
bread and honey.
To
chew the fat
comes from
have a chat
and
brass tacks
comes from
facts.
And if
you've ever wondered why a Bronx cheer is called a
raspberry,
you may wish to bear in mind that a popular dessert in Britain is called a raspberry tart.
16.
THE FUTURE
OF ENGLISH
I N 1
7 8 7 ,
WHEN REPRESENTATIVES OF
the new United States gathered in Philadelphia to draw up a Con-stitution that could serve as a blueprint for the American way of life forever, it apparently did not occur to them to consider the matter of what the national language should be. Then, and for the next two centuries, it was assumed that people would speak English. But in the 198os a growing sense of disquiet among many Americans over the seepage of Spanish, Vietnamese, and other immigrant lan-guages into American society led some of them to begin pressing for laws making English the official language.
According to the Census Bureau, 11 percent of people in Amer-ica speak a language other than English at home. In California alone, nearly one fifth of the people are Hispanic. In Los Angeles, the proportion of Spanish speakers is more than half. New York City has 1.5 million Hispanics and there are a million more in the surrounding area. Bergenline Avenue in New Jersey runs for ninety blocks and throughout most of its length is largely Spanish-speaking. All told in America there are zoo Spanish-language news-papers,
200
radio stations, and 30o television stations. The television stations alone generated nearly $30o million of Spanish-language advertising in 1987.
In many areas, English speakers are fearful of being swamped.
Some even see it as a conspiracy, among them the former U.S.
Senator S. I. Hayakawa, who wrote in 1987 that he believes that "a very real move is afoot to split the U.S. into a bilingual and bicul-tural society."
[Education Digest, May
1987] Hayakawa was instru-mental in founding U.S. English, a pressure group designed to
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promote English as the lone official language of the country. Soon the group had 350,000 members, including such distinguished "ad-visory supporters" as Saul Bellow, Alistair Cooke, and Norman Cousins, and was receiving annual donations of $7.5 million. By late 1988, it had managed to have English made the official lan-guage of seventeen states—among them Arizona, Colorado, Flor-ida, Nebraska, Illinois, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, Georgia, and California.
It is easy to understand the strength of feeling among many Americans on the matter. A California law requiring that bilingual education must be provided at schools where more than twenty pupils speak a language other than English sometimes led to chaos.
At one Hollywood high school, on parents' night every speech had to be translated from English into Korean, Spanish, and Armenian.
As of December 1986, California was employing 3,364 state work-ers proficient in Spanish in order to help non-English speakers in matters concerning courts, social services, and the like. All of this, critics maintain, cossets non-English speakers and provides them with little inducement to move into the American mainstream.
U.S. English and other such groups maintain that linguistic di-visions have caused unrest in several countries, such as Canada and Belgium—though they generally fail to note that the countries where strife and violence have been most pronounced, such as Spain, are the ones where minority languages have been most strenuously suppressed. It is interesting to speculate also whether the members of U.S. English would be so enthusiastic about lan-guage regulations if they were transferred to Quebec and found their own language effectively outlawed.
U.S. English insists that a national English-language law would apply only to government business, and that in unofficial, private, or religious contexts people could use any language they liked. Yet it was U.S. English that tried to take AT&T to court for inserting Spanish advertisements in the Los Angeles Yellow Pages. That would hardly seem to be government business. And many Hispan-ics feel that there would be further encroachments on their civil liberties—such as the short-lived 1985 attempt by Dade County in Florida to require that marriage ceremonies be conducted only in
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH
English. U. S. English says that it would not ban bilingual educa-tion, but would insist that its aim be transitional rather than en-couraging entrenchment.
The most unpleasant charge is that all of this is a thinly veiled cover for racism, or at least rampant xenophobia. As an outsider, it is difficult not to conclude sometimes that there is a degree of overreaction involved. What purpose, after all, is served by making Nebraska officially English? Nor is it immediately evident how the public good would be served by overturning a New York law that at present stipulates that the details of consumer credit transactions be printed in Spanish
as
well
as
English. If U.S. English had its way, they would be printed
only in
English. Would such a change really encourage Hispanics to learn English or would it simply lead to their exploitation by unscrupulous lenders?
There is little evidence to suggest that people are refusing to learn English. According to a 1985 study by the Rand Corporation, 95 percent of the children of Mexican immigrants can speak En-glish. By the second generation more than half can speak
only
English. There is after all a huge inducement in terms of conve-nience, culture, and income to learn the prevailing language. As the Stanford University linguist Geoffrey D. Nunberg neatly put it:
"The English language needs official protection about as much as the Boston Celtics need elevator shoes."
Perhaps a more pressing concern ought to be not with the En-glish used by Hispanics and other ethnic groups so much as the quality of English used in America generally. A great deal of news-print has been consumed in recent years with reports of the decline in American educational attainments, particularly with regard to reading and writing. According to
U.S. News & World Report
[February 18, 1985], between 1973 and 1983, the proportion of high school students scoring boo or higher on their Scholastic Ap-titude Tests dropped from lo percent to 7 percent. Between 1967
and 1984 verbal scores on the SAT exams slumped from an average of 466 to 424, a decline of nearly 10 percent. It is perhaps little wonder. Over the same period, the proportion of high school stu-dents receiving four years of English instruction more than halved from 85 percent to 41 percent.
U.S. News & World Report
put the
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