Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

Spelling was still haphazard. Church could be cherche, chirche, charge, cirche, while people could be pepull, pepille, poepul, or pupill. Order was first put in to this by the Master of Chancellery, shortened to Chancery. This entity was a cross between the Law Courts, the Tax Office and Whitehall, in effect an office that ran the country, and ‘Chancery English’ came to be regarded as the ‘official’, authorised version. Ich was replaced by I, sych and sich by suche, righte became right. Spelling became even more fixed after the invention of printing, which was also accompanied by the Great Vowel Shift, when a systematic change was made in the pronunciation of English. No one quite knows why this shift took place but the example Bragg gives shows that the sentence ‘I name my boat Pete’ would have been pronounced ‘Ee nahm mee bought Peht.’¹²⁵

All these were signs of increasing confidence, as was the great innovation of 1611, the King James version of the Bible, based on William Tyndale’s translation. Here we see modern English in the process of formation, its poetry as well as its form:

Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are they that morne: for they shalbe comforted.

Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.

Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes: for they shalbe filled.

In the Renaissance and the age of discovery, English began to burst with new words: bamboo (Malay), coffee and kiosk (Turkish), alcohol (Arabic), curry (Tamil). The rise of humanism, and an interest in the classics resurrected many Greek and Latin words (skeleton, glottis, larynx, thermometer, parasite, pneumonia). Their usage led to the so-called Inkhorn Controversy. An inkhorn was a horn pot which held ink for a quill and came to symbolise those who liked to coin new words, to show off their erudition in the classics. This blew itself out, but though we still use the words mentioned above, not all neologisms remained – for example, ‘fatigate’ (to make tired), ‘nidulate’ (to build a nest) and ‘expede’ (the opposite of impede).¹²⁶ Shakespeare was part of this renaissance and he was the first to use many words and phrases, whether he invented them or not. Whole books have been written on Shakespeare’s English but among the words and phrases we find fresh in his plays and poems may be included: obscene, barefaced, lacklustre, salad-days, in my mind’s eye, more in sorrow than in anger. However, he too used words that didn’t fly: cadent, tortive, perisive, even honorificabilitudinatibus.¹²⁷

In America the new landscape and the new people inspired many fresh words or innovative coinages, from foothill, to bluff, to watershed, to moose, to stoop. Then there were squatter, raccoon (rahaugcum at one point), and skunk (segankw). Familiar words were put together to describe new things and experiences: bull-frog, rattlesnake, warpath. Traditional meanings changed in the New World: lumber meant rubbish in London but became cut timber in the United States. Noah Webster, a schoolteacher who wrote the best-selling American Spelling Book

, which sold more copies than any other book in the New World save for the Bible, sparked that country’s obsession with pronunciation: today, whereas the British say cemet’ry and laborat’ry, Americans pronounce the whole word, cemetery and laboratory.¹²⁸ It was Webster who dropped the ‘u’ from colour and labour, the second ‘l’ from traveller. They were, he said, unnecessary. He changed theatre and centre to theater and center – that was clearer, as was check for cheque. Music and physic lost their final ‘k’.¹²⁹ The opening up of the frontier introduced more Indian words – maize, pecan, persimmon, toboggan, though tamarack and pemmican didn’t catch on so well. The poor travelled west on rafts which were steered with oars known as riffs – hence ‘riff-raff’. ‘Pass the buck’ and ‘the buck stops here’ came from card games played out west. The ‘buck’ was originally a knife with a buck-horn handle, which was passed to show who had the authority, who was dealing.¹³⁰

OK, or okay, allegedly the most-used word in the English language, has many alleged etymologies. The Choctaw Indians had a word Okeh, meaning ‘it is so’. In Boston it was said to be short for Orl Korrekt, and some Cockneys claim they too used Orl Korrec. Labourers working in Louisiana used to scrawl Au quai on bales of cotton that were ready to be transported downriver to the sea. But these derivations just scratch the surface and the issue is far from settled.¹³¹ ‘Jeans’ owe their existence to Mr Levi Strauss, who used a cloth called geane fustian, which had originally been manufactured in Genoa.