money in general) dough, potatoes, lettuce and cabbage (the last two from the green colour of the banknotes). The origin of some of the words is a real puzzle. There has been plenty of speculation, but no firm conclusion, over moolah and spondulicks (both occurring in various spellings). And if I offer you fifty smackers, is this because people often kissed banknotes or plonked them down on the table? Mazooma is from Yiddish. So is motza (also in various spellings), used chiefly in Australia.
New words continue to arrive. The 20th century brought lolly (probably from lollipop) and dosh (perhaps related to a doss, ‘a place to sleep in a common lodging-house’). A surprising development was archer for ‘?2,000’. It came from the court case involving British author Jeffrey Archer in which a bribe of this amount was alleged to have been used. It probably won’t be part of the language for long.
The vast majority of these words stay in their country of origin. We don’t find Americans describing dollars as quids or the British describing pounds as bucks. That’s why grand is so interesting. It’s one of the few money words to have travelled. First used in the USA in the early 1900s, meaning ‘$1,000’, it was very quickly shortened to G. The term then transferred to British usage, meaning ‘?1,000’. British people happily talk about something costing a grand. But the digital age seems to have pushed G out of fashion. During the 1980s K, influenced chiefly by kilobyte, became the abbreviation of choice for ‘thousand’ in business plans and job advertisements. No city gent seems to earn Gs any more.
87. Mega — prefix into word (20th century)
Mega- became a popular prefix towards the end of the 19th century. Scientists found it a useful way of expressing something that was very large or abnormally large. So, a relatively large bacterium was called a megabacterium. As a unit of measurement, it expressed a millionfold increase, as in megawatt. And in the 20th century, from around the 1960s, it came to mean anything of great size or excellence. In the city, takeover bids involving large sums of money were megabids. Large shopping complexes were megacentres. An extremely successful song or film was a megahit. People attended megafestivals.
With all this mega- about, the stage was set for the prefix to become an independent word. And in the late 1960s, we find it being used to mean ‘huge’ (Those are mega achievements), ‘excellent’ (That’s a mega idea) and ‘very successful’ (She’s mega in France). It could even be a sentence on its own. A reaction to a brilliant stage performance might simply be an awed Mega!
Quite a few prefixes have started a life of their own as words. Garments and vehicles have been called midis, minis and maxis. If someone proposes a course of action, we can be pro or anti (or con). We can weigh up the pros and cons. If you’re an ex, you’re a former something — usually a former husband or wife, though any previous office-holder or member of an organisation could in principle be called one.
The words can go in various directions. If we hold extreme views, especially in politics or religion, we might be called ultra, or labelled one of the ultras. But ultras are also people who have extreme tastes in fashion. And since the 1970s a long- distance run of great length, especially one that is much greater than a marathon, has been called an ultra.
Multi- is another prefix that has developed a wide range of meanings as an independent word. If we heard the sentence Multis are everywhere these days, the speaker could be referring to cinemas (multiplexes), yachts (multihulls), buildings (designed for several families — multi- family houses), fashions (multi-coloured), very rich people (multimillionaires), bridge players (making an opening bid of two diamonds — multi-purpose), international businesses (multinationals) or products that contain a range of vitamins (multivitamins). This is really quite an exceptional range of senses, and all came to be used in the second half of the 20th century. Multi, in short, has become mega.
88. Gotcha — a non-standard spelling (20th century)
When The Sun reported the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in 1982, the headline attracted almost as much attention as the event itself: GOTCHA. And a generation on, it is the headline that has stayed in the popular mind. It was the non-standard spelling that caught the public imagination. The effect disappears when we re-spell it as GOT YOU.
Not everybody liked it. Gotcha has playful connotations. We say it when somebody is caught out in an argument or discovered in a game of hide-and-seek. Yet this was a story about war, with lives being lost. Many thought non-standard usage wasn’t an appropriate choice for such an event. But few headlines have had such staying power.
A surprising number of words appear in non-standard spelling in newspaper headlines, novels, advertisements, graffiti and other written genres. The Sun has many famous instances, such as its claim after the 1992 election, IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT. Often it’s a pun that motivates the spelling, such as the headline reporting cases of swine flu in Britain: PIGS ’ERE.
There comes a point when a non-standard spelling becomes so frequently used that it gets into the dictionaries as an ‘alternative’ (§61). We’ll find gotcha and gotcher in the Oxford English Dictionary, first recorded in 1932, as well as geddit? (‘get it?’, 1976), ya (‘you’, 1941), thanx (‘thanks’, 1936), gotta (‘got to’, 1924) and gonna (‘going to’, 1913). In the 19th century we find luv (‘love’, 1898), wanna (‘want to’, 1896), wiv (‘with’, 1898), dunno (‘don’t know’, 1842), wot (‘what’, 1829) and cos (‘because’, 1828). Sorta (‘sort of’) is recorded as early as 1790.
19. The front page of The Sun, 4 May 1982. Have non-standard spellings ever become standard in recent times? The recorded examples suggest that their public presence is still quite limited. Because non-standard English is strongly associated with informal, jocular and intimate subject-matter, they typically occur in the creative, leisure, sports and comment pages of newspapers. The Sun is exceptional in using them for news. Thru for through has made great public progress in American English, where we also find it in compounds, such as drive-thru, see-thru, sell-thru and click- thru. But other forms seem to be restricted to special usages, such as Mr Chad’s graffiti use of Wot (§10) or forms representing colloquial speech, such as Sez who?
