wide range of senses — ‘lively’, ‘vivid’, ‘sophisticated’. There were jazz dances and jazz patterns (in clothing and furniture); there was jazz journalism and jazz language. Today we’d say jazzy.
The music sense is first recorded in the Chicago press of 1915 — and it quickly took off. It was used to describe hundreds of notions associated with the music — types of music (jazz blues, jazz classics), musical instruments (jazz guitar, jazz clarinet), players and singers (jazz pianist, jazz vocalist) and performing groups (jazz quartet, jazz combo). Virtually all the terms we now associate with jazz (band, club, music, singer, records) were in use by the end of the 1920s.
The word acquired more applications as the century progressed. New musical trends motivate fusions, so we find such phrases as jazz-rock, jazz-funk and jazz-rap. In the 1950s and ’60s, we encounter jazzetry (‘reading poetry to jazz’) and jazzercise (‘performing physical exercises to jazz’). In the 1990s, we find jazz cigarettes (‘marijuana’).
The early practitioners of jazz knew that they were living through a musical revolution: jazz era is first used in 1919; jazz age in 1920. Not everyone would agree with the voting of the Society members, which probably reflects their musical interests as much as anything else, but to my mind it was quite a good choice.
96. 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?
97. 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’.
