One of the most noticeable features of English vocabulary is the large number of words that entered the language as borrowings from French, especially in the period after the Norman invasion of 1066. Some of them are illustrated by the cooking and legal terms that form part of the story of pork and chattels (§§17, 18). The vast majority of French loans were borrowed just once — which is what one would expect. But on a few occasions, a word got borrowed twice.
Why borrow a word twice? If English speakers were already using it, what would be the point? The answer lies in the fact that the people who introduced these words had different social and linguistic backgrounds. In the early part of the period, they were usually speakers of the dialect of French spoken in Normandy; in the later part, they were people who had learned the French of Paris — the ‘posh’ dialect that was becoming the standard. Several words had different forms in these two dialects. The Norman version was borrowed first; a Parisian version came along later. And English sometimes kept both of them.
That’s why we have both gaol and jail. The g-spellings are recorded first, in the 13th century: we read about a gayhol and a gayll. The j-spellings, such as iaiole and iayll come long later (i and j weren’t distinguished as separate letters in the Middle English period). It must have been quite confusing. Which form should one use? Even as late as the 17th century, people were scratching their heads. The point was noted by the political author Roger L’Estrange, writing in 1668: he talks about the ‘rage’ some people feel because they can’t decide ‘whether they shall say [write] Jayl or Gaol’.
5. In Monopoly, one goes directly to jail, not gaol. Over a hundred local variants of the game have now been licensed. A spin-off dice-game was called ‘Don’t Go To Jail’. But at least the meaning stayed the same in this instance. In many other cases of ‘double borrowing’, the two words developed different meanings. Today, convey (from Norman French) doesn’t have the same meaning as convoy (from Parisian French). Nor are Norman reward, warden, warrant and wile the same as Parisian regard, guardian, guarantee and guile.
Three hundred and fifty years on, the problem of gaol and jail is still there in British English. The Americans sorted it out in the 18th century, opting for jail, and that’s the only form found in the USA today. But Britain kept both. Official legal documents preferred the gaol spelling. British and Irish prisons were originally spelled Gaol. Oscar Wilde wrote a ‘Ballad of Reading Gaol’. In speech, of course, there’s no difference: both words are pronounced ‘jail’.
Gaol seems to be disappearing from everyday writing nowadays in Britain, though lawyers still use it. And it’s still popular in some other countries, such as Australia. Overall it’s definitely the junior partner: a mere 2 million hits on Google in 2010, compared with 52 million for jail. It’s difficult to say just when the replacement trend started. Some people put it down to the influence of the popular board game Monopoly, invented in the USA. When the game was ‘translated’ into Britain in the 1930s, the non- London squares weren’t changed. That’s why there is a distinctly American-looking policeman on the ‘Go To Jail’ square. And suddenly British players were being sent ‘directly to jail’.
22. Take away — a phrasal verb (13th century)
It must have come as quite a shock to Samuel Johnson, slowly working his way through the alphabet for his Dictionary of the English Language in the early 1750s, when he reached the letter T. The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.
The high total was caused by a large number of combined forms, where take was used along with another word, such as in, off, up and out, or two words, as seen in take up with. These are called phrasal verbs in modern grammatical parlance. The combination of words expresses new senses. Take off, for example, has such meanings as ‘become airborne’, ‘be successful’ and ‘remove’. Aircraft and projects can take off. Clothes can be taken off.
Phrasal verbs became an important feature of English vocabulary during the Middle Ages. Take away is first recorded around 1300 in its general sense of ‘remove’ or ‘withdraw’, and it soon developed special applications. If someone was taken away, it could mean he died or was killed. If servants were taking away, they were clearing the table after a meal. If something took away from an achievement, it detracted from it. And other senses have arrived in modern times. Since the 1930s, we have had the option of eating food in the place where it has been prepared or taking it away to eat elsewhere.
A few phrasal verbs take on a second life as nouns. If I hand something out, what I deliver is a handout. If I tell someone to go ahead, I give them a go-ahead. And this has happened to take away too. In Britain, the shop that sells food that can be eaten off the premises is called a takeaway (often hyphenated, as take-away), usually with a characterising adjective: a Chinese takeaway, an Indian takeaway. The word can be used as an adjective too: a takeaway curry, takeaway hamburgers. And since the 1970s it has been applied to the meal itself: We’re having a takeaway tonight. But takeaway isn’t universal in the English-speaking world. In Malaysian and Singaporean English, they use a Chinese word — tapau, food. And American English has opted for different phrasal verbs — take-outs or carryouts.
23. Cuckoo — a sound-symbolic word (13th century)
Most words don’t resemble the things they refer to. There’s nothing about the shape of the word table that shows us an object with four legs and a flat surface. And there’s nothing in the sound of the word commotion that makes us hear a violent disturbance. But English has quite a few words where the opposite is the case: cough, knock, murmur, zoom, crunch, bang, clatter, teeny, babble, splash, plop… The sound of the word seems to imitate the reality to which it refers. Such words are often called onomatopoeic — a term from Greek meaning ‘word creation’ — especially when people are talking about the effects heard in poetry. Linguists call them instances of sound symbolism.
Cuckoo is an excellent example of a sound-symbolic word. In many languages the name of this bird echoes the sound of its call. The effect can’t be heard so well in the Old English word for a cuckoo, geac; but in the Middle Ages it comes across clearly in the form cuccu. The earliest recorded use, from the mid-13th century, is in the famous ‘Cuckoo Song’, the earliest known singing ‘round’ in English:
