blood, birth and family, as well as ‘position’ words such as princess, majesty and highness. Learned Latin offered an alternative mode of expression to courtly French, and both were more stately, refined and cultured than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents.
These trends are still apparent today. Regal has had relatively little development over the centuries. It still typically adds connotations of superiority or distinction. Anything regal, by implication, is ‘fit for royalty’ — hence its application to such things as cars (Buick Regal), whisky (Chivas Regal), buildings (Regal Cinema) and the visit from an especially magisterial great-aunt.
By contrast, royal has accumulated a huge range of uses. It’s used in relation to the activities and words of royal people (royal charter, visit, assent, command, warrant and not forgetting the royal we — ‘We are not amused’) as well as social groups (Royal Navy, Borough, Society) and a host of person-related activities such as transport (Royal Scot), colours (royal blue) and cards (royal flush).
The words don’t substitute for each other. The Royal Mail could not become the Regal Mail or the Queenly Mail. Nor is it possible, except in jest, to talk about the Regal Shakespeare Company or the Kingly Albert Hall. Kingly and queenly seem to be dying out, in fact, with only a few hundred thousand hits on Google, whereas regal has 20 million and royal 200 million.
But we can never predict the future, when it comes to vocabulary. Who would ever have thought, in the Middle Ages, that royal would one day be used as a colloquial intensifier, similar to bloody? But it happened in the 19th century, and the usage is still with us. I recently heard someone say He’s a royal pain in the neck. And the defeat of a local football enemy was summed up in the regal words: They got a right royal hammering.
31. Money — a productive idiom (14th century)
Vocabulary isn’t just a matter of single words. It includes thousands of idioms — strings of words which have taken on a special meaning. We talk about doing something at the drop of a hat (‘immediately’), getting cold feet (‘becoming afraid’) and having a heart of gold (‘a generous nature’). Some words are very frequently used in idioms. Money is one of them — a popular idiomatic source since the word arrived from French in the 14th century.
You can give someone a run for their money, see the colour of their money, get your money’s worth, have money to burn and spend money like water. Maybe you won’t do something for love nor money, perhaps because you’re not made of money. Or maybe you will, because it’s money for old rope, money for jam. If you’ve got some, then money is no object and it might burn a hole in your pocket. You can put your money where your mouth is. Money talks, after all. And if you’re feeling proverbial, you can observe that money is the root of all evil, doesn’t grow on trees and makes the world go round. Even nonstandard grammar can survive in standard English as an idiom. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
It’s not just the general word that attracts idioms. The individual coins and banknotes do too, reflecting the currency of the culture. So in American English people feel like a million dollars, make a fast buck, bet their bottom dollar and put their two cents worth into a conversation. Some, such as pass the buck, have become part of colloquial standard English everywhere. In other cases, the idiom is translated: in British English, we’re more likely to see feel like a million quid and put in their two pence worth.
If there’s a change in the currency system, or in the value of money, it quickly affects the language (§86). Penny and pence have been really popular over the centuries, but many of these idiomatic expressions reflect an age when things cost a penny. In old publications we’ll find such expressions as penny dreadful, penny bun, penny bank, penny arcade, penny whistle and penny novelette. Some live on. Many people still say that cheap things are ten a penny, observe that something expensive is a pretty penny and offer others a penny for your thoughts. And, even in an age of new technology, people still say the penny dropped, from the 1930s, when people put a penny in a slot machine. Older people still use the euphemism about going to spend a penny, though the days when a public lavatory had a penny slot are long gone. Today it costs at least 20p, and more in some places. Maybe one day British English will get a new idiom: I have to spend a pound.
7. The 19th-century Yorkshire Penny Bank building in Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK. The idea behind the name was that savings could be deposited as small as a penny — a practice that the larger banks did not condone. 
32. Music — a spelling in evolution (14th century)
How many possible ways are there to spell music? Today, just one. But over the history of English we see this word spelled in over forty ways. The word arrived from French in the 14th century, and early spellings reflected its origins. We find the French q in such forms as musiqe, musyque and musique. An English k makes its appearance in musyk, musik and musike. A few writers opted for c, producing musice and music.
The uncertainty led to some strange combinations. In the 15th century we find musycque, mewsycke, musick, musicke and others. And in the 16th century some writers, evidently totally at a loss, decided to cover themselves by using all three consonants: musickque. The vowels too were variable, especially when people pronounced the word in different ways. We find moosick, mwsick, maisick, masic, meesic and misic.
When Dr Johnson published his Dictionary, in 1755, most of these variations had disappeared, but the modern spelling had not yet arrived. Johnson had strong views about spelling, and was of the opinion that ‘The English never use c at the end of a word’. So in his dictionary we find musick, as well as comick, critick, physick, publickly and many others. But this is one of those occasions where Dr Johnson’s authority wasn’t enough. In the USA, Noah Webster and other dictionary writers began dropping the final k as part of the changes being introduced into American English. The change evidently had universal appeal, for within a few decades the final k had been dropped from these words in British English too.
There is still a great deal of variation in the spelling of English words. Some of it is due to the differences
