35. Gaggle — a collective noun (15th century)
I think it went something like this. A group of monks, wondering how to pass the time on a cold, dark winter’s evening in the 15th century, invent a word game. ‘Let’s think up words for groups of things’, says one. ‘What do we call a group of cows?’ ‘A herd.’ ‘A group of bees?’ ‘A swarm.’ ‘A group of geese?’ ‘A flock.’ Words like herd and swarm had been in the language since Anglo-Saxon times. There weren’t many of them, and the few that were available had been used for all kinds of things. People talked about a herd of cranes, wrens, deer, swans, gnats and more. The game must have palled after a while.
Then someone had a bright idea. ‘Let’s think up better words. What would be a really clever way of talking about geese?’ ‘A cackle of geese, maybe?’ ‘Not bad, but that better suits hens. What about gaggle? It goes better with goose because of the g’s? What do you all think?’ ‘Agreed? Write it down, Brother John.’
And Brother John did. Or maybe it was Dame Juliana. She was the prioress of Sopwell nunnery, near St Albans in Hertfordshire, and her name appears in a collection of material on hunting, heraldry and folklore that was printed in 1486, called The Book of St Albans. It’s one of the first English printed books, and it contains a list of some 200 collective nouns. Several are traditional expressions, such as herd. But many seem to be inventions. This is where we find a muster of peacocks, an unkindness of ravens, a watch of nightingales, a charm of goldfinches and dozens more. But the list goes well beyond animals. We find a diligence of messengers, a superfluity of nuns, a doctrine of doctors, a sentence of judges, a prudence of vicars and a non-patience of wives. And people tried out fresh combinations. ‘A gaggle of geese?’ ‘What about a gaggle of women?’ ‘Write that down, Brother John.’ He did. A gaggle of women is recorded in a book written around 1470. An early sexist joke.
Why do I think this is the sort of thing that happened? Because this is a game people still happily play today, and human nature hasn’t changed that much in 500 years. A great deal of entertainment can be derived from thinking up the funniest way of describing a group of ‘X’ — where X can be anything from dog handlers to dentists. What’s the best collective noun for politicians, or undertakers, or linguists? Competitions have produced some fine examples. I made my own collection a few years ago, and found many that deserve prizes. Here’s a top ten:
An absence of waiters
A rash of dermatologists
A shoulder of agony aunts
A clutch of car mechanics
A vat of chancellors
A bout of estimates
A lot of auctioneers
A mass of priests
A whored of prostitutes
A depression of weather forecasters
An exces’s of apostrophes
And still they come. In recent times I’ve encountered a crash of software, an annoyance of mobile phones and a bond of British secret agents.
36. Doable — a mixing of languages (15th century)
How many English words do you know? People tend to seriously underestimate the size of their personal vocabulary. They think that it’s only a few thousand words. But if you were to take a dictionary and work your way through, ticking the words you know, you’d be pleasantly surprised. The total would be at least 50,000.
This figure seems less surprising when we reflect on how easy it is to make up new words. A single word can generate a whole family. Happy, happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily, unhappiness, happy-go-lucky, happy-hour, happy-dust, happy-hearted, happy-clappy, trigger-happy, slap-happy… The prefixes (such as un-) and the suffixes (such as -ly and - ness) are especially important in building up our vocabulary. There are just over a hundred of them in everyday English, and at least one will be found in nearly half the words in the language. Most of them came in from Latin and French during the Middle Ages. That’s when we find a flood of new words beginning with such forms as con-, de-, dis and ex-, and ending with such forms as -ment, -tion, -ity and -able.
The French suffix -able alone produced hundreds of words. It was immediately used not only with French loanwords, such as agreeable and changeable, but also with Old English words to produce such forms as knowable and doable. Doable, first recorded in the mid-1400s, is a good choice to represent the class. Do is one of the earliest known English verbs, found in some of the first Anglo-Saxon texts, and here it is happily being used with a French suffix. It shows that word-coiners are no respecter of origins.
Another flood of creations began when un- started to be used with - able words, in the 14th century, so we get unknowable, unthinkable and many more. Then a remarkable thing happened. The -able was added to two-element verbs. We find get-at-able and come-atable, and then unget-at-able and uncome-at-able. Some writers went over the top. Ben Jonson coined un-inone-breath-utterable. But the basic pattern became very popular. Since the 12th century there have been hundreds of coinages, such as undryupable and unkeepoffable. Not all have achieved a permanent place in the language, but some, such as unputdownable, unswitchoffable and unwearoutable, are often used. And a few have developed their own linguistic families. What is the state or quality of ‘being get-at-able’? The 19th century provided the answer. Get-at-ability. Get-at-ableness.
37. Matrix — a word from Tyndale (16th century)
Ask most young people what matrix means and they will tell you. It is the name of the computer-simulated reality which will imprison the minds of human beings in the not-so-distant future, and it has a capital M. They are thinking of the 1999 science-fiction action film starring Keanu Reeves. This is as far away from the Bible as it is possible to get, but the link is there, linguistically. For the first clear use of the word matrix is in an English translation of the Gospel of St Luke (2: 23) made in 1525 by William Tyndale.
It’s often said that no single book has had greater influence on the vocabulary of the English language than the Bible. I don’t dispute that, as long as by ‘Bible’ we mean all the English translations that have been made, starting with John Wycliffe’s manuscript version in about 1382 and ending with the King James Bible of 1611. The King James text is usually cited as the main influence, and in a way it was, as its official status meant that it would be heard and read by more people in Britain than any previous translation. But its main role was to popularise. Most
