Xerxes, Ximenes, Xanthus, Xavier? Yield, yield, ye youths! ye yeomen, yield your yell! Zeus’, Zarpater’s, Zoroaster’s zeal, Attracting all, arms against acts appeal! Suwarrow, incidentally, was the name of a Russian general. And did you notice that there was no line for J? This was because J was seen as a variant of I.
Alphabet achieved new heights in the 20th century, when its use was extended by computer scientists to include numerals and other characters. It also became one of the few words which we could literally eat. Around 1900, food manufacturers introduced a clear soup containing tiny pieces of pasta or biscuit shaped like individual letters. They called it alphabet soup. And not long after there was alphabetti spaghetti.
39. Potato — a European import (16th century)
Something very noticeable happened to English vocabulary during the 16th and 17th centuries. It began to look different. Loanwords from French had already started the process in the early Middle Ages. New French words meant new French spellings. But the revival of learning known as the Renaissance brought a fresh encounter with the countries of Europe, and as the people of Britain learned about the latest thing in such areas as science, architecture, cuisine and the arts, so they found themselves faced with an array of new words and spellings that must have seemed bizarre.
Bizarre was one. Grotesque was another. These were from French. So were moustache, colonel, vogue and naive. Even less familiar would have been the way words were ending with sounded vowels. English had long had a ‘silent e’, usually marking a long vowel earlier in a word (house, time, sore…), but a sounded final -ee in a word of several syllables was a novelty, as in devotee, referee and repartee.
A final -o in these new loanwords must have felt really strange. Italian imports included cameo, concerto, portico, soprano and volcano. Spanish or Portuguese arrivals included bravado, desperado, mosquito, tobacco and potato. Some of these words originated in the Indian languages of South or Central America. Potato is one of them, thought to be from a Haitian language, and introduced to Spain by Christopher Columbus.
Words like potato presented a number of linguistic problems. People were evidently uncomfortable with the -o ending, for a popular early spelling was potatoe. And then, how should they turn it into a plural? Simply ‘adding an s’, which is the usual English way, would give potatos, and that -os ending didn’t well reflect the long vowel. Potatoes, as we now know, became the standard spelling. But in the 16th century, there was an alternative solution: use an apostrophe. We find potato’s — one of the earliest examples of what today some people call the ‘green-grocer’s apostrophe’. The problem didn’t go away. English speakers have never felt comfortable with the spelling of words ending in sounded vowels, which is why forms such as potato’s and tomato’s are still widely seen.
Spelling aside, potato has been quite a linguistic success story. Few vegetables have acquired such a wide range of meanings. In the 18th century, unimportant or worthless things or people began to be called potatoes. The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge once famously described the London literati as little potatoes. American English began to use the phrase small potatoes for something unimportant. Then there was a curious development: potato developed the opposite sense. Now it meant something or someone was right, correct, excellent. That’s the potato! In Australian English we find clean potato being used for a first-rate or honest person. And American slang gave us a sense of ‘money’: Got the potatoes to buy it?
A really odd development was when the word came to be used in a children’s counting game. One potato, two potato, three potato, four… — linguistically highly unusual because there’s no plural ending. And something even odder happened in Australian slang, when in the mid-20th century potato came to be used as a slang word for a girl or woman. Why? Rhyming slang. Potato peeler. Sheila.
40. Debt — a spelling reform (16th century)
Why on earth is there a b in debt? This is one of the questions that English learners — native speakers and foreigners alike, faced with yet another irregular spelling to be acquired — ask with a mixture of frustration and resignation. ‘The language seems to have gone out of its way to make things difficult,’ said a student to me once. That’s certainly how it appears. Except we have to remember that language has no existence outside of the people who use it. And it is people who put the b into debt.
Sixteenth-century people, to be exact. That was a century when writers were hugely expanding the language through the use of loanwords, as we saw with words like potato (§39), and Latin and Greek were especially favoured because of their prestige in literature and education. Many writers felt that English would become a much better medium, capable of reaching the heights achieved by the classical languages, if it used as many Latin and Greek words as possible. And the more these words looked like classical words, the better.
Debt, meaning ‘something owed’, had been in English since around 1300. It was a French word, and in French it was spelled dete or dette. So English did the same, using those spellings as well as det and dett. Here we have a neat phonetic representation of how the word sounded. Why would anyone ever want to change it?
A good question. But the mindset of the 16th century was different. Scholars pointed out that the ultimate origin of the word was Latin, not French, and in Latin the word was debitum. So writers made the word ‘look’ more classical by introducing a b, and the practice caught on. It was reinforced by other loanwords where the Latin consonant was pronounced, such as debit and dubious.
Debt was not alone. The same process affected doubt, which came into English spelled dute or doute, and a b was added because people remembered Latin dubitare. Subtle got its b from Latin subtilis, though earlier it had such spellings as sotill and suttell. Receipt got its p from Latin recepta, despite earlier spellings such as recyt and resseit. Baptism came in as baptem or baptime, then acquired an s from Latin baptismus. Fault came
