The Story of English in 100 Words

in as faut or faute, then added an l from Latin fallita. There were many more.

Of course, once a word was spelled in a certain way, some people then thought that all the letters should be pronounced. The pedantic schoolteacher Holofernes, in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (V.i.20), is horrified at the thought that there are people who don’t pronounce the b in debt! In fact, few of these Latin letters ever came to be pronounced, except in jest. Baptism was an exception. So was fault. We pronounce the l today, but even in the 18th century the word was being pronounced ‘faut’. Dr Johnson tells us in his Dictionary: ‘The l is sometimes sounded, and sometimes mute. In conversation it is generally suppressed.’ And his quotations from Pope and Dryden show it rhyming with thought.

41. Ink-horn — a classical flood (16th century)

About two-thirds of all the new words that arrived in English during the 16th century came from Latin. And Latin continued to supply words at a great rate during the 17th century too. It was all part of a mood to ‘improve’ the language. Many authors felt that they should use a lot of Latin words because, as the playwright Ben Jonson put it, ‘Words borrowed of Antiquity do lend a kind of Majesty to style’.

But several writers overdid it. The English diplomat Thomas Wilson wrote a book on rhetoric in 1553 in which he quotes the kind of ornately obscure style that he saw emerging at the time. His example is of a letter written by a Lincolnshire gentleman wanting help in obtaining a job. I’ve modernised the spelling, but several of the words still need a gloss in order to be understood:

Pondering, expending [‘weighing’], and revoluting [‘revolving’] with myself your ingent [‘enormous’] affability, and ingenious capacity, for mundane affairs, I cannot but celebrate and extol your magnifical dexterity above all other.

Wilson roundly condemns this kind of writing. He calls it ‘outlandish English’. These people have forgotten their mother tongue, he says, and he goes on to remark that if their mothers were still alive they wouldn’t be able to understand a word of what their children were saying.

The critics found a vivid way of describing this style: ink-horn, or ink- pot. An ink-horn, as its name suggests, was a small vessel, originally made of horn, for holding writing-ink. The Latin-derived words were scornfully called ink-horn terms. The idea was that these words were so lengthy that it would take a huge amount of ink to write them. People who used them a lot were said to ‘smell of the ink-horn’.

The argument went backwards and forwards throughout the 16th century. Some found the classical words appealing; others argued for the superiority of ancient Anglo-Saxon words, which were felt to be short and clear. The scholar Sir John Cheke was quite certain about it. He writes in 1557: ‘I am of the opinion that our tongue should be written clean and pure, unmixed and unmangled with borrowing of other tongues.’

The arguments about the use of classical vs Anglo-Saxon vocabulary resound across the centuries, and are still with us today (§74). In the 20th century, George Orwell was one who launched an attack on what he called ‘pretentious diction’ in a famous essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’. But in the end it all comes down to balance. It’s actually impossible to write English without using some words taken from other languages. Even Cheke, in his comment, has four of them: opinion, mix, mangle and pure. And both of Orwell’s critical words come from Latin via French.

English vocabulary, in fact, shows Latin and Greek loanwords of different levels of difficulty. Some of the words that arrived in the 16th century and became a permanent part of English remain ‘hard words’ — inveterate and susceptible, for instance. But others are so much a part of modern daily expression that most people wouldn’t realise they had classical origins, such as benefit, climax, critic, explain, immediate, official and temperature. Indeed, some, such as fact, crisis and chaos, would take up hardly any ink at all.

42. Dialect — regional variation (16th century)

The many manuscripts written in Old and Middle English show lots of evidence of regional variation, so it’s a bit surprising that the word dialect doesn’t actually appear in the language until the 16th century. But it doesn’t take long thereafter for it to be widely used. And as awareness of local dialects increased, so did the collections of dialect words.

Spare a thought for the words that never get into dictionaries. Everyone knows that, in the part of the country where they live, there are local words and expressions which differ from those used further afield. But, precisely because they are local, they don’t get into the big dictionaries. Dictionaries usually focus on the words in common educated use — the standard language. Only occasionally does a compiler allow in some local expressions. Dr Johnson was one who did. We find a few Scottish words in his dictionary, such as mow (‘wry mouth’) and sponk (‘touchwood’), as well as some words from Staffordshire, such as proud taylor (‘goldfinch’) and shaw (‘small wood’). Why these places? Five of his assistants were from Scotland, and Johnson himself was from Lichfield. Small nods of appreciation, perhaps.

Most dialect words remain uncelebrated until enthusiasts decide to collect and publish them. Once they do, we soon get a sense of just how numerous they are, and how important they are as a strand in the history of a language. One of the first serious attempts to locate dialect words in Britain was John Ray’s A Collection of English Words, published in 1674. Ray is best known as ‘the father of English natural history’ because of his pioneering work in classifying plants and animals, but he was also a keen amateur linguist. Everywhere he travelled he made notes about the words he heard. He found boor in Cumberland, meaning ‘parlour’; bragget in Lancashire and Cheshire, meaning ‘spiced drink’; and bourd in Scotland, meaning ‘jest’. His book contains hundreds of examples.

The greatest dialect wordsmith was Joseph Wright, born in 1855, son of a Yorkshire labourer. He had no formal schooling, and he learned to read and write only when he was fifteen, but he went on to become professor of comparative philology at Oxford. He collected around half a million observations and between 1898 and 1905 published six large volumes as the English Dialect Dictionary. This is where to go if we want to find out how dialect words were used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Which counties used agoggle to mean ‘trembling’? Berkshire and Hampshire. Where was alkitotle used to mean ‘foolish fellow’? North Devon. In Wright’s pages we see old linguistic worlds passing before our eyes.

But not always passing out of use. If we move on seventy years to a modern dialect survey, the Linguistic Atlas of England (1978), we find a surprising number of words still in use. Take boosy, the word for a ‘cattle trough’ or ‘manger’. Wright found it chiefly used in the West Midlands, in an area running north–south between Cheshire and Herefordshire. It was still being used there in the 1960s. And in the 1990s, when the Survey of English Dialects published a dictionary, it was still there. The word turns up in John Ray’s book too, and we find it again in the Anglo-Saxon gospels. Some dialect words have a very long life.