It’s sometimes difficult to recognise Indian words in early writings. The indigenous languages were very different from anything Europeans had encountered before, and they had no idea how to spell the words they heard. Captain John Smith arrived in Virginia in 1606 and explored the new territory at length, writing an account of the meetings between the colonists and the local tribes. He’s best known for the famous story of his escape from execution by the Indian chief Powhatan through the intervention of Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas. He sent an account of the colony back to England, where it was published in 1608.
His book contains many Amerindian place-names, and at one point — during a visit to the Powhatan Indians — a new noun:
Arriving at Weramocomoco, their Emperour proudly lying uppon a Bedstead a foote high, upon tenne or twelves Mattes, richly hung with Manie Chaynes of great Pearles about his necke, and covered with a great Covering of Rahaughcums.
Rahaughcums? A little later in his book he spells it Raugroughcuns. These are the first brave attempts to write down raccoons in English.
46. Shibboleth — a word from King James (17th century)
The King James Bible, published in 1611, is often called the ‘Authorised Version’ of the Bible because — as it says on its title-page — it was ‘appointed to be read in churches’. Earlier translations of the Bible, such as William Tyndale’s (§37), had introduced many new words and idioms into English, but the King James Bible popularised them in a way that hadn’t been possible before.
The team of translators didn’t actually introduce many new words and phrases themselves. They say in their Preface that their job was not to make a new translation, but rather ‘to make a good one better’. They had no choice in the matter, actually, as they’d been given guidelines, approved by King James, which required them to use a previous edition (known as the Bishops’ Bible) as their model. As a result, there are very few words and phrases which actually originate in the text of the King James Bible.
Only forty-three words are currently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as having a first recorded use there. They include several religion-specific expressions, such as Galilean (as a noun) and rose of Sharon, as well as a few general words, such as battering-ram, escaper and rosebud. Far more important are the idioms which the Bible popularised: there are over 250, such as salt of the earth, a thorn in the flesh, root and branch, out of the mouths of babes and how are the mighty fallen. Their significance in the shaping of English mustn’t be forgotten. Idioms are part of vocabulary too.
Shibboleth is not among the forty-three, because this word had been used in all the earlier English translations. But there is nonetheless something distinctive about the way it appears in the King James Bible: its spelling. Shibboleth appears in the Old Testament Book of Judges. We are told how the regional accent of an unfortunate Ephraimite, who had fallen into the hands of the Gileadites, reveals his origins:
Then said they unto him, Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he could not frame to pronounce it right. Then they took him, and slew him at the passages of Jordan.
The spelling of the word varies in the earlier translations. In John Wycliffe’s version, the Ephraimite seems to have more of a lisp, for he says Thebolech instead of Sebolech. Other versions have Schibboleth and Scibboleth. The Geneva Bible and the King James Bible both have Shibboleth, and it is this spelling which has prevailed.
But even biblical words and phrases don’t stand still, and in later centuries shibboleth developed several new senses — a custom, a habit, a catchword, a moral formula, an imaginary error, an unfounded belief. There are lots of shibboleths in the study of language. Some people think it’s wrong to end a sentence with a preposition (That’s the man I spoke to) or to split an infinitive (to boldly go) or to pronounce H as ‘haitch’, even though such forms are widely found in modern English. These are the kinds of issue, often called linguistic shibboleths, that have fuelled usage debates since the 18th century. They are debates in which emotions sometimes run high — though never, as far as I know, having an outcome like that of the biblical precedent.
47. Bloody — an emerging swear-word (17th century)
On 11 April 1914, the Daily Sketch, a London tabloid newspaper, ran this headline:
TO-NIGHT’S ‘PYGMALION’, IN WHICH MRS PATRICK CAMPBELL IS EXPECTED TO CAUSE THE GREATEST THEATRICAL SENSATION FOR YEARS.
What was all the fuss about? George Bernard Shaw had given Mrs Campbell, in the character of Eliza Doolittle, a dangerous line to say: ‘Not bloody likely.’ Nobody had said such a swear-word on a public stage before. The paper went on:
Mr. Shaw Introduces a Forbidden Word.
WILL ‘MRS PAT’ SPEAK IT?
She did. And the audience loved it. There was a gasp of surprise, then everyone roared with laughter.
It had taken bloody a thousand years to cause such a stir. It was first used by the Anglo-Saxons with such meanings as ‘bleeding’ and ‘stained with blood’, and it developed a range of related senses to do with slaughter and bloodshed. It’s a point we have to watch when we listen to Shakespeare. When Macbeth tells us that his ‘bloody cousins’ have fled from Scotland (Macbeth III.i.29), he isn’t swearing but accusing them of a murderous stabbing.
The word began to be used in an emphatic way towards the end of the 17th century — meaning ‘very’, but with an intensifying force. When Jonathan Swift, writing a letter to Stella in 1711, talks about the day being bloody hot, he means ‘very hot indeed’. There’s no hint of any impropriety. The word seems to have been used in colloquial speech by all kinds of people at that time.
But during the 18th century the sensitive ears of the aristocratic and respectable classes turned against bloody, probably because of its associations with rowdiness and rough behaviour. Aristocratic rowdies were known as bloods, so to be bloody drunk was to be ‘drunk as a blood’. (We have the same association today, when we say ‘drunk as a lord’.) The historical association with blood and mayhem would have appealed to those for whom rough behaviour was a way of life, and this reinforced upper- and middle-class antipathy. By the middle of the 18th century it was definitely a ‘bad word’. Dr Johnson described it in his Dictionary of 1755 as ‘very vulgar’. That settled it.
