People who wanted to be emphatic had to find socially more acceptable alternatives. Deuced, rattling and ripping became popular. Bleeding was used first by Cockneys in the 1850s, but — perhaps for that very reason — never acquired upper-class respectability. Blooming, used from the 1880s, was more successful. Ruddy, slightly less so. Dozens of words became fashionable, such as devilish, damned, jolly, awfully and terribly.
It was all a very British thing. Americans have never understood the British timidity towards using bloody, and Australians find it even more puzzling. In both Australia and the USA, the word is used as an intensifer, yet without the aura of rudeness which is part of its historical baggage in the UK.
Usage in Britain is slowly adapting to the world scene — though very slowly. Bloody is no longer printed as b----y, and it isn’t one of the words relegated to late-night television viewing. But the sensitivity is still there. In 2006 a television ad for Tourism Australia included the sentence ‘So where the bloody hell are you?’ This was too much for the regulators at the British Advertising Clearance Centre, who cut it out, and restored it (for late-evening viewing) only after a huge row. So I’m not expecting to hear a BBC weather forecaster say in the foreseeable future: ‘It’s been bloody hot today…’
48. Lakh — a word from India (17th century)
Here are two recent newspaper headlines from India.
Nearly 5 lakh foreigners throng India for cheap treatment
Rs 50-lakh divorce for runaway wife
Lakh. A Hindi word meaning 100,000. So, 5 lakh is half a million. 50 lakh (Rs = rupees) is 5 million. It’s one of the words you need to know. The figures get bigger when you turn to the business pages. There you find people talking about crores as well. A crore is 10 million.
These words arrived in English in the early 1600s. Already several Indian words had entered the language from earlier contacts. A godown is a place where goods are stored — a warehouse. It’s recorded in a voyager’s report of 1588. It comes from a Malay word, godong, and probably took its English form because people heard it as ‘go down’ — the storehouses were often in cellars.
Once the British East India Company was established (in 1600), travel to and from the region greatly increased. It wasn’t long before the local languages began to provide English with new words, and several eventually lost their cultural associations with India. From the north of the Indian subcontinent, where Indo- European languages such as Hindi were spoken, we find such 17th-century words as bungalow, dungaree, guru, juggernaut, punch (the drink) and pundit. Examples from the south, where Dravidian languages such as Tamil were spoken, were atoll, catamaran, cheroot, pariah, teak and curry. In the Far East, Tibetan, Malay, Chinese, Japanese and other languages all began to supply new words, such as ginseng, bamboo, ketchup, kimono, junk (the ship) and chaa — this last one not immediately recognisable in that form, but the origin of tea (and, of course, colloquial char).
The various routes to India also brought English into renewed contact with languages such as Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Quite a few Arabic words, for example, had come into Middle English, especially introducing scientific notions such as alchemy and almanac, but in the 16th and 17th centuries there is a significant expansion. In many cases, the Arabic words entered English through another language: assassin, for example, is ultimately from Arabic hash- shashin (‘hashish-eaters’), but came to English via Italian assassino.
The new words reflect local life and customs. Arabic loans include fakir, harem, jar, magazine, sherbet, minaret, alcove and sofa. From Turkish we find vizier, horde, kiosk, coffee and yoghurt. From Persian, bazaar, caravan, divan, shah and turban. From Hebrew, sanhedrin, shekel, shibboleth, torah and hallelujah.
Today, the regional English vocabulary of a country like India is extensive indeed, and continues to develop. The 20th century has seen a host of food words such as tandoori, samosa and pakora. Among the colloquial words to arrive have been cushy, doolally and loot (‘money’). A new lease of computational life has been given to avatar. And in Indian newspapers of the 2000s we will find such local forms as speed-money (‘bribe’), timepass (‘way of passing the time’), timewaste (‘time- wasting’) and petrol bunk (‘petrol station’), as well as new uses of older forms, such as hi-fi (‘fancy’, as in hi-fi clothes). Even the basic vocabulary of the language can be affected, such as kinship terms. Who is your co-brother? The man who married your wife’s sister. And your cousin-sister? Your female first cousin.
49. Fopdoodle — a lost word (17th century)
People started to use the word fopdoodle in the 17th century. It was a combination of fop and doodle, two words very similar in meaning. A fop was a fool. A doodle was a simpleton. So a fopdoodle was a fool twice over. Country bumpkins would be called fopdoodles. But so could the fashionable set, because fop had also developed the meaning of ‘vain dandy’. Dr Johnson didn’t like them at all. In his Dictionary he defines fopdoodle as ‘a fool, an insignificant wretch’.
Fopdoodle is one of those words that people regret are lost when they hear about them. There are several delightful items in Johnson’s Dictionary which we no longer use. He tells us that nappiness was ‘the quality of having a nap’. A bedswerver was ‘one that is false to the bed’. A smellfeast was ‘a parasite, one who haunts good tables’. A worldling was ‘a mortal set upon profits’. A curtain-lecture was ‘a reproof given by a wife to her husband in bed’.
Every generation gives us new words which eventually disappear. I once did a study of words that were being feted as ‘new’ in the 1960s. Over half of them have gone out of everyday use now. Do you recall Rachmanism, Powellism, peaceniks, dancercise, frugs and flower people? All frequent in the 1960s. Historical memories today.
It’s always been like this. But dictionaries are notoriously reluctant to leave words out — for the obvious reason that it’s very difficult to say when a word actually goes out of use. You can spot a new word easily; but how do you know that an old word has finally died? Did grody (slang ‘nasty, dirty’) die out in the 1970s, or is it still being used in the back streets of Boston?
On the whole, dictionaries keep words in, either until constraints of space force some pruning, or a new editorial broom looks at the word-list afresh and says ‘Enough is enough’. That’s presumably what happened in 2008, when the editors of the Collins dictionary decided that some words are so rare these days that nobody would ever want to look them up. They blamed pressure on space in the dictionary: with 2,000 new words to include, several old words would, regrettably, have to go. They included abstergent (‘cleansing or scouring’), compossible (‘possible in coexistence with something else’),
