fatidical (‘prophetic’), fubsy (‘short and stout’), niddering (‘cowardly’) and skirr (‘a whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight’).
9. A group of US scholars offer a toast to Samuel Johnson, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the publication of his Dictionary in 1955. A Johnson Society was founded in 1910, based in his home town of Lichfield, where the Birthplace Museum has a permanent exhibition of his life and times. The Times was having none of this. In its issue of 22 September 2008 it launched a campaign: ‘How you can help to save some cherished words from oblivion.’ People could vote to save the words they fancied. Collins, which is owned by News Corporation, the parent company of The Times, agreed that words would be granted a reprieve if evidence of their popularity emerged.
It was a curious headline, if you think about it, for if these words were being genuinely cherished, why should they be in this list at all? Nevertheless, there was quite a reaction. Andrew Motion went on record as supporting skirr. Stephen Fry was all for saving fubsy. Indeed, a ‘save fubsy’ online petition group was set up.
Just because words are left out of a dictionary of standard English doesn’t mean that they have disappeared from the language, of course. Some of the words remain alive and well in regional dialects. I know niddering and skirr are still used in parts of Scotland and the north of England, and fubsy (along with fub, ‘stout’) is mentioned in several dialect books.
It’s a daring decision, to leave a word out, because you can never predict the future with language. A word or phrase can be obsolescent, then suddenly have its fortunes reversed by being used by some celebrity. Or attitudes change towards a word, so that one generation loves it and the next hates it and the next loves it again. But whatever has happened to words in the past, the future is going to be very different. The internet is changing everything, because in an electronic world dictionaries can be of unlimited size, pages are time-stamped and nothing disappears (§83). The internet is already the largest corpus of attested historical language data we have ever known. In that dictionary words never die. Even fopdoodle, attracting a lowly 8,000 hits on Google in 2011, will live on. If words could talk, they would say they had finally achieved what they always wanted: immortality.
50. Billion — a confusing ambiguity (17th century)
As scientists extended the boundaries of knowledge, so they needed larger numerals to talk about what they found. A million, known since the Middle Ages, wasn’t enough. They needed billions, trillions and more. Popular usage followed suit. People were already saying things like a million to one and one in a million in the 17th century. Then inflation set in. One in a billion sounded much more impressive.
But what did billion mean, exactly? The English thought of the six zeros in a million (1,000,000) as being a functional unit, so the next value up was going to be twice six zeros (1,000,000,000,000). Billion in Britain thus meant ‘a million millions’ — a ‘long-scale system’, as it later came to be called. But French mathematicians later went in a different direction. They thought of 1,000,000 as two groups of three zeros, so for them the next unit up was three groups of three zeros — that is, 1,000,000,000. In France, billion thus meant ‘a thousand million’ — a ‘short-scale system’.
The history of usage is complicated and varies enormously from country to country. Britain stayed with the long-scale system, but in the 19th century the USA adopted the short-scale system. For over a century, American English dictionaries recommended ‘thousand million’ and British dictionaries ‘million million’. Then, in 1974, Britain capitulated. The prime minister of the time, Harold Wilson, made a statement to the House of Commons:
The word ‘billion’ is now used internationally to mean 1,000 million and it would be confusing if British Ministers were to use it in any other sense.
However, usage doesn’t take kindly to government statements. Although officially a billion is now a thousand million in the UK, people are still aware of the older use, and uncertainty is common. So whenever I use billion, I gloss it. If I say that ‘English is spoken by 2 billion people’, I immediately add, ‘2 thousand million’, to be on the safe side.
It’s the normal state of affairs in a language for everyday words to have more than one sense. We only have to look in a dictionary to see that. There’s usually no ambiguity, because when we use the words in sentences we see which sense is involved. On its own, bed is ambiguous: it could mean (for example) a place where we sleep or a place where we plant flowers. But we have no problem interpreting I stayed in bed until ten or Look at that lovely bed of roses.
It’s unusual to find a scientific term developing an ambiguity of the kind displayed by billion. Normally, when scientists create terms, they’re accepted by the whole scientific community. There are standard definitions of such words as hydrogen, atom and pterodactyl, and we don’t expect to find differences between American and British usage. But here’s a mathematical term which is not only ambiguous but where the ambiguity doesn’t disappear when we put it in a sentence. When we read, ‘The disaster has lost the company a billion pounds’, we can’t tell how much has been lost. Billion reminds us of the ever- present dangers of ambiguity in the history of the language.
Of course, for most of us, the difference isn’t important. It’s simply ‘a lot’. And the language has come to reflect this ‘couldn’t care less’ attitude. The -illion ending is now used to express very large but indefinite amounts. In the mid-20th century we find zillion and bazillion, later gazillion and kazillion. People with really huge amounts of money were zillionaires. The Record, a New Jersey newspaper, took the coinages to new heights when it talked about an economic crisis in 1990:
The savings-and-loan industry bailout, which as of yesterday was expected to cost taxpayers $752.6 trillion skillion, is now expected to cost $964.3 hillion jillion bazillion, not including the Christmas party.
Doubtless these words got a new lease of life during the banking crisis twenty years later.
51. Yogurt — a choice of spelling (17th century)
How do you spell yogurt? When the word arrived in English from Turkish in the early 17th century, people made several stabs at it. The first recorded usage is yoghurd. Then we get yogourt. Then yahourt, yaghourt, yogurd, yoghourt, yooghort, yughard, yughurt and yohourth. In the 19th century, there was a trend to simplify, and yogurt emerged as the front runner. It still is. In 2011 it was getting some 14 million hits on Google, with yoghurt 8 million and everything else a long way behind.
Preferences vary somewhat between countries, however. Yogurt is the norm in the USA. In the UK, both are used, but yoghurt is three times more common than yogurt. Yogourt has achieved some presence in Canada,
