because of its French-looking character, but even there yogurt is more widespread. In Australia and New Zealand, yoghurt is commoner than yogurt, but yogurt is catching up, probably because of exposure to American and internet usage. Yogurt is catching up in the UK too. You have to be careful where you look, when you consult a dictionary. Some give yogurt as the headword, which places it after yogi and yogic. Others give yoghurt as the head-word, which places it before.
Yogurt is not the only word that turns up at different places in a dictionary depending on how it’s spelled. The differences between British and American spelling can lead to very different locations. Depending on the dictionary you use, you’ll look under either MO- or MU- for moustache/mustache, under PY- or PA-for pyjamas/pajamas and under FO- or FE- for foetus/fetus. The problem is especially noticeable when the first letters of a word are affected. At least aeroplane and airplane keep you in letter A, and tyre and tire in T. But we have to make some big jumps with oestrogen and estrogen, aesthetics and esthetics and kerb and curb. A good dictionary will always anticipate the problem and include a cross- reference to get you from one place to the other.
Probably the commercial use of the word will condition the ultimate success of one yogurt spelling over the others. If you explore the yogurt-making world, you’ll encounter a whole family of derived forms. There are compound words such as yogurt machine, yogurt maker and yogurt freezer. Adjectives such as yogurt-like, yogurtish and yogurty. And brave new worlds too, it seems, judging by the name of an American international chain of frozen yogurt stores — Yogurtland.
52. Gazette — a taste of journalese (17th century)
The year 1665 is known for the Great Plague. Charles II moved his court out of London to Oxford. But how would the court keep in touch with the news? Publisher Henry Muddiman was authorised to produce what is often called ‘the first English newspaper’, the Oxford Gazette. When the danger was over, and the court moved back to London, the paper changed its name, becoming the London Gazette in February 1666.
The word gazette had come over from the continent, where it was used to describe a popular — though by all accounts not very reliable — news-sheet. One commentator described gazettes as including ‘idle intelligences and flim flam tales’ — frivolous nonsense. Perhaps for that reason, it was soon displaced in everyday usage by the word newspaper, whose first recorded use is in 1667, written as two words: news paper. However, gazette remained as the name of various official journals. If you were gazetted, you were the subject of an official announcement. And the journalists who wrote for them were called gazetteers.
10. The front page of The Oxford Gazette, published in Oxford in November 1665. The early newspapers looked very different from those of today. Notably, they had no banner headlines running across the page. A news item in the Oxford Gazette began simply with its place of origin and the date, such as Paris, Nov 18. Banner headlines didn’t become a feature of the daily press until the end of the 19th century.
Once they did, there was an immediate effect on language. The headline had to catch the eye and capture interest. With a very limited amount of space available, short words became privileged, and a new lexical style quickly evolved. We see it mainly in the tabloid press, but all newspapers are to some extent influenced by the need to keep headlines short and snappy.
So we are less likely to see headlines in which people abolish, forbid, reduce, swindle and resign. Rather, they will axe, ban, cut, con and quit (or simply go). We will rarely read of a division of opinion, an encouraging sign, an argument or an agreement. Instead, it will be a rift, boost, row or deal. And many short words are doubly appealing because they carry an extra emotional charge: fury, clash, slam, soar…
All this is a long way from the cultivated and elaborate language of the Oxford Gazette, reporting events in the Anglo-Dutch War:
Not knowing what account the Publick has hitherto received of the progress of the prince of Munster’s Arms, we have thought it not improper without further repetition, to give an account of such places as he at present stands possest of in the enemies Country…
The writer goes on to list the various forts and ships that the prince had captured. How might a modern newspaper deal with such a situation? If past tabloid performance is anything to go by, it might even be a single word. Few headlines have stayed in the popular memory longer than the one that appeared in The Sun for 4 May 1982, reporting the attack on the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano in the Falklands War: GOTCHA (§88).
53. Tea — a social word (17th century)
On 25 September 1660, Samuel Pepys wrote in his Diary: ‘I did send for a cup of tee (a China drink) of which I never had drunk before.’ The beverage had been imported into Europe from China early in the 17th century, but the British seem not to have taken to it until mid-century. Pepys probably got his tea from one of the coffee houses which had begun to sell both liquid and dry tea in the 1650s. The first recorded reference to the word is 1655.
In 1661, tea-taking was introduced into the Restoration court by Queen Catherine, the Portuguese wife of Charles II. It immediately became a fashionable ritual, accompanied by an elegant apparatus of silver spoons, pots, stands, tongs and caddies, and an occasion for conversation. But the innovation was taken up by other levels of society too. As its price fell, everyone adopted the habit, upstairs and downstairs alike, taking tea usually twice a day.
The linguistic consequences were both functional and social. Over the next fifty years we find a family of words introduced to describe all the bits and pieces needed in order to drink tea efficiently, such as tea-pot, tea-spoon, tea-water, tea-cup (with handle, unlike in China), tea- dish, tea-house and tea-room. And a century later the family multiplied in size when society recognised the crucial notion of tea-time — the ideal midway point between midday and evening meals.
Thereafter, the technology becomes more sophisticated and the occasions more elaborate. Few words can have developed so many uses so quickly as tea. We find tea-treats, tea- saucers, tea-trays and tea sets. People bought from tea- shops and made tea-visits. In the 19th century, we find tea- bags, tea-cakes, tea-towels and tea-services. High society met for
