tea circles and tea nights and rang tea- bells for service. New fashions introduced tea-gowns and tea- jackets. In the 20th century, we find an extension into the world of business and manufacture, where tea trolleys and tea wagons are pushed by tea ladies and tea girls. People take tea breaks and visit tea bars. Teashades (wire-rimmed sunglasses) were popular among 1960s’ rock-stars such as John Lennon and Ozzy Osbourne.
Meanwhile, the word was worming its way into 20th-century English idiom. Not for all the tea in China seems to have started in Australia. Tea and sympathy became popular following a stage play and film from the 1950s. The most curious idiomatic development was cup of tea. The expression was originally used for a person, as in You’re a nice strong cup of tea. Then it became a focus of interest, either a person (He’s my cup of tea) or a topic (Science fiction is more my cup of tea). We then find it used in a negative way (Science fiction isn’t my cup of tea) and then as an expression of comparison (That’s a very different cup of tea). Nobody knows how the idiom started. It feels like something that would come out of a Victorian music-hall, but its earliest recorded use in the Oxford English Dictionary isn’t until 1908.
The story of tea isn’t over yet. It continues to be reported in street slang in a huge range of expressions, though one never knows just how widely used they are. To go tea tax? To get really angry. Tea-brained? An obtuse person. In 2009, tea even became a political acronym in the USA, when the Tea Party was formed. TEA? Taxed Enough Already.
54. Disinterested — a confusible (17th century)
Interest is one of those words where you have to look carefully at the context to see what is meant. It started life in English in the 15th century as a legal expression. If you have an interest in an estate, you have a right or claim to some of it. Later it developed a financial sense. If you hold an interest in a company, you have a financial stake in it. More general senses emerged. When people say they have our interests at heart, they mean our good. When politicians say It’s in your interest to vote for me, they mean our advantage. And in the 17th century we find the meaning which eventually became the most common modern use: a feeling of concern or curiosity about something. What are your interests?
Some of this ambiguity spilled over into the adjective, interested. The earliest recorded meaning is the curiosity one. I’m interested meant ‘I’m curious to know’. But soon after, the self-seeking meaning arrived. I’m interested now meant ‘I spy a personal advantage’, and people began to talk of interested parties in a venture.
This leads us to the negative form. How did people express the idea that they were not interested? Two prefixes were the chief candidates: un- and dis-. Which should be used? There are dozens of cases in the 16th and 17th centuries of people experimenting with both. Should they say discontent or uncontent? Discomfortable or uncomfortable? Sometimes the dis- form survived (as in discontent). Sometimes the un- form did (as in uncomfortable). And in others, both forms survived with different meanings.
What makes interested so interesting is that both forms survived, but with the meanings totally overlapping.
• Disinterested is first recorded in the early 17th century. It meant ‘unconcerned, indifferent’. By the mid-century it had come to mean ‘impartial, unbiased’.
• Uninterested is first recorded in the mid-17th century with the sense of ‘impartial, unbiased’. A century later it developed the sense of ‘unconcerned, indifferent’.
We might think this would be a recipe for semantic disaster. By 1750 each form could express the same two different meanings.
Dr Johnson tried to sort it out. In his Dictionary he gave disinterested the unbiased sense (‘not influenced by private profit’) and uninterested the ‘incurious’ sense (‘not having interest’). From then on, people strove to maintain the distinction — but with only partial success. In the 20th century, surveys showed that over a quarter of all the uses of disinterested in Britain meant ‘bored’, and nearly twice as many used it in this sense in the USA. People regularly say such things as ‘After a while I became disinterested in football, and stopped going to matches.’
As the 20th century progressed, such usages came to be roundly condemned by people who felt that an important distinction was being lost. In fact, the context makes it perfectly clear what is meant. The usage wouldn’t have developed at all if there had been any real ambiguity. And it evidently wasn’t a big issue in Henry Fowler’s day, for he doesn’t even mention it in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage in 1926. But concern evidently grew in the following decades, and when Sir Ernest Gowers came to revise Fowler in the 1960s he added an entry on disinterested and pleaded for the distinction to be rescued, ‘if it is not too late’.
It wasn’t. Today, the difference between the two words remains a live issue, thanks to its flagship status among usage pundits. But for many, the controversy has engendered a distrust. If they write disinterested meaning ‘unbiased’, will it be understood in the sense they intend? The feeling has grown that perhaps it would be better to avoid the word altogether, and use a synonym. The future of disinterested remains in the balance.
55. Polite — a matter of manners (17th century)
We learn to be linguistically polite at a very early age. It starts during the fourth year of life, when children have acquired enough language to have proper conversations. Parents start drilling. ‘Say please.’ ‘Say sorry.’ ‘I haven’t heard that little word yet.’ ‘Don’t talk with your mouth full.’ The kids learn that there are words that should not be used in polite company. These then become the most desirable words of all, of course!
As we grow up, we learn more sophisticated expressions.
Times of day are given a linguistic introduction (Good morning, Good night), along with their informal variants (Morning, Night-night). Unexpected body noises elicit linguistic apologies (Bless you, Pardon me). Written English introduces us to special formulae (Yours sincerely, All the best). We learn to use the appropriate terms of address for different kinds of people in society (§19). And at the informal end of the scale, different groups develop their own politeness routines (Hi, Yo, Cheers).
It’s never possible to predict which words and phrases in a language a social group is going to accept or reject as polite. What is clear is that, from age to age, these expressions change. We can see this if we look at some of the expressions Jonathan Swift noted in the early 18th century. He tells us he used to keep a notebook in his pocket when he went to visit the ‘most polite families’. After he left the company, he would write down ‘the choicest expressions that passed during the visit’. Modern linguists do the same sort of thing as they travel about.
Some of the expressions Swift heard are still with us today. The members of his polite families said such things as talk of the devil and it’s an ill wind. But most of them
