cheeseology, tattoo-ology and (I kid you not) fartology. The ending means ‘the science or discipline’ of something, and comes from Greek logos (‘word’). It literally translates as ‘one who speaks in a certain way’.
Ology, as a noun for a science, is first recorded in 1811, and by the time Charles Dickens was writing it was in common use. In Hard Times, Mrs Gradgrind reflects to her daughter about her headmaster husband, ‘a man of facts and calculations’:
You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother. Ologies of all kinds from morning to night. If there is any Ology left, of any description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say is, I hope I shall never hear its name.
There certainly had been a flood of ologies in the previous century, many of them cheeky coinages such as dogology and bugology.
The usage is still with us. In the 1980s, actress Maureen Lipman, playing the part of Jewish matriarch Beattie in a series of British television commercials for British Telecom, is on the phone to her grandson, who has just admitted to failing most of his exams. However, he has passed sociology, to which she replies proudly: ‘An ology! He gets an ology and he says he’s failed! You get an ology, you’re a scientist!’ When the script-book was published in 1989, it was titled You Got An Ology? In 2000, this ad was voted 14th in Channel 4’s ‘The Hundred Greatest Adverts.
If an ology was a branch of knowledge, then an expert in that subject was an ologist — a usage first recorded in 1839. Anything related to an ology was ological. Mrs Gradgrind hopes Louisa will turn all her ological studies to good account. And anything related to an ologist would be ologistic — a usage which has been spotted just once, in the mid-19th century.
Few other suffixes have made such progress. People who have a strong like or dislike for something have sometimes been called phils or philes (for) and phobes (against). In medicine, a disease of a certain kind has sometimes been called an itis. They aren’t common. The only ending that could compete with ology is ism. At least two reference books have been published with the title Ologies and Isms, listing all the subjects ending in these ways.
We first find ism as a separate word in the 16th century, usually in the plural, and in a context where the writer is being critical of religions (one writes: Puritanism, Jesuitism, and other isms). Dozens of coinages such as Communism and Impressionism led to ism being extended to movements in politics and art, and eventually to all kinds of beliefs and practices (a 20th-century writer: isms like racism and sexism). Today, the easiest way of being scornful about a set of topics is to call them isms.
During the 19th century, the word attracted its own endings. An adherent of an ism was an ismatic. Ismatics could be ismatical. The world of isms was ismdom. Turning a topic into an ism was to ismatise it. We only lack a record of ismism, and I’m sure this will turn up one day. In the meantime, the negative associations of the word are growing. There is now an internet site called the Institution of Silly and Meaningless Sayings: ISMS.
73. Y’all — a new pronoun (19th century)
The problem with saying you is that it’s ambiguous — it can mean one addressee or several (§69). So it’s hardly surprising that people have made up new forms to try to get round the problem. The obvious solution, following the usual pattern for nouns, is to make a new plural by simply ‘adding an s’, and this was one of the first variants to emerge. We find it recorded in Irish English in the early 19th century. God bless yees! says a character in one of Maria Edgeworth’s tales. And the spellings began to proliferate: yeez, yez, yiz. The speaker was always talking to more than one person.
Similar forms developed elsewhere. Yous was another Irish creation, and it was probably this one which spread to various parts of England, Australia and the USA, often spelled youse and sometimes yows. But as it spread, it gradually lost its plural sense. Now just one person could be addressed as yiz or youse. I often heard it used like that, both as singular and plural, when I was a teenager in Liverpool. It was the same sort of development that had happened to you in the Middle Ages, once people stopped using thou. The ambiguity was back.
The you forms that developed in the USA showed a similar pattern of development. Dialect usages such as yowe yens from East Anglia probably travelled across in the Mayflower, and settled down as youns or you- uns in the eastern states. It’s still used there today for both singular and plural addressees.
Y’all is the most famous of all the new pronouns. It’s a shortened form of you all, first recorded in southern states of the USA in the early 19th century. Usage varies quite a bit, with some people restricting it to plural addressees and some using it for single addressees as well. It’s the singular usage which can come as a shock to a British person, being addressed by y’all for the first time and realising that nobody else is included. When this first happened to me, in Texas in the 1960s, I was completely taken by surprise. As I entered a store, the assistant greeted me with a Howdy, y’all, and I actually looked round to see who else had come into the store with me. But there was only me there. And as I left he said Y’all take care now.
Nobody knows for certain whether y’all started out as a local usage among the southern black population or whether it was introduced by white immigrants. Either way, it rapidly established its presence, and then became more widely used throughout the country. It even travelled abroad, thanks to the many novels, movies and television serials reflecting life in the US south. Y’all is the usual spelling, but we’ll also find ya’ll, yawl, yo- all and others.
So, if you already exists in modern English, why use y’all? The two forms can be used for either singular or plural, so that can’t be the reason. Is there a difference between saying I hope to see y’all and I hope to see you? Most people find y’all ‘warmer’ — a sign of familiarity, friendliness, informality or rapport. Some are still a bit suspicious of it and don’t use it, perhaps because it reminds them of past ethnic tensions. But for many, today, it’s simply customer-friendly.
74. Speech-craft — an Anglo-Saxonism (19th century)
It was only a matter of time before the huge influx of words from Latin, Greek and the Romance languages produced an antagonistic reaction. In the 16th century, the English scholar John Cheke thought English was being ‘mangled’ by all the classical words that were entering the language — the so-called ‘ink-horn’ terms (§41). And in the 20th century, George Orwell was a loud voice complaining about the way some writers went out of their way to use a Latin or Greek word when a good old Anglo-Saxon one would do.
Nobody took this position to such extremes as did the 19th-century Dorsetshire poet William Barnes. He felt that if all non-Germanic words could be removed from English, the language would immediately become much more
