18. The cover of the first ‘strine’ book, published in 1965. Jocular forms of grammatically irregular verbs also sometimes achieve a widespread use. How often have you heard people say they’re fruz or froz, instead of frozen? Or: Shakespeare thought every thought that’s ever been thunk. Here too, literature can give these usages a blessing. Mark Twain is one of many whose characters smole a smile. James Joyce used thunk in Finnegans Wake. And so did Tigger in Winnie-the-Pooh.
85. Alzheimer’s — surname into word (20th century)
Names are important in word-making. We’ve already seen how place-names can make words (§80) and first names (§28). Now it’s the turn of surnames.
A remarkable variety of everyday objects come from the names of the people who invented them or who are closely associated with them. We find them in such areas as clothing (cardigan, leotard, mackintosh), including hats (stetson) and boots (wellingtons), food (garibaldi, pavlova, sandwich), flowers (begonia, dahlia, magnolia), musical instruments (saxophone, sousaphone) and guns (colt, derringer, mauser). Creative people, especially (if they’re famous enough), can have their surname turn into a general word. Film buffs talk about a movie being Hitchcockian, and similar coinages are found in other areas of the arts, such as Dickensian, Mozartian and Turnerian. Language buffs who admire Henry Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage have created no fewer than three adjectives to characterise his approach — Fowlerian, Fowlerish and Fowleresque.
Science, in particular, recognises achievements in this way. Think of all the names of physical constants that come from scientists, such as ampere, celsius, hertz, ohm and watt. Many terms in anatomy, physiology and medicine reflect their discoverers, such as the Rolandic and Sylvian fissures in the brain or the Eustachian tube between throat and ear. When diseases are person-named, they are usually shortened. So Meniere’s disease becomes Meniere’s, Parkinson’s disease becomes Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease becomes Alzheimer’s.
Derived uses soon follow, as the case of Alzheimer’s shows. The disease was first described by the German pathologist Alois Alzheimer in 1907, and the name was soon used as an adjective in such phrases as Alzheimer patients and Alzheimer sufferers, sometimes with an ’s and sometimes not. By the 1930s, the name of the disease was being abbreviated to Alzheimer’s or (especially in the USA) Alzheimer, even in medical journals. Concern over the effect of the disease grew in the early 2000s, so much so that it became one of the few diseases to be identified by an initial letter: the big A. (The big C — cancer — is another.)
Surnames that become common nouns and adjectives don’t have to belong to a real person. English literature has provided several examples of characters who have given their name to a general situation. What would it mean to call someone a Scrooge, a Cinderella, a Girl Friday, a Romeo? In each case the situation described in the original book has been left behind, and the words are even sometimes written without the capital letters. Rather less usual is the use of two surnames together. A Jekyll and Hyde personality. A David and Goliath situation. A Holmes and Watson relationship. There aren’t many of these.
Several fields go in for first name + surname. The world of roses, for example, has hundreds of examples of cultivars named after the whole name of an individual, including such well-known personalities as Cary Grant and Bing Crosby. And we’ll find whole names in such domains as dog breeds (Jack Russell), ships (USS Ronald Reagan), locomotives (Winston Churchill), cocktails (Rose Kennedy) and cakes (Sarah Bernhardt). Titles are not ruled out (Earl Grey tea). These do lead to some unusual English sentences: ‘Just smell that Cary Grant’; ‘Would you like some Earl Grey?’; ‘I’ll have two Rose Kennedies.’
86. Grand — money slang (20th century)
Some areas of vocabulary are more productive than others. I once went through a dictionary pulling out all the ways there are in English for saying ‘good’ things about the world (such as wonderful, happily, a marvel) and all the ways there are for saying ‘bad’ things (such as awful, clumsily, a disaster). I found 1,772 expressions of positive sentiment and 3,158 expressions of negative sentiment. It’s almost twice as easy to be critical in English, it seems.
Everyday concerns attract the largest vocabularies, especially as slang. Drugs, sex and booze have each generated hundreds of expressions. And so has money, both for the general meaning and for specific units and amounts. The different currency systems of English-speaking countries have added to the diversity (§31). Even old terms can live on in idioms: people still say in Britain that someone is worth a few bob, even though bob for a shilling (‘12 old pence’) disappeared decades ago. In Australian English we find buckaroo (‘a dollar coin’), brick (‘$10’) and shrapnel (‘small change’). In Jamaica, a coil is a ‘roll of banknotes’. In Trinidad, a dog is a ‘$20 bill’ — perhaps an echo of the days when people used dog dollars (‘dollar coins where an original lion design had been worn away into something resembling a dog’).
Slang words for ‘money’ vary greatly. Some go back hundreds of years. In Britain, brass, associated with the colour of gold coins, is found from the late 16th century. Ready (= ‘ready money’) is recorded from the 17th, now heard only in the plural readies. Also from the 17th century is quid, originally referring to a sovereign or guinea. It probably comes from the Latin word for ‘what’ (quid), which transmuted into a jocular sense of ‘the wherewithal’ at a time when Latin was widely known.
Cockney rhyming slang has given us several expressions. Bread is from bread and honey (= ‘money’). Five (‘?5’) produces beehive; a fiver is a lady (from Lady Godiva). Ten (‘?10’) gives us Big Ben as well as cock and hen. Eight (‘?8’) is a garden, thanks to garden gate. Amounts and numerals sometimes appear as back-slang: dunop, evif, nevis, yennep. The rhyming practice crossed the sea. In Australia we find Oscar Asche (an Australian actor of the early 20th century) for cash, Oxford scholar for dollar and bugs bunny for money. In South Africa, ‘money’ is sometimes called tom (from tomfoolery = ‘jewellery’). And new rhyming slang is still being coined. In the late 20th century, we find ayrton as a word for ‘?10’, Why? Racing driver Ayrton Senna = tenner.
The USA has a huge range of slang expressions, some widely known thanks to their regular use in films and television, such as (for dollars) bucks and greenbacks, and (for
