Friday, April 11: Bandersnatches
LOVE OF WORDS
by Steve Steinbock
I have a deep and abiding love for words. They, together with their partner syntax, form the most profoundly unique human invention: language. Without words, not only would we have nothing to talk about on this forum, but we quite literally (pun not intended) wouldn’t have the words to do so.
There’s a name for the love of words: philology. Not surprisingly, philology means love of words. These days, the scientific discipline of philology is considered passé in academic, linguistic circles. Real theoretical linguists are more concerned with neo-Chomskian linguistics and research on innate versus cultural origins of syntactic rules. But I’m just in it for the fun.
I contend that all language is metaphor. In fact, both language (from the Latin “measure of tongue”) and metaphor (from Greek meaning “to carry after”) are metaphors.
I try to be conservative in my word usage. I’m not comfortable using “effect” as a verb, and the word “orientate” gives me the willies. However, I recognize that language changes, and without that change, there would be no language.
Just as our bodies need constant inhalation and exhalation in order to thrive, language needs to breathe. And just as our lungs breathe by expanding and contracting, so does language. Language expands when we come up with new, expressive ways of saying something that’s never been said before. Contraction happens when out of laziness or economy, we abbreviate our words.
Yup, language owes a lot to laziness. I have a theory about the common use of the word “gross.” Originally the word simply meant “large.” But today it’s usually used as a synonym for “disgusting.” Occasionally you find “gross” meaning “coarse.” This is probably from lazy pronunciation of “crass” from the Latin “crassus.” My theory as to how, in 1958, American youth began using “gross” to mean “yucky” is that is a weird contraction of “grotesque.”
Words do weird things. The word forte (meaning a person’s strength) is supposed to be pronounced “fort,” but most people, myself included most of the time, pronounce the “e” at the end, confusing it with the Italian musical notation. Conversely, the word for a two-door car, coupé is usually spelled with an accented “e” at the end, and if you listen to old radio programs, you’ll sometimes hear it pronounced so that it rhymes with toupee. Blame it on the Beach Boys.
Yesterday I was struck by the use of the slang “pissed.” To piss, of course, is slang for urinating. So why is it that when an American gets angry, he gets pissed off, and why an Englishman, when wanting to unwind, will go into a pub to get pissed? I don’t understand why we use so many body parts and body functions to express metaphors. Nor do I know why the same bodily function can mean two very different things.
I’m always amused at how anally (how’s that for a metaphor?) the French try to preserve their language, protecting it from change and foreign influence. For several centuries, the Académie Française has governed proper usage and issued rulings against the use of foreign (non-French) words. I’d like to tell you more about it, but their website is only in French. Perhaps the most pervasive French word that we non-French speakers encounter is monsieur. This important French word illustrates just how language changes, how we expand and contract our words to make new ones. Monsieur evolved from the Latin meus senior, which roughly means “my elder.” Somewhere along the line, meus became mon, and senior was condensed into sieur. In the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, mon and sieur were smooshed together (that’s a technical term) into monsieur, which, out of further economy (read “laziness”), half of it’s letters aren’t even pronounced.
As a final show of linguistic evolution, there’s a story about Sir Christopher Wren and the redesign of St. Paul’s Cathedral in that late 1600s. I’ve probably told it before, so forgive me. It’s also likely apocryphal (i.e. it may never have actually happened, that’s another metaphor), but the linguistic details are correct. One version of the story has Queen Anne commenting on Wren’s design by telling him that it is “pompous, artificial, and awful!”
Wren was pleased by these words, for in his time, “pompous” implied “elegant,” “articifial” meant “made artistically,” and “awful” meant “full of awe.”
Happy Weekend, everyone. And hoping that you didn’t find this column too awful, artificial, or pompous, however defined.
Steve — I thoroughly enjoyed this. I too love words, and anything dealing with the evolution of language (guess that makes me a philologist). And any column that uses terms ranging from “neo-Chomskian” to “yucky” is going to be interesting, period.
Great post!
Hmm… I don’t know Latin but based on similar words I would think philology would be the study of (or writing about) love, and logophilia would be love of words. Shows how little I know.
Steve and I disagree as to the derivation of the contemporary use of “gross” to mean “disgusting”. I regard it as a mutation of the original word’s sense of describing something coarse or profane, which goes back to the 1500s.
Likewise, “to piss” in its strict sense is not slang, merely indelicate (one might even say a gross word) although all its metaphorical usages are certainly slang. The word is a lexical gift of the French dating back to the 1300s, and in its native land, “pisser” is a perfectly polite verb. To be “pissed off” in the sense of being angry is American slang from the 1940s, likely from “getting into a piss up”; it describes a state of wrath so pronounced that one could express one’s contempt for the object of ire by urinating on it. Another version of “piss up”, viz., “having a piss up”, is the likely origin for the 1920s British slang term “pissed”, i.e., drunk — but in this case, it relates to the well-known diuretic effects of excessive alcohol consumption.
Rob is right about logophilia being the love of words — strictly speaking, philology is the study of language, especially its structure and evolution, now more commonly referred to as linguistics. He’s joking about Latin, of course, since he knows philology is from the Greek. Linguistics is from the Latin. I mean, he’s a librarian. He knows everything.
One of my favorite twists and turns in etymology is philander. The prefix (philos = love) and stem (andros = man) indicate it means “lover of man”, and in its original Greek form, it was a noun, philandros, referring to a woman who faithfully loved her husband. From there, it descended to mean a lover of either sex, and by the 18th century it had become a verb meaning to make love in a trifling manner, i.e., to flirt. Since men trifled with women’s affections more frequently than women trifled with men’s, it acquired a masculine tint, and a new noun, philanderer, meaning a woman-chaser, was subsequently coined, from which we ultimately derive its contemporary meaning of a serially unfaithful married man. Exactly the opposite of its original meaning! What a journey!
So a croque-monsieur means ‘my elder crunchy ham’n’cheese’?
Your hypothesis of ‘gross’ is interesting. ‘Grotty’, from grotesque and meaning the same as ‘gross’, was a common expression in the UK around the same time.
I can’t recall which English writer of historical mysteries, perhaps Ellis Peters or Edward Marston, used the word doubt as it was long ago, roughly the opposite of what it means now.
My all-time annoyance, as I’ve noted once, is the Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus insistence that Americans use ‘nonplussed’ in the opposite sense:
“In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’:: the hostility of the new neighbor’s refusal left Mrs. Walker nonplussed. In American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’—more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning: | hoping to disguise his confusion, he tried to appear nonplussed. This new use probably arose on the assumption that non- was the normal negative prefix and must therefore have a negative meaning. Although the use is common, it is not yet considered standard. Note that the correct spelling is nonplussed, not nonplused.”
Grrrrrrrrr…! They should be brought up on charges.
Since we’re speaking of the British in this and since James touched on ‘pissed’ a second time, I’ll add that the British also use it in another sense, much like we say ‘pulling one’s leg’ or ‘leading down the garden path’. I prefer ours, although none of the three make much sense.
From what I’ve heard, in England if you visit someone’s house you knock on their door, and the phrase from this, meaning “to visit somebody” is to “knock them up” (as when we phone someone we “ring them up.”) 35 years ago in High School my German Teacher said “Language is something alive, always changing.” The only quote from a H.S. Teacher I wrote down. I can only guess what he’d say if he heard the current use of the word “pimp” as in “Pimp My Ride!” Come to think of it, “ride” for “car” or “wheels” or “vehicle” is more prof that language is alive! (My late teacher, Mr. Dieter H. Daub, circa 1974.)
I’m thoroughly plussed by the comments today.
I hadn’t known the history of philandering (the word, not the behavior). Interesting story. Makes me wonder where cuckold was hatched.
Speaking of pimps, and their rides, I remember reading the word “punk” in Shakespeare (one of the Henry IV plays?), used to mean “prostitute.”
I started learning Spanish in earnest in 1990 at age 47, when I bought a little apartment in Mexico City. Having studied Latin, French and German academically, I was aware of the language-learning process, but had never attempted conversation in any of them. I decided to learn Spanish as children learn a language, by listening and imitating.
My first instructor was Alfredo, a working-class handyman who helped me remodel my new home away-from-home. Alfredo taught me the names of hundreds of items and many common phrases. Little did I know that Alfredo’s language was born in the streets. When I started using Alfredo’s Spanish at dinners and parties, people spilled their drinks. By my inept usage, native speakers, who were my educated friends, knew I was a beginner and over the years have moved Alfredo’s vulgar vocabulary from my everyday vocabulary to that special brain area where we hide the worst words.
Alfredo used the word pedo to mean drunk, when it is in fact the vulgar Spanish word for fart. The relationship between the vulgar English word piss (to urinate) and the British term pissed (for drunk) mentioned in the above blog seems similar in that they make drunkenness a vulgarity.
We Americans use the word pissed to mean angry, not drunk. Alfredo did something similar. His word for angry was “encabronado,” incorporating the vulgar word “cabrón,” which is more or less the equivalent of the English vulgarity “dirty bastard.” Once when I told a Mexican doctor friend’s wife that I had become encabronado – soon after meeting Afredo, of course – she had trouble getting the air out of her vocal cords to reply. When I saw the shock in her face, I realized I had made a mistake, and asked her what was wrong. Probably like when her children had returned from school with “new words,” she discreetly set me straight.
San Diego’s populated area extends south to the Mexican border, where the city of Tijuana begins. I would guess that half the population of San Diego speak Spanish as a native language. Spanish is being injected here like vaccines in a children’s clinic. As an example there are fast-food outlets where no employee – except maybe the manager – speaks fluent English. Their English vocabulary consists of only the menu items and a few phrases cashiers must know. Mother’s call in to radio shows complaining that their child is in a class of 24 and is the only English speaker.
As mentioned in Steve’s blog, the French Académie Française has tried to extract foreign terms from their language. Our own Congress has made similar xenophobic attempts at making English our “official language.” Would that mean you couldn’t order carne asada or vichyssoise anymore? And what would a Porsche owner call his car?
English has historically adopted words from every culture and language into its own. When the Norman French invaded England in 1066 they tripled the English vocabulary. For example, to the word ROYAL, the Normans added the synonyms KINGLY, SOVEREIGN, and REGAL. Consider the adopted English words tortilla, déjà vu, glasnost, schadenfreude, schlep, tepee, tattoo, pizza, jihad, igloo and sayonara.
The Oxford English Dictionary vocabulary contains more than 600,000 words, said to be triple the size of any other major language. New words – blog, fax, Google, statin – are added every day. Can we ever keep up?