The Story of English in 100 Words (24 page)

Do all these classical names count as English? We can’t ignore them. In a discussion at a flower show, we will often hear such sentences as ‘I’ve got a large
clump of
Tulipa tarda
in my garden, and it looks terrific’, and several of the technical names have actually become everyday usage, such as
rhododendron
and
fuchsia
. Similarly, any walk around a zoo or a natural history museum will introduce us to the technical names of animals, some of which, such as
Homo sapiens
(‘wise human’) and
Tyrannosaurus rex
(‘tyrant lizard king’), have become widely known.

If there are 2 million known species, then there are 2 million names awaiting inclusion in a super-dictionary. And we ain’t seen nothin’ yet, for biologists say that many more millions of species have yet to be discovered.

Ain’t

right and wrong (18th century)

For a word that has regularly attracted a bad press during the 20th century,
ain’t
is remarkably audible in speech and visible in writing. It’s widely condemned as bad English, and yet all kinds of people use it. It isn’t just something we hear in regional dialect speech. Speakers of standard English use it too, in such expressions as
If it ain’t broke don’t fix it, Ain’t it the truth, Ready it ain’t
and
Things ain’t what they used to be
. They’re using the non-standard form to make their speech sound more robust, unpretentious and down-to-earth.

We’ll also find it in written English. Did you notice an example at the end of the previous chapter? It’s by no means the first time that the expression has been used in print. Indeed, in 2002 it was part of a book title:
You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet: The Future of Media and the Global Expert System
. And several other titles have included an
ain’t
, such as
Ain’t Misbehavin’: A Good Behaviour Guide for Family Dogs
and
It Ain’t Necessarily So: Investigating the Truth of the Biblical Past.
The nonstandard form, unusual in print, grabs the attention.

In these last two cases there’s an allusion to a well-known song. We seem to have stored away in our memory such phrases as
ain’t misbehavin’
(the name of a Louis Armstrong hit from the 1929 musical comedy
Hot Chocolates
) and can bring them out again as required, confident that other people will recognise the allusions. Nor is it only song that uses the word.
It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum
has entered British consciousness as a result of a popular TV programme.
It ain’t over till the fat lady sings
has prompted a sports commentary cliché.

Ain’t
has had an unusual history. It’s a shortened form of several words –
am not, are not, is not, has not
and
have not
. It appears in written English in the 18th century in various plays and novels, first as
an’t
and then as
ain’t
. During the 19th century it was widely used in representations of regional dialect, especially Cockney speech in the UK, and became a distinctive feature of colloquial American English. But when we look at who is using the form in 19th-century novels, such as those by Dickens and Trollope, we find that
the characters are often professional and upper-class. That’s unusual: to find a form simultaneously used at both ends of the social spectrum. Even as recently as 1907, in a commentary on society called
The Social Fetich
, Lady Agnes Grove was defending
ain’t I
as respectable upper-class colloquial speech – and condemning
aren’t I
!

She was in a rapidly diminishing minority. Prescriptive grammarians had taken against
ain’t
, and it would soon become universally condemned as a leading marker of uneducated usage. There was a chorus of criticism in 1961 when the editor of
Webster’s Third New International Dictionary
decided it was so widespread, even among cultivated speakers, that he could not possibly omit it. Rarely has a single word attracted such fury. But, as
gotcha
and other non-standard spellings illustrate, it’s by no means alone (
§88
).

Trek

a word from Africa (19th century)

In 1883, Olive Schreiner published a novel in London under the pseudonym of Ralph Iron. It was called
The Story of an African Farm –
a tale about a strong, independent-minded woman working on an isolated ostrich farm. The first novel to come out of South Africa, it became a bestseller.

While she was writing her book, Schreiner knew she had a problem. How was she to present the South African setting in an intelligible way? The opening lines of her story paint a picture of the countryside. It talks about
karroo bushes, kopjes
and
sheep kraals
. How would British readers know what she was talking about?

Her solution was to put a glossary of the most important words at the front of the book. There the reader would learn that the
karroo
was a ‘wide sandy plain’, a
kopje
was ‘a small hillock’ and a
kraal
was ‘the space surrounded by a stone wall or hedged with thorn branches, into which sheep or cattle are driven at night’. The words included animals (
meerkat
, ‘a small weasel-like animal’), people (
predikant
, ‘parson’), food (
bultong
, ‘dried meat’), clothing (
kappje
, ‘a sun-bonnet’) and various domestic objects and activities. Most of the words were of Afrikaans origin, but some were adaptations of British words. An
upsitting
, for instance, was a custom in Boer courtship: ‘the man and girl are supposed to sit up together the whole night.’

It was during the 19th century that words from Africa began to make an impact on English vocabulary. Previously, there had been very few.
Yam
and
banana
had arrived during the 16th century, and a few more followed, such as
harmattan
(a type of wind) and
zebra
. In South Africa,
kraal
appears in the 18th century, first in the sense of ‘village’, then in Schreiner’s sense of ‘animal enclosure’. Hundreds of words remained local to South Africa, such as
bioscope
(‘cinema’) and
dorp
(‘village’), along with borrowings from indigenous languages, such as
maningi
(‘very’) and
induna
(‘headman’). Several became part of standard English, such as
commando, spoor
and
veld
, as well as politically loaded terms such as
resettlement
and
apartheid
. But few have achieved such general usage as
trek
.

Trek
arrived in the 1840s, meaning a journey by ox-wagon, very much associated with Boer movements in the region following the first ‘Great Trek’. It developed several senses in South African English and came to be used in a number of compounds, such as
trek path
(‘right of way’) and
trek swarm
(‘migrating honey bees’). But a century later, it was being used for any arduous overland journey in any part of the world. It became the perfect media word to describe dramatic explorations of jungles, deserts and ice caps.

Then
trek
went in a different direction. People began to use it for activities which, in Boer terms, would have seemed totally trivial. A boring or routine trip to the shops was called a
trek
. People
trekked
from home to their offices.
Trekking
holidays became popular, with
trekkers
warned to choose a level of physical commitment they could cope with. It didn’t even have to be a physical task. You could go on a
mental trek
, if you were going on an emotional journey or having difficulty thinking something out.

In the 1960s, there was an unpredictable development: a use developed with a capital
T
. Devotees of a new science fiction television series came to be called
Trekkies
or
Trekkers
(the choice was serious, as each name had its supporters and critics). In 1997 a documentary film about the fans was called
Trekkies
. The term began to be used beyond the series: anyone obsessed with fantasy space travel might be labelled a
trekkie
(with a small
t
). Thanks to
Star Trek
, the word has regained its ‘long-distance’ meaning, boldly going where no loanword has gone before.

Hello

progress through technology (19th century)

It’s such a natural expression, used every day as a greeting. Surely this is one of those words which has been in the language for ever? In fact, its first recorded use is less than 200 years old.

English people have been using
h
-words to catch each other’s attention since Anglo-Saxon times.
Hey
and
ho
are recorded in the 13th century, and
hi
in the 15th.
Hollo
,
hillo
,
holla
,
halloo
and other shouts used in hunting are known from the 16th century, and are doubtless much older. For greetings, one of the words used by the Anglo-Saxons was
hal
(‘whole’, ‘healthy’) in such expressions as ‘be healthy’.
Hail
appeared in the 13th century. But we have to wait until the 19th century to see the modern greeting.

When it emerges, we find it in several spellings. All five vowels are used:
hallo
,
hello
,
hillo, hollo
and
hullo
. The variations arose because the stress in the word was on the second syllable, making it difficult to hear the quality of the vowel in the first. Today,
hello
is the usual spelling, about four times more common than
hallo
– except when authors are putting words into the mouths of policemen:
Hallo, ’allo, ’allo
says PC Palk, answering the phone in Agatha Christie’s
The Body in the Library
.

13. An early advertisement for Bell Telephones in the USA, emphasising the social role of the phone in a family context. When the telephone first arrived, there was a degree of concern that it might herald the end of traditional face-to-face social interaction. Ads like this one were intended to counter that scepticism.