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Sean O'Donoghue

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The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English

by Henry Hitchings

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Sean O'Donoghue said: " Loved this book – amazing research. Often stating the obvious, but we hadn’t thought about it till delivered to us readymade. History is embedded in words. For example, words like sheep, pig and deer metamorphose into mutton, pork and venison as we b Loved this book – amazing research. Often stating the obvious, but we hadn’t thought about it till delivered to us readymade. History is embedded in words. For example, words like sheep, pig and deer metamorphose into mutton, pork and venison as we become more civilised. And when the words go out of fashion or whatever they refer to is no longer extant, we lose them, and their associated history. Robert McFarlane made just this point in his recent The Lost Words, in which he laments the removal from childrens’ dictionaries of many words representing the natural world he delighted in growing up in, such as acorn, bluebell and kingfisher.

An alternative title for Hitching’s book could be The Evolution of English. Just like looking at a cliff face where all the variants of Darwinian evolution are visible, words tell us about the history of the human world.

In 1604, the first monolingual English dictionary was published. Shakespeare added 1700 words to that. The Italian renaissance period was the busiest ever in new words being borrowed from other cultures, with art, music and food being the biggest contributors.

Words often start their lives as a description of things, their “thingness” and evolve into compound words …thus beach ball, motor cycle. This is not unlike placenames which are descriptive of the topography they are representing. Such is why in Wales so many places have the Welsh cym, du and Llan – valley, black and townland – in them.

In the USA, the Puritan prohibition on profanities led to rather muted alternatives such as doggone, gee whiz and drat. When the first American dictionary was published by Noah Webster much of what had proceeded as English spelling was streamlined and hence we had check replace cheque, music for musick, color for colour and labor for labour.

Much of how language evolved is still embedded in our culture. Latin had been the language of intellectuals in the middle ages , utilised in statehood, medicine and science. It was a way of claiming high moral status, with the corrollory of those who spoke in the vernacular tongue – and there was many vernacular tongues throughout the UK and Ireland – were accorded low moral status. This is where we find the origins of racism; a good example is how the Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral portrays people from the East as monsters and malformed. In the absence of any other representation, hardly surprising that such imagery took root in the public imagination, all ready to become the justification for colonialism and imperialism and the civilisation mission sold to the public.

All in all, a fascinating book, a fairly easy read and just about non-put-downable. ...more "

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— Jul 22, 2022 01:40PM

Nov 13, 2021 02:54PM · see review