English. The words. II

“Words are created.

Often they spring seemingly from nowhere. Take “dog”. For centuries the word in English was “hound” (or “hund”). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, “dog” – a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word – displaced it. No one has any idea why.

Many words are made up by writers. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us: obscene, frugal, radiance, excellent, fretful, hint, hurry, lonely and some 1700 others.

Words change by doing nothing

That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes.

Simeon Potter notes that when James II saw St Paul Cathedral he called it amusing, awful and artificial and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe and full of skilful artifice.

Sometimes the changing connotations of a word can give a new and startling sense to literary passages, as in “The Mayor of Casterbridge” where Thomas Hardy has one of his characters gaze upon”the unattractive exterior of Farfrae’s errection” or in “Bleak House” where Dickens writes that “Sir Leicester leans back in his chair and breathlessly ejaculates”.

Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement “the exception proves the rule”. Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can’t. The answer is that an earlier meaning of “prove” was “to test” and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible – the exception tests the rule.

Words are created by adding or substracting something

This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word “incomprehensibility” which consists of the root “-hen-“ and eight affixes and infixes: in, -com, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it-, -y. Even more melodic is the musical term “quasihemidemisemiquaver”, which describes a note that is equal to 128^th of a semibreve.

Many of our most common words are contractions of whole phrases – for instance, “goodbye”, a shortening of “God be with you” and “hello”, which was in Old English “hal beo thu” or “whole be thou” ”

BillBryson.MotherTongue

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English. The words. I

“If you have a morbid fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth, there is a word for it: arachibutyrophobia.
There is a word to describe the state of being a woman: muliebrity.
And there’s a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought: aposiopesis.
If you harbour an urge to look through the windows of the homes you pass, there is a word for the condition: crytoscopophilia.
When you are just dropping off to sleep and you experience that sudden sensation of falling, there is a word for it: it’s myoclonic jerk.
If you want to say that a word has a circumflex on its penultimate syllable, without saying flat out that it has a circumflex there, there is a word for it: properispomenon.
There is even a word for a figure of speech in which two connotative words linked by a conjunction express a complex notion that would normally be conveyed by an adjective and a substantive working together. It is hendiadys.”

BillBryson.MotherTongue

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JackKerouac.OnTheRoad

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

“They danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn…”

 

“Once there was Louis Armstrong blowing his beautiful top in the muds of New Orleans; before him the mad musicians who had paraded on official days and broke up their Sousa marches into ragtime. Then there was swing, and Roy Eldridge, vigorous and virile, blasting the horn for everything it had in waves of power and logic and subtlety — leaning into it with glittering eyes and a lovely smile and sending it out broadcast to rock the jazz world.”

“A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.”

“We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess–across the night…”

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