Language matters

Language can be fascinating. Where do words come from? Where did ‘posh’ come from? Which writer came up with the word ‘muggle’? In which century did the word ‘input’ first get used? What’s the plural of ‘octopus’, or what is the most common vowel sound in the English language? What does DVD stand for, or RIP for that matter? Or what does the girls’ name Rose literally mean? Sometimes there are no definite answers; there are some corners and nooks of language that remain, and will perhaps forever remain, a mystery. Often language can surprise us.


For instance, did you have J. K. Rowling in your head for the ‘muggle’ question? Wrong. Or perhaps the twentieth century for the ‘input’ one? Or the nineteenth? Wrong again. Or ‘octopi’, or ‘e’ for the commonest vowel sound, or ‘Digital Versatile Disc’? Wrong, wrong, wrong. And so on, ad infinitum. Arse.

Many things about language are misunderstood, and one of the misunderstood things is that language is boring. Somehow uninteresting, merely functional, mundane, perfunctory, existing purely for us to communicate. Well, how boring. What sort of person genuinely believes this? Usually it’s the kind of people who also go around saying that sex and reproduction are the only reasons we were put on this earth, which is a little bit like saying that the only reason for wearing a watch is so that every now and then you can change its batteries, or that the sole reason for having a mobile phone is that every few days you get to charge it up and see that little battery symbol pop up on the display. Arse. Wank. Bollocks. Language is obviously the best communicative tool we have, and the chief reason we are able to create such complex things: buildings, committees, parliaments (crooked MPs with their arsepapery expenses notwithstanding), books, schools, universities, life-saving medicine and surgery, sewage systems, the telephone, the computer, the flush toilet, and so on. But with that function, that ability to talk to each other and to share complex bits of information, comes something else: the capacity to impress other people with our use of language, the right choice of the right words in the right order. (‘Where you been all my life, darling’ was probably a big hit when it was first used by our distant ancestors, as undoubtedly was ‘Do you come to this swamp often?’ and ‘Fancy a bowl of hippopotamus soup back at my cave?’) With language we can seduce, persuade, delight, injure, cause people to cry with tears of joy, laughter, pain, relief, grief, wonder…. You get the point I’m trying to make.

After all, the same is true of non-verbal language, too: we may be able to use our right arm to indicate, while cycling on a busy road, that we intend to turn right at the next junction, but we can also use the middle finger on the end of our right arm (or our left, for that matter) to tell someone in not so many words (or in fact no words at all) that it would be best if they were to quit our sight forthwith, as we have found something displeasing about their conduct and behaviour. Similarly, there’s all that stuff about women playing with their hair while on a date, or touching their knee, pointing their feet inward, licking their right thumb three times while simultaneously fingering their left breast … well, you get the idea with that. Body language is far from being merely something we use for communicative purposes, and there is a whole range of signs, gestures, and unconscious signals which we might deploy or give off without even being aware of it. (Sometimes they may be perfectly innocent, of course: a woman might keep touching her hair because she has itchy hair because she’s a tramp and only washes it once every fortnight, or she might be touching her knee because she’s got a paranoid fear that her knees will disappear any moment. You never know, is all I’m saying.)

All this is something I’ve been aware of for many years, and having taught language as a subject at University for the last couple of years, I have come to realise just how many people see language as merely something we use, like a stapler or a tin-opener or a teaspoon or a toothbrush. Students who come to University often view it thus. And who can blame them? Looking about it’s not difficult to see why you might come to the conclusion that language is merely something to be deployed like a cheese-grater or a kitchen knife. We use language as much as we ever have done before: text messages, email, online Messenger services, post-its…. And then there’s the human voice, the far-voice of the tele-phone; only now we can talk even more on the phone thanks to cheaper rates (owing to competitive phone companies), answer machines and voicemail services, and the like. And yet the language we use in such situations is often functional: I’m running late, where shall we meet, what time are you heading to the pub, and so on, et Peter cetera. I’d like to think there are other strange types out there who compose poems via text message, but I suspect we’re a minority. Then there are all the complaints from so-called purists that language is being ‘dumbed down’, that this new technology is destroying our beloved mother tongue, that children are illiterate and can only speak in txt, n that ant gr8, that sux cos l8r in life they wnt b able 2 right proper. Right? Perhaps these armchair moralisers have a point, in a way: what’s certainly true is that most of us are using language differently from how we used it fifteen or even ten years ago. But language is ever changing and that’s the point: that’s what makes it exciting. And, ironically, it is first and foremost the fact that language is functional that makes it exciting, because as the uses of language change, so language itself changes, warps, develops.

Think of a paintbrush, for instance. What do you see? Do you see a thick, broad-bristled, hefty item for dipping in a large pot of Dulux and plastering the wall in a bright, glossy shade of Apple White or Distressed Egg? Or do you see a thin, delicate instrument for dabbing at an easel with, preparatory to bringing the fine bristles of the brush into contact with the smooth, as yet unmarked canvas? In other words, do you see something functional, or something artistic? Language is a bit like that paintbrush. You can look at it either way, or perhaps both ways depending on the situation, whom you’re conversing with, and so on. That’s the beauty of it all. Twenty years ago, who had heard of a modem, or the world wide web? Well, nobody, because the world wide web had only just been invented, and even then, Tim Berners-Lee hadn’t yet invented that name for it. Or let’s go back a bit further: two hundred years ago, if you’d talked about the boredom you were feeling, people would’ve looked at you as though you’d just said sprenge my dongcock, or rump my blumberpuss. That word hadn’t been invented yet: it would not be until 1852, and Dickens’s novel Bleak House, that that word would finally join the language. The same is true of chortle, a word it is easy to take for granted; but in 1809 people wouldn’t have chortled, or done anything much except stare at you for some kind of weirdo, if you’d dropped that word into after-dinner conversation. It simply didn’t exist. It would not be until 1871 and the appearance of Lewis Carroll’s great nonsense poem ‘Jabberwocky’ that chortle would join the ranks of English words. (It’s a ‘portmanteau word’, or blend, of ‘chuckle’ and ‘snort’, by the by.) Similarly, if Gary Barlow of Take That fame, or Gary Glitter (perish the thought) showed up in 1909 they would be greeted with wry looks and bemused faces, for ‘Gary’ was nobody’s name a hundred years ago, and it would not be until a man named Frank Cooper adopted it as his showbiz sobriquet a few decades later that it would suddenly become a very popular boys’ name. Or think of a girls’ name we perhaps take for granted now: Wendy. In 1890s society you’d be looked upon as a weird sort if you had the name Wendy, and not just if you were a man. It wasn’t until J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan appeared, near the beginning of the following century, that that name would become so well known.

And then, of course, there’s a girls’ name with supposedly flowery connotations: Rose. A popular name for many years, it became even more common in the nineteenth century thanks to a vogue for feminine forenames with a horticultural flavour: Daisy, Violet, and so on. But Rose did not come from the flower; it would appear that’s a misunderstanding. The origin of the girls’ name Rose is the Germanic hros, which is interestingly enough the source of our modern word for a gramnivorous quadruped (to allude to Bitzer in Dickens’s Hard Times). Yes, hros gave us ‘horse’, but it also gave us ‘Rose’. So, next time you’re watching a rerun of Billie Piper in Doctor Who, don’t think red flowers and thorns, but long faces and big horsy willies.

The origins of words can be fascinating. Who could fail to love a language where the words for something you paint on, something that politicians do before every election, and something you smoke to get high, are all etymologically linked? (I refer, but of course, to canvas, canvassing, and cannabis. I could also have thrown hemp in there.) The Middle English poet Layamon was the first writer (at least on record) to use the word ‘muggle’, in the 1270s, long before J. K. Rowling used it in her Harry Potter series. Posh does not come from ‘Port Out Starboard Home’, as is often claimed, but possibly has its origins in a nineteenth-century fisherman whose manly physique was much admired by Edward Fitzgerald, the poet who translated the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The truth is, nobody knows for sure. It’s a mystery. The word ‘input’ was first used in the fourteenth century, when John Wyclif included it in his translation of the Bible, long before computers had come along.

To return flittingly to those other questions I so tantalisingly teased you with in that opening paragraph, the commonest vowel sound in the English language is the schwa, the name for the unvoiced vowel sound that abounds in English words (it is the first sound in the word ‘abound’, the first in ‘about’, and the first, third, and fourth syllables in the word ‘presentable’). It’s a sort of … uh sound. And yes, the plural of ‘octopus’ is ‘octopuses’, not ‘octopi’, because it’s of Greek rather than Latin origin (so fungus, cactus, locus, and other Latin words get the ‘i’ treatment, but ‘octopus’ doesn’t). DVD officially stands for nothing, according to the people who developed the technology, and RIP stands for requiescat in pace, a Latin phrase meaning ‘may he or she rest in peace’. A slight difference from ‘Rest in Peace’, but an important one, mefeels.

So why, if language is so vibrant, so fertile and so fascinating, do we so often find ourselves at a loss for words?

‘Talking in bed ought to be easiest,’ as Philip Larkin once wrote. ‘Lying together there goes back so far.’ ‘Lying’ is meant to hit us with its full ambiguous force, of course, old horse. How many times have you found yourself in a situation where words just aren’t enough, where they seem insufficient to express how you are feeling? Never? Well, lucky you, you smug, verbally dextrous and linguistically well endowed so-and-so. But not so for me—and I say this as one who can talk and talk and talk—because every now and then I’ll find myself feeling the inadequacy of language to represent fully what I feel. Words are not enough, as those great philosophers, Steps, once sang. Or maybe that’s arrogance on my part: what I probably really mean is my own inadequacy with language. But, as Blackadder reminds us, too often too late it is one thinks of what one should have said. But one fact remains true: language is the best tool we have for affecting those around us, and it’s a bloody good one.

Take poetry, for instance. Take these lines from Antony and Cleopatra:

It is well done, and fitting for a princess
Descended of so many royal kings.
Ah, soldier!

These lines come right near the end of the play, just after Cleopatra has killed herself with the deadly asp. They are spoken by Charmian, Cleopatra’s friend and attendant, directly before she herself dies, having followed her queen’s example and applied the asp to herself. Soldiers have burst in, and, seeing the dead body of Cleopatra, one of them has asked Charmian, ‘Is this well done?’ Charmian’s response is what I just quoted above. There is nothing particularly striking about the words: as dying words in Shakespeare they’re hardly up there with Hamlet’s ‘the rest is silence’ or Othello’s ‘I kissed thee ere I killed thee’. And nor should they be, necessarily: Cleopatra, as title character, is given the best lines (her aposiopesis-tastic ‘What should I stay—’), with her attendant being given what seem to be rather perfunctory dying words: ‘It is well done, and fitting for a princess / Descended of so many royal kings.’ The first four words merely echo the soldier’s question (‘Is this well done?’) while the rest make some platitudinous remark about Cleopatra’s royal ancestry. But it is those last two words, right before she dies, that are interesting: ‘Ah, soldier!’ As T. S. Eliot once remarked (he was a rather big fan of these lines himself), there is nothing particularly dramatic or poetic about those two words, but there is yet something in them, something that goes beyond what they seem to be saying. What does ‘Ah, soldier!’ mean, anyway? Is Charmian crying out in pain, because she can feel the poison going to work on her? Is she crying out at the hopelessness of love and the human spirit? Or is it merely a cry of resignation, because she is now ready to die? Who can say? But there is something within those two words, and they add far more to the scene than can ever be (sufficiently) put into words by yours truly. That was Shakespeare’s gift with language.

I s’pose I cannot leave off with this blog without spending a few moments contemplating fuck and other words. Swearing is indissolubly and inextricably a part of language. This fact is ingrained within the expressions we hear so many folk use: Mind your language, don’t use language like that, and so on, and so on. People who object to swearing in itself are an odd bunch. Usually they’re not entirely sure why they object to it. ‘Don’t use a word like that,’ our elders would say to us. ‘But why not? It’s only a part of language.’ ‘Because I don’t like it.’ ‘But why?’ ‘I just don’t.’ Well, glad that’s sorted then. Invariably these people have no grasp of the history or real connotation of the words they so inexplicably and arbitrarily object to. For instance, they’ll object to cunt, a word that was for many centuries a harmless term for the female pudenda, while condoning—indeed, often positively espousing—the word vagina, a word which literally means ‘sword sheath’, from the Latin. What makes this linguistic ignorance so much worse is that it is usually women who raise whiny objections to ‘the C-word’ for the female part. Well, that’s okay then. You don’t want us to use the word cunt because it’s offensive, but you’re happy to see your genitals as nothing more than the place for a man to stick his weapon. Feminism is alive and well!

The same is true of the word I used just then to try to refer politely to a woman’s ‘part’: the female pudenda. It comes from a Latin word meaning literally ‘shame’ or ‘shameful’, and is linked to the word ‘impudent’ (which means literally ‘without shame’). Okay, so you women should be ashamed of what you have between your legs (or don’t have: after all, a notorious slang term for the female genitals in Shakespeare’s day was ‘nothing’, which also says a lot about past attitudes to women and female sexuality). Good, good, doubleplusgood. Well done. I don’t mean this to sound like a directionless—or all too directed—rant about women in general, for my intentions could not be further from that. But there is a certain class of person—and it is, it would seem, usually a lady person—who objects to sexual swear words, in some misguided attempt to show ‘standards’ or ‘moral compasses’, or some other arsywank no-nonsense nonsense. Nuff said.

But that’s the point, I know: language changes, the force and power that words are charged with changes. Vagina has lost its sheathy connotations, just as cunt has somehow acquired some distasteful overtones. The same is true of terms for the act of sex: many people object to fuck, whereas few would object to swive, although in Chaucer’s day, and for many centuries thereafter, it was far more offensive to the average lady (and as I’ve already said, it is mostly women, I find, who voice their ‘offendedness’ at so-called ‘bad’ language). And I use the word ‘offensive’ with a quiet deliberateness: people are always ‘offended’ by swearing. Never hurt, or scared, or upset: no, no real feelings except being ‘offended’. Well—so fucking what?

Swearing can be a remarkable way of adding expression and flavour and force to what you’re saying. And I’m not just talking about ‘yobs’ and ‘hoodies’ and other mysterious figures on the streets of a Saturday night, where ‘fucking’ has to be inserted between every other pair of words. Take the legendary moment when Sid Vicious (late lamented guitarist with the Sex Pistols) was asked whether, when he made his music, he thought about the man in the street. Sid answered, ‘No. I’ve met the man in the street: he’s a cunt.’ Substitute any other word—a word less monosyllabic, less harsh in its consonants, less Anglo-Saxon—for ‘cunt’, and it wouldn’t be as witty an epigram as it is. ‘No. I’ve met the man in the street: he’s a damnable fellow.’ No, somehow that’s not going to have me quoting it endlessly in conversation as one of my favourite things I’ve ever heard. So, anyone who says swearing is a sign of a lack of vocabulary or verbal dexterity is, well, just a See You Next Tuesday (a synt, presumably: how come the people who invented that euphemistic substitute, presumably because they saw the expletive itself as a sign of poor linguistic skill, have such a poor grasp of spelling and acronyms themselves?).

So, language is never really merely functional. There is so much to the way we use it: intonation, pitch, speed, pauses, silence, loudness, quietness, and—lest we forget—the words themselves, the words we choose to use. One book which I would recommend to any amateur of all things linguistic, or to anyone who would like to learn many fascinating things about the English language, is Mario Pei’s The Story of Language. But there is also the wonderful book by Bill Bryson, Mother Tongue, which I would also heartily recommend. If you’re up for teaching yourself about the English language in a full-on academic way, no holds barred, then I have to recommend Rob Penhallurick’s Studying the English Language, which is written in a lively, engaging, and genuinely witty style, which puts my own poor attempts at humour here to shame.

Enjoy language. Go, let the words drip from your tongue like Lyle’s Golden Syrup. Mmm.… You know you want to.