The Story of English in 100 Words (15 page)

Taffeta
is ultimately from Persian, a language we don’t normally think of as a source for English vocabulary; but over the years, either directly or indirectly, it has supplied English with a surprising number of words (
§48
). You are entering an originally Persian linguistic world if you ever find yourself sitting on a
divan
in a
caravan
, wearing a
scarlet
or
lilac shawl
, eating
couscous
, having been
checkmated
by a
rook
in
chess
and watching ‘The Day of the
Jackal
’. The shawl would have to be taffeta, of course.

Information(s)

(un)countable nouns (14th century)

It’s one of the commonest errors heard when people are learning English as a foreign language. They say such things as ‘I want to buy some furnitures’, ‘I’d like some advices’ and ‘Do you have any informations about that?’ Or they use the singular form, and talk about
a furniture
,
an advice
,
an information
.

Teachers know why such things happen. It’s often interference from the student’s mother tongue. In French, for example,
information
is used as a plural when it means ‘news’, so French learners assume the same thing happens in English. Teachers sort it out by getting learners to say
a piece of information
, and suchlike. And they draw attention to the important distinction between nouns that are
countable
in English (such as
eggs
,
chairs
and
elephants
) and those
that aren’t –
uncountable
nouns such as
information
.

However, we mustn’t fall into the trap of thinking that words like these can never vary. In fact, when
information
arrived in English from French in the 14th century, it was also used as a countable noun, with the meaning of ‘a charge’ or ‘accusation’. Someone might
make informations
about you. And in law, this countable usage remains today in various technical senses.

It was used as a countable noun in everyday English too, in the sense of ‘a piece of advice’ or ‘a piece of news’. Chaucer talks about
wise informations and teachings
. Coverdale’s Bible has
informations and documents of wisdom
. And usages such as
reliable informations
and
latest informations
can be found in print written by native speakers right up to the present day. At the same time as all this was going on, of course,
information
was developing its uncountable use, which is the most common use today in this
information age
.

The message is plain. Words can be countable or uncountable depending on the sense we have in mind when we use them. Before the 20th century,
tea
and
coffee
were uncountable, apart from in specialist settings where types of tea or coffee were being identified. But in recent times we have seen the development from ‘Would you like tea/coffee?’ to ‘Would you like a cup of tea/coffee?’ to ‘Would you like a tea/coffee?’ and such usages as ‘Two teas/coffees, please’. We also say ‘I like tea/coffee’ and ‘Would you like some tea/coffee’. These words have two uses today.

Many words switch in this way. We eat
cake
and
a cake.
We play
piano
and
a piano
. We hear
noise
and
a noise
. We turn on
a light
to let some
light
in. The process works the other way round too. Countable nouns can become uncountable. I can imagine a children’s story about a family of moths discussing what they’re going to have for lunch today. ‘I’m eating coat’, says one. ‘I tried some coat yesterday, and it wasn’t very nice’, says another, ‘I prefer hat, personally’. Well, why not?

Gaggle

a collective noun (15th century)

I think it went something like this. A group of monks, wondering how to pass the time on a cold, dark winter’s evening in the 15th century, invent a word game. ‘Let’s think up words for groups of things’, says one. ‘What do we call a group of cows?’ ‘A herd.’ ‘A group of bees?’ ‘A swarm.’ ‘A group of geese?’ ‘A flock.’ Words like
herd
and
swarm
had been in the language since Anglo-Saxon times. There weren’t many of them, and the few that were available had been used for all kinds of things. People talked about a
herd of cranes, wrens, deer, swans, gnats
and more. The game must have palled after a while.

Then someone had a bright idea. ‘Let’s think up
better words. What would be a really clever way of talking about geese?’ ‘A cackle of geese, maybe?’ ‘Not bad, but that better suits hens. What about
gaggle
? It goes better with goose because of the
g
’s? What do you all think?’ ‘Agreed? Write it down, Brother John.’

And Brother John did. Or maybe it was Dame Juliana. She was the prioress of Sopwell nunnery, near St Albans in Hertfordshire, and her name appears in a collection of material on hunting, heraldry and folklore that was printed in 1486, called
The Book of St Albans
. It’s one of the first English printed books, and it contains a list of some 200 collective nouns. Several are traditional expressions, such as
herd
. But many seem to be inventions. This is where we find
a muster of peacocks, an unkindness of ravens, a watch of nightingales, a charm of goldfinches
and dozens more. But the list goes well beyond animals. We find
a diligence of messengers, a superfluity of nuns, a doctrine of doctors, a sentence of judges, a prudence of vicars
and
a non-patience of wives
. And people tried out fresh combinations. ‘A gaggle of geese?’ ‘What about a gaggle of women?’ ‘Write that down, Brother John.’ He did. A
gaggle of women
is recorded in a book written around 1470. An early sexist joke.

Why do I think this is the sort of thing that happened? Because this is a game people still happily play today, and human nature hasn’t changed that much in 500 years. A great deal of entertainment can be derived from thinking up the funniest way
of describing a group of ‘X’ – where X can be anything from dog handlers to dentists. What’s the best collective noun for politicians, or undertakers, or linguists? Competitions have produced some fine examples. I made my own collection a few years ago, and found many that deserve prizes. Here’s a top ten:

An absence of waiters
A rash of dermatologists
A shoulder of agony aunts
A clutch of car mechanics
A vat of chancellors
A bout of estimates
A lot of auctioneers
A mass of priests
A whored of prostitutes
A depression of weather forecasters
An exces’s of apostrophes

And still they come. In recent times I’ve encountered
a crash of software, an annoyance of mobile phones
and
a bond of British secret agents
.

Doable

a mixing of languages (15th century)

How many English words do you know? People tend to seriously underestimate the size of their personal vocabulary. They think that it’s only a few thousand words. But if you were to take a dictionary and work your way through, ticking the words you know, you’d be pleasantly surprised. The total would be at least 50,000.

This figure seems less surprising when we reflect on how easy it is to make up new words. A single word can generate a whole family.
Happy, happily, happiness, unhappy, unhappily, unhappiness, happy-go-lucky, happy-hour, happy-dust, happy-hearted, happy-clappy, trigger-happy, slap-happy
… The prefixes (such as
un-
) and the suffixes (such as
-ly
and
-ness
) are especially important in building up our vocabulary. There are just over a hundred of them in everyday English, and at least one will be found in nearly half the words in the language. Most of them came in from Latin and French during the Middle Ages. That’s when we find a flood of new words beginning with such forms as
con-, de-, dis
and
ex-
, and ending with such forms as
-ment, -tion, -ity
and
-able
.

The French suffix
-able
alone produced hundreds of words. It was immediately used not only with French loanwords, such as
agreeable
and
changeable
, but also with Old English words to produce such forms as
knowable
and
doable
.
Doable
, first recorded in the mid-1400s, is a good choice to represent the class.
Do
is one of the earliest known English verbs, found in some of the first Anglo-Saxon texts, and here it is happily being used with a French suffix. It shows that word-coiners are no respecter of origins.

Another flood of creations began when
un-
started to be used with
-able
words, in the 14th century, so
we get
unknowable, unthinkable
and many more. Then a remarkable thing happened. The
-able
was added to two-element verbs. We find
get-at-able
and
come-atable
, and then
unget-at-able
and
uncome-at-able
. Some writers went over the top. Ben Jonson coined
un-inone-breath-utterable
. But the basic pattern became very popular. Since the 12th century there have been hundreds of coinages, such as
undryupable
and
unkeepoffable
. Not all have achieved a permanent place in the language, but some, such as
unputdownable
,
unswitchoffable
and
unwearoutable
, are often used. And a few have developed their own linguistic families. What is the state or quality of ‘being get-at-able’? The 19th century provided the answer.
Get-at-ability. Get-at-ableness
.

Matrix

a word from Tyndale (16th century)

Ask most young people what
matrix
means and they will tell you. It is the name of the computer-simulated reality which will imprison the minds of human beings in the not-so-distant future, and it has a capital
M
. They are thinking of the 1999 science-fiction action film starring Keanu Reeves. This is as far away from the Bible as it is possible to get, but the link is there, linguistically. For the first clear use of the word
matrix
is in an English translation of the Gospel of St Luke (2: 23) made in 1525 by William Tyndale.