The Story of English in 100 Words (7 page)

an early exclamation (10th century)

Imagine the scene. You are in front of an audience, about to make an announcement or give a speech. Everyone is noisy. Some may have had too much to drink. You need to quieten people down. You’ve no hammer to bang against a table. There’s no spoon to clink against a glass. All you have is your voice. At least you can shout. But what will you say? ‘Ladies and gentlemen …’? ‘Quiet, please …’? ‘Excuse me …’? They all seem a little weak.

The poet-minstrels in Anglo-Saxon mead-halls had the same problem. They were called
scops
(pronounced ‘shops’), and their role was to tell the heroic stories of the Germanic people to the assembled warriors. The scops must have had prodigious memories. The epic poem
Beowulf
is 3,182 lines long – that’s about the same length as Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet
– and, if it was recited in one go, without interruptions, it would have taken a scop well over three hours. But first he had to call the assembly to order. And he did this with a single word, which appears as the opening word of that poem:
Hwæt!
It is one of the first oral exclamations in English to achieve a literary presence. Nine Old English poems begin with the word.

How was
hwæt
pronounced? The letter
æ
was like the short
a
of modern English
cat
as spoken by someone from the north of England. The
h
shows
that the
w
was pronounced with aspiration – a puff of air. Anyone today who makes a distinction in their speech between
whales
and
Wales
is using the old
hw
sound. And if we turn the whole word into modern spelling, it appears as
What!

Hwæt
certainly packs an auditory punch. Scholars usually translate it as ‘Lo!’, or as a story-telling opener such as ‘Well now’ or ‘So’, but nothing quite captures the short sharp impact of a
Hwæt!
With its open vowel and high-pitched final consonant, it’s a vocal clap of the hands. We can easily imagine a hall of warriors falling silent, after such an attention-call.

What!
continued to have an exclamatory use throughout the Middle Ages, when the word came to be spelled in the modern way and gradually broadened its meaning. It began to express surprise or shock. It could be used to hail or greet someone, in the manner of a modern
Hello!
And it acted as a summons. In
The Tempest
(IV.i.33), Prospero uses it to call his spirit-servant to him: ‘What, Ariel! My industrious servant, Ariel!’

We don’t use
what
as a greeting or summons any more. The closest we get to that is in the phrase
What ho!
, which lasted well into the 20th century in Britain, and is still sometimes heard. Its fashionable use among the upper classes led to a neat parody by P. G. Wodehouse in
My Man Jeeves
(1919):

‘What ho!’, I said. ‘What ho!’ said Motty. ‘What ho! What ho!’ ‘What ho! What ho! What ho!’ After that it seemed rather difficult to go on with the conversation.

What!
is still used today as an exclamation of surprise or astonishment, often tinged with irritation or anger. We can expand it with an intensifying phrase:
What the devil! What the dickens! What on earth!
And if our emotion is so great that we’re at a real loss for words, we simply leave the sentence hanging in the air:
What in the name of …! What the …!

What
, spelled
wot
, was especially visible as an exclamation in the mid-20th century, during and after the Second World War, when everything was in short supply. All over Europe appeared the drawing of a man with a small round head, a long nose and two hands, peering over the top of a wall. He was called Mr Chad, and he was always complaining about shortages, using such phrases as ‘Wot, no eggs?’ or ‘Wot, no petrol?’ In the USA he was called Kilroy, and a similar cartoon contained the caption ‘Kilroy was here’. In Australia, ‘Foo was here’.

The origin of
Chad
is uncertain, but it’s likely to derive from the nickname of the cartoonist George Edward Chatterton, who was known to everyone as
Chat
. The caption became a catch-phrase, and it stayed popular long after wartime shortages disappeared. It’s still with us. In recent months I’ve seen the drawing on a wall where someone was complaining about the lack of a good mobile phone connection. The writing said simply: ‘Wot, no signal?’

3. The name may vary, but the face remains the same – one of the most widely travelled pieces of 20th-century graffiti. Theories abound as to the origins of the names Chad, Foo and Kilroy, with several real-life candidates suggested. The character has been given other names too. In the British army, for example, he was called ‘Private Snoops’.

Bone-house

a word-painting (10th century)

What comes into your mind when you hear the word
bone-house
? It sounds like a building where someone has put a number of bones – animal bones, perhaps. Or maybe human. I once visited an ancient monastery church in Belgium, and in the crypt, on shelf after shelf, were the skulls of innumerable generations of monks. That felt like a bone-house. But whichever way you look at it, bone-houses are for the dead. Charnel-houses, we would call them these days – from the Latin word for ‘flesh’,
carnis
. Flesh-houses.

The Anglo-Saxons used the word.
Ban-hus
(pronounced ‘bahn-hoos’) it was then. But they used it to talk about something very different: the human body while still alive. It paints a wonderful picture. That’s what we all are, at the end of the day. Bone-houses.

Evidently the picture was an appealing one, for the poets coined several words for the same idea. They also describe the body as a ‘bone-hall’ (
bansele
, pronounced ‘bahn-selluh’), a ‘bone-vessel’ (
ban-fæt
, ‘bahn-fat’), a ‘bone-dwelling’ (
ban-cofa
, ‘bahn-cohvuh’) and a ‘bone-enclosure’ (
ban-loca
, ‘bahn-lockuh’). The human mind, or spirit, was a
banhuses weard
– ‘guardian, or ward, of the bone-house’.

This sort of vivid description is found throughout Anglo-Saxon poetry. It’s one of the earliest signs of an impulse to create figures of speech in English
literature. It was an impulse that extended well beyond English, for similar word creations appear in the early poetry of other Germanic languages, such as the Viking tongue, Old Norse. But the Anglo-Saxon poets really took it to heart. There are over a thousand such descriptions in the great Old English saga
Beowulf
.

The coinages are called
kennings
, a word adapted from the Old Icelandic language.
Kenning
is from the verb
kenna
, ‘to know’, and it captures the idea that these coinages have a meaning that is more insightful than can be expressed by a single word.
Ken
is still used as a verb in Scots English and in some northern dialects of England. And we still hear it as a noun in the phrase
beyond our ken
.

The poets loved kennings, because they were opportunities to vary their descriptions when they told long stories of heroes and battles. Stories of this kind repeatedly refer to the same kinds of events, such as a battle, or a banquet or an army crossing the sea. We can easily imagine how a story could get boring if the storyteller said ‘And he crossed the sea in a boat’ a third, fourth or tenth time. How much more appealing would be fresh, vivid descriptions – especially ones that would suit the rhythm of the verse and echo the sounds of other words in his lines.

So, what could a ship be? A
wave floater, sea goer, sea-house
or
sea steed
. And the sea? A
seal bath, fish home, swan road
or
whale way
. Anything could be described using a kenning. A woman is a
peace-weaver
,
a traveller is an
earth-walker
, a sword is a
wolf of wounds
, the sun is a
sky candle
, the sky is the
curtain of the gods
, blood is
battle sweat
or
battle icicle
. There are hundreds more.

Kennings don’t seem to have been much used outside of poetry, and they fell out of use after the Anglo-Saxon period. But the same poetic impulse lies behind many compound words. We hear it still when a scientist is described as an
egghead
, or a criminal as a
lawbreaker
or a boxer as a
prize-fighter
. But we don’t seem to take the same joy in creating vivid alternative descriptions as the Anglo-Saxons did.

Perhaps we should. Imagine a football sports commentary, for example, in which the commentators used kennings. They’d be talking about
net-aimers
and
ball-strikers
and perhaps, when things got exciting,
score-cuddles, card-offs
and
ref-haters
. Am I misremembering, or have I sometimes heard the occasional off-the-cuff kenning in a commentary? If so, without realising it, the bone-house is tapping into a tradition that is a thousand years old.

Brock

a Celtic arrival (10th century)

During the 11th century, several books were written which listed the names of plants and animals, especially in relation to their medicinal properties. In one of the first, around the year 1000, we read this:
‘Sum fyðerfete nyten is, ðæt we nemnaþ taxonem, ðæt ys broc on Englisc.’ Translation: ‘There is a four-footed animal, which we call taxonem, that is brock in English.’

Brock
, the Old English name for a badger. It was the everyday name until the 16th century, when
badger
took over in standard English. Why the change? Probably because
brock
had developed a number of unpleasant associations: people would talk about a
stinking brock
, and by 1600 the word had come to be applied to people who were dirty or who behaved in an underhand way – much as someone might use the word
skunk
today. In Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
(II.v.102), Sir Toby Belch sees Malvolio puzzling over the meaning of a letter and says
Marry, hang thee, brock!
Malvolio is indeed, badger-like, rooting out the sense. But Toby is also calling him a stinker.

Badger
, by contrast, had positive associations in the 16th century. The word probably comes from
badge
, the white mark on the animal’s head being its most striking feature. Badges had strongly positive associations, being chiefly associated with the ‘badges of arms’ used by knights. The word was also being used, in the sense of a ‘distinguishing sign’, in the 16th-century translations of the Bible. So if people wanted an unemotional way of talking about the animal,
badger
would be more appealing.

But
brock
didn’t disappear. It stayed as the everyday name for the animal in regional dialects all over the British Isles and was especially popular in the
north of England. Then it started to creep back into standard English – as a name.
Brock the badger
. It has appeared in countless sympathetic accounts of badgers by naturalists, and is the regular name used in children’s stories, most famously by Alison Uttley. Few other dialect words have achieved quite the same press.