History in English words

by Owen Barfield

There is, however, another historical event which had a far more universal and direct bearing on English words, and that is the Revival of Learning. The new intercourse with the ancient literatures of Greece and Rome naturally brought into English a positive stream of “literary borrowings”. At first these were mostly Latin words. If we try to imagine an English from which such words as accommodate, capable, capacious, compute, corroborate, distinguish, efficacy, estimate, experiment, insinuate, investigate, and a host of others equally common are as yet absent, we may partly realize what an important part was played by the Renaissance in producing the language in which we speak and think. There is indeed good evidence that the stream of new words flowed too fast at this time for ordinary people to keep up with it. For instance, many of the Latin words that were borrowed have since fallen out of use. At the beginning of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon, who is not a fantastic writer, was using such unfamiliar expressions as contentation, contristation, digladiation, morigeration, redargution, ventosity, ... and somewhat before this, when the Classical influx was at its height, it was conspicuous enough to call forth several amusing parodies. We remember Shakespeare’s Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Sir Thomas Wilson includes in his Arte of Rhetorike a fictitious letter applying for a church benefice, in which he satirizes as follows the Klondyke rush after fashionable Latinity:

Pondering, expending, and revoluting with myself, your ingent affability, and ingenious capacity for mundane affairs: I cannot but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other. For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative, and domestical superiority, if the fecundity of your ingeny had not been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?...

Now this outcrop of linguistic parody is significant for other reasons too. It reminds us that the English language had at last become “self-conscious”. In former times the struggle between different ways of saying the same thing, between the old and the new, the native and the foreign, had generally worked itself out under the surface, amid the unconscious preferences of the mass of the people. Thus, the old English translators who rendered the Latin ‘exodus’ as outfaring and ‘discipulus’ (disciple) as learning-boy, were not consciously trying to keep the Latin words out; nor did the fourteenth-century author of a book, which he called the Againbite of Inwit, have any academic horror, as far as we know, of the new Latin borrowings remorse and conscience, with one of which, at least, he must have been familiar. The same may be said of Wyclif, who translated ‘resurrectio’ againrising and ‘immortalitas’ undeadliness. These old writers anglicized because it came natural to them to anglicize, just as the next generation began to prefer the Latin words. But it was not so in Italy, nor in France, in both of which countries poets had long ago written careful treatises on the beloved medium of their art, their native language. And now, after the Revival of Learning, in England, too, scholars and literary men began to notice such things. Counterbalancing the enthusiasm for Latin and Greek, there arose a “Purist” movement of just the kind which has had such a powerful effect on the development of modern German. People tried to expel all “foreign” words from the language; Sir John Cheke began a translation of the New Testament in which none but native words were to be used; and we find in his Matthew moond for lunatic, hundreder for centurion, frosent (from-sent) for apostle, crossed for crucified, freshman for proselyte, and many other equally odd-sounding concoctions. To look back in this way on the uncertainty and chaos which reigned at the beginning of the seventeenth century is to intensify our admiration for the scholarship and poetic taste displayed by the devout compilers of the Authorised Version.

If we were to look for another symptom of this sometimes pedantic self-consciousness, we could find it in the modern way of spelling debt and doubt. The old orthography, det and dout, is a perfectly correct English rendering of the French words from which they are taken, but the scholars of the Renaissance, anxious to show the ultimate derivation from the Latin stems ‘deb’ and ‘dub’, inserted an entirely unnecessary “b” into the words, and there it has stayed ever since. Sometimes, too, these Elizabethan dons made learned howlers, as in the now abandoned spelling abhominable, which arose from a quite false idea that that adjective is derived from the Latin ‘ab’ (from) and ‘homo’ (man).

One can also get a curiously vivid sense of the way in which new Latin words had been streaming into the language during the sixteenth century from Bacon’s literary style. He is so fond of placing a Latin and an English word side by side, in order to express what is virtually a single idea, that two consecutive pages of the Advancement of Learning supply no less than ten examples of this habit. Among them are immoderate and overweening, action and business, charge and accusation, eloquence and speech. To understand the exact effect which this kind of writing must have had on the ears of his contemporaries we must try and realize the faintly novel and difficult sound with which many of these Latin syllables would still be ringing. No such effort is required, however, to comprehend the way in which this deliberate duplication must have helped to familiarize English people with the sound and meaning of the new words.

Very soon the Greek language too began to be drawn upon, though never to quite the same extent as Latin. Thus, English of the fifteenth century must also be thought of as a language in which hundreds of familiar words like apology, apostrophe, bucolic, climax, drama, emphasis, encyclopedia, epidemic, epilogue, episode, hypothesis, hysterical, paragraph, parallel, paraphrase, physical, do not yet exist, for these are all examples of words which came in with the Renaissance.[17] The number of technical terms of art and literature is particularly noticeable, and it was now that the foundations were laid of that almost automatic system whereby a new Greek-English word is coined to mark each advance that is made in science, and especially in mechanical science. Automatic is itself an example, and it is hardly necessary to add chronometer, dynamo, magneto, metronome, telescope, theodolite, thermometer,...

But though the stern lovers of their native tongue were thus hopelessly outclassed, yet the mere existence of the conservative feeling which they tried to voice must have acted as a useful brake on the too indiscriminate adoption of new words. The English language was, in fact, settling down. It was in the future to receive countless additions—never to change its very essence as it had done in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. And thus, as we look on towards the modern period, we find only fewer and more scattered historical vestiges. But if we can no longer expect etymology to tell us anything approaching to a complete and coherent tale, it will nevertheless still light up for us from different angles different little portions of that dark, mysterious mass, the past.

By the sixteenth century, for example, that peculiarly English characteristic, the love of sport, had already begun to make its mark on the language. Sport itself is an abbreviation of ‘disport’, a French word meaning ‘to carry oneself in a different direction from that of one’s ordinary business’. It is interesting to observe how both the form and meaning of the English word have diverged from their origin, and how they have since been reborrowed into French and most of the other languages of Europe. Italian tailors will even use the vocable to describe a roll of loud check cloth! Of the older sports, hawking has given us allure, haggard, rebate, and reclaim. The Latin ‘reclamare’ had meant ‘to cry out against’ or ‘to contradict’; it was only in hawking that it acquired its present sense of ‘calling back’ from the cries that were uttered to summon the hawk back to the wrist. Allure is from the old lure, an apparatus for recalling the birds, and haggard is a word of obscure etymology which was used of a wild hawk. Forte and foible are old fencing terms, describing the strong and weak (feeble) points of a sword. Couple, muse, relay, retrieve (French ‘retrouver’), run riot, ruse, sagacious, tryst, and worry we owe to hunting, as also the development of the Latin ‘sentire’ into the English word scent. Of these the most interesting are perhaps muse, which is supposed to be derived from the same word as muzzle, and ruse, another form of rush. The hounds were said to ‘muzzle’ when they sniffed the air in doubt about the scent, and a ruse was a doubling of the hunted animal on its own tracks. Rove (but not rover) is from archery, meaning in the first place ‘to shoot arrows at an arbitrarily selected target’. Bias, bowl over, and rub in the phrase ‘there’s the rub’ are from bowls, crestfallen and white feather from cockfighting, and chess, check, checkmate, cheque, and chequer come to us through the Arabian from Persian, the central word being a corruption of the Persian ‘Shah mat’, meaning ‘The Shah (the King) is dead’. It is not so generally known that all the varied meanings of these words are metaphors taken either from the game or from the board on which it is played.

The more modern sports do not yet seem to have provided us with many new words, but there is a promising tendency to transmute some of their technical terms into lively idiom. In this way we can use, for example, to sprint, to put on a spurt, the last lap, clean bowled, to take his middle stump, to skate on thin ice, to kick off, to tee off, one up,...; and modern games have also been instrumental in preserving from oblivion the odd old French word bisque, of unknown origin, which came over to England with the now nearly obsolete game of tennis, as well as the French-Scottish caddie.