Words: The ungothroughsomeness of stuff

A wonderful old book on the English language by Professor Meiklejohn

I have a wonderful old book called The English Language – Grammar, History, Literature by Professor Meiklejohn. It was printed in 1905.

It is full of interesting stuff about the making of the English language and I dare say I will return to it several times to share some of its gems.

There is a fascinating section on the effect of Norman French on the language used in Britain after William the Conqueror (1066 and all that). We often see lists of the new words given to the language by the invaders, but we don’t so often hear about the losses from the previous Anglo-Saxon vocabulary.

To paraphrase the book, before the coming of the Normans, the English language was in the habit of forming new compounds with ease and effect, but afterwards this power disappeared and ready-made French or Latin words usurped home-grown compounds.

A statue of Anglo-Saxon King Alfred in Winchester, Hampshire

Thus the Anglo-Saxon words were pushed out and we had:
Despair for wanhope
Suspicion for wantrust
Auction for bidding-sale
Disciple for learning-knight
Arithmetic for rime-craft
Treasure for gold-hoard
Library for book-hoard
Agriculture for earth-tilth
Residence for wonstead

Don’t you just love those old words?

The champion of Anglo-Saxon around the time of the King Alfred celebrations in 1849 was a Dorset poet called William Barnes, who sought to restore the English language of his time to some kind of modern equivalent of its earlier form.

As well as the Norman French, he wished that we would throw out Latin-based words and replace them with good old Anglo-Saxon words. Thus an “omnibus” (that’s what the Victorians called buses) should be a “folkwain” and “the impenetrability of matter” should become “the ungothroughsomeness of stuff”.

He also had another aim, however, being most explicit on the matter of Old English as a subject for schools, as the preface to his book Se Gefylsta makes clear:

A portrait of Dorset poet and teacher William Barnes by George Stuckey

“The learning of Anglo-Saxon would be found …a wit-sharpening exercise of the mind, as the same kind as that of learning any other dead language, and… worthy of a place in the youthful mind, – it is to be hoped that Anglo-Saxon may yet take a place, …in the English school-room, if not on the desk of the grammar school.”

Returning to Meiklejohn, we hear that the ancient Greeks and modern Germans also had/have the power of making compound words in high degree.

For example, the Greeks had a 14-syllable word roughly translated as:
“Meanly-rising-early-and-hurrying-to-the tribunal-to-denounce-another-for-an-infraction-of-the-law-concerning-the-exportation-of-figs” – which means “sycophant”.

The Germans say iron-path for railway, hand-shoe for glove and finger-hat for thimble.

We used to do this, too, with descriptions like want-wit, find-fault, mumble-news (for tale-bearer), pinch-penny (for miser) and slugabed.

We also had stone-cold, heaven-bright, honey-sweet, snail-slow, nut-brown, lily-livered, earth-wandering, wind-dried, thunder-blasted, death-doomed etc…

Gerard Manley Hopkins

This sort of hyphenated language has been used as a technique by poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas.

In his lengthy “Wreck of the Deutschland”, about five nuns who drowned in 1875, Hopkins piles on the adjectives…

“For the infinite air is unkind,
And the sea flint-flake, black-backed in the regular blow.
Sitting Eastnortheast, in cursed quarter, the wind;
Wiry and white-fiery and whirlwind-swivelled snow
Spins to the widow-making unchilding unfathering deeps.”

Dylan Thomas, painted by Augustus John

Meanwhile our own Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in “Especially when the October wind” refers to “star-gestured children in the park”, “the spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales” and “by the sea’s side hear the dark-vowelled birds”.

Perhaps we have recovered our ability to extend English through neologisms (new words), because we have had to, in our fast-changing world.

But sadly a fashion for compressed portmanteau words has taken over from wild hyphenation. Think emoticon (emotion-icon), webinar (web-seminar) and docudrama (documentary-drama).

While the Normans had words for those things they brought by conquest and the Anglo-Saxons didn’t, today we all need new words for the things no one has seen or thought of before and some of them catch on and enter popular usage. Let’s keep coining those neologisms…