Words, Words, Words: Forty Years of Growth

I

A FEW years ago I contributed to the Atlantic an article on English dictionaries, tracing their development from the tiny pocket volumes of the early seventeenth century down to the gigantic, and at that time incomplete, New English Dictionary, now officially known, from its editorial home, as the Oxford English Dictionary, O.E.D. In 1928 the great enterprise was brought to a triumphant conclusion, and the two surviving editors of the Big Four, Sir William Craigie and Dr. C. T. Onions, at once set to work on the Supplement, for which material had been accumulating since the very inception of the main work. On November 14 of last year this final volume, conceived on the same massive scale as its predecessors, was issued to an expectant public. By the generosity of the Clarendon Press a copy has been presented gratis to every possessor of the ten mighty tomes which constitute the original O.E.D.

The new work aims not only at registering and explaining all new words (and what hosts of them there are!) which have acquired civic rights in the English language since the corresponding part of the O.E.D. was printed. It also picks up stragglers, accidentally or in some cases intentionally omitted in earlier years, supplements the information already given in many cases, corrects, modifies, or amplifies. In addition it contains an Historical Introduction, a sort of biography of the enterprise, with exhaustive lists of all who have helped therein, and a complete catalogue of every book, record, or periodical from which the two million illustrative quotations are derived.

The inception of this great lexicographical undertaking dates from a conversation, in 1857, between Dr. Furnivall and Dean (later Archbishop) Trench, which resulted in a paper ‘On some Deficiencies of our English Dictionaries,’ read to the Philological Society in November of the same year. The enthusiastic and pugnacious Furnivall, who almost up to the time of his death (1910), at the age of eightysix, might have been seen sculling in all weathers on the Thames, lived to see a great part of the Dictionary completed. Trench, whose Study of Words (1851) and English Past and Present (1855) first made the treasures of word lore accessible to the educated public, died in 1886, a few years after the first sheets went to print. The association with the Philological Society has persisted up to the present day, the Dictionary being described on the title-page as ‘founded mainly on the materials collected by the Philological Society,’ but the actual carrying out of the work is due to the munificence and public spirit of the Oxford University Press.

The final performance went far beyond the original plan, which did not aim at much more than supplementing the dictionaries of Johnson and Richardson, still considered authoritative in the middle of the nineteenth century. As material accumulated, the scheme became more ambitious, and, after a long period of incubation, a formal contract was concluded in 1879 between the Philological Society and the Delegates of the Oxford Press, and J. A. H. Murray, later Sir James Murray, was appointed editor. He started work ‘in an iron building, detached from his house,’ at Mill Hill School, Middlesex, where he was a master, his first batch of material being a ton and three quarters of manuscript forwarded by Furnivall.

A great proportion of this material came from America, and Murray, in his Presidential Address to the Philological Society in 1880, spoke very cordially of ‘the kindness of our friends in the United States, where the interest taken in our scheme, springing from a genuine love of our common language, its history, and a warm desire to make the Dictionary worthy of that language, has impressed me very deeply.’ He could, at that date, hardly have foreseen how impressively American vocabulary and American usage would bulk in the Supplement of more than half a century later, and, if lexicographers are allowed to look down from the celestial abode which seems the due reward of their herculean labors, he must be amazed to see one of his younger co-editors, Sir William Craigie, occupying the Chair of English in the University of Chicago and busied with the history of the American language.

The first section of the Dictionary was sent to the printers on April 19, 1882, and published on February 1, 1884. A searching review in the Academy by Henry Bradley led to his being invited to share in the editorship. Murray and his ‘Scriptorium’ moved in 1885 to Oxford, whither Bradley also migrated some years later. The Delegates of the Press, anxious to accelerate the progress of the work, which eventually took forty-four years instead of the contemplated ten, proposed further editorial assistance; so W. A. Craigie was invited from St. Andrews to Oxford and began work as a full editor in 1901, the same dignity being attained in 1914 by C. T. Onions, who had been helping in the work since 1895. These two younger editors, left to carry on the work by the deaths of Murray (1915) and Bradley (1923), both at a ripe old age, have now set the coping stone on this great linguistic and national work by the production of the Supplement.

II

To students of language the O.E.D. is a sort of recurring marvel which never loses its glamour, but those who use it intensively know how it improves volume by volume in scope, thoroughness, and elaboration of detail. It is natural that the earliest volumes are those most in need of additions. This may be illustrated by the fact that the first part of the Supplement, A to K, hardly corresponding to a third of the original Dictionary, forms five eighths of the new volume. The first word in the Supplement is the South African Dutch ‘aasvogel,’ vulture (literally, carrion bird), quoted from Rider Haggard, followed closely by ‘abalone,’ the mollusk familiar to California, ‘Spanish, of unknown origin.’ ‘Absquatulate’ is to be found in the original A volume, with a quotation from ‘Sam Slick,’ but here we find the supplementary information, ‘Said to have been first used by Nimrod Wildfire, a character in a play, The Kentuckian, by Bernard, 1833.’

Naturally there is a big new section on the compounds of ‘air’ in connection with the latest mode of traveling, while ‘on the air,’ in reference to broadcasting by wireless, is dated 1927. I was recently informed by a wireless fan that his infant son ‘tuned in about 1 A.M. and was on the air intermittently till about 4.30.’ Thus our stock of metaphor is being sifted and transformed! And so, on every page, there are new words, new meanings, earlier dated examples, and new bits of information until we come to ‘zoom,’ with its general application to a humming noise before it became airman’s slang.

It is the tragedy of the lexicographer that new words come into existence or earlier information comes to hand while his work is in the press. The Supplement has just missed the acrostic ‘Nira,’ as the original Dictionary did ‘appendicitis,’ coined, as we are here informed, by Fitz in 1886. The earliest O.E.D. record of ‘Jericho,’ as a place of peremptory relegation, is dated 1635, but the recently published Letters of Stephen Gardiner show that that somewhat intolerant divine used the word in the same sense in 1545. The London Daily Express for November 16, 1933, informs us that the ‘haywire mind,’ whatever that may be, has just reached England from America. It is especially difficult to keep up with the political vocabulary. The Supplement has duly booked ‘Fascist’ (1921) and ‘Nazi’ (1930); Signor Mussolini’s ‘black shirts’ appear in 1923; but alas for Herr Hitler’s ‘brown shirts’ and the United Ireland ‘blue shirts,’ the latter a costume proscribed by the Irish Government on December 9, 1933 — they have come too late.

A supplement to the Supplement consists of an extraordinary list of spurious words, or what Skeat called ‘ghost-words,’ originally due to misreadings, misprints, or misunderstandings, and conscientiously copied from dictionary to dictionary, sometimes with fantastic etymological explanations of the nonexistent. It would be unkind to particularize! It is only in the course of such an investigation of a language as has been carried out by the Oxford Dictionary that these impostors can be detected. It is obvious that a ‘word’ which has found its way into dictionaries without the most diligent search revealing a single example of its use in print is not a word at all.

III

Roughly speaking, it may be said that the two main blocks of new words are represented by scientific phraseology and ‘Americanisms.’ Opening the book at random, we find, in addition to the now familiar ‘heterodyne,’ coined in 1908 by Fessenden, no fewer than sixty new compounds of ‘hetero-,’ which have been called into existence by the progress of science. Really, the way these people treat the language! Many users of the Supplement will probably turn at once to ‘relativity,’ to find that it was first used, in the scientific sense, by Einstein in 1905, and took its specific modern meaning (which few of us can follow) in 1915, The ‘thermionic valve,’ another mystery to the non-physicist, dates from 1922. Under ‘quantum’ there is an important additional paragraph illustrating its latest sense, ‘A discrete unit quantity of energy, proportional to the frequency of radiation, emitted from or absorbed by an atom.’

All this stuff is, of course, rather algebra than language; but, if we turn to science as applied to popular amusement or convenience, we find a whole new vocabulary which has passed more or less into everyday speech. First of all, the ‘cinema,’ which arrived from France too late to get into the original Dictionary. The word is not much used, at any rate in England, modern youth preferring the ‘pictures,’ ‘movies,’ ‘flickers’ or ‘flicks.’ If we look up ‘film’ in the O.E.D., we shall find no reference to what is now its chief use, first booked in 1897 and abundantly illustrated in the Supplement. It is interesting to note that the ‘talking film,’ projected in 1910 and realized in 1921, became the more convenient ‘talkie’ in 1928.

It is to the cinema that English owes a considerable proportion of recent Americanisms. The word ‘caption’ itself, though of fairly old standing in English, was never in popular use till reintroduced with American films. The Supplement’s new quotations for the word seem to treat it as a rather humorous neologism, and this writer was rather puzzled several years ago on receiving from an American correspondent a letter referring to a recent article under a certain ‘caption.’ Our ancestors drew their stock of metaphor from man’s essential occupations. Our descendants will draw theirs largely from mechanized life. ‘Fade-out,’ in the figurative sense of a rather furtive departure, is too recent even for the Supplement, though it has ‘close-up, fig. a detailed or intimate view.’ One has even heard the Characters of Theophrastus described in modern parlance as a ‘series of close-ups.’ ‘Black-out,’ also missing here, is now used of a temporary loss of memory, or failure of the electric light. ‘Sob-stuff,’ perhaps the most expressive term in cinema jargon, but one which did not originally belong to that milieu, crossed the Atlantic in 1920.

Among modern inventions it is inevitably the cinema, frequented by about 99 per cent of the population, that has made the chief contribution to the figurative language of our day. But any devout student of the work of Mr. P. G. Wodehouse will realize how often his entertaining ‘chumps’ draw their metaphor from the automobile, known in England as a car, and the aeroplane. Irresistibly funny, at least to one reader, is the picture of young Bingo Little, laughing ‘in an unpleasant, hacking manner, as if he was missing on one tonsil,’ or of Mr. Slingsby, millionaire soup magnate, stamping in his fury on a golf ball lying in the vestibule, and making ‘a forced landing against the wall.’

IV

The post-war period has been very prolific in new political terms, few of which are to be found even in the most up-to-date dictionaries. Of these the two most generally familiar are ‘soviet’ and ‘bolshevik,’ the first a harmless name for ‘council’ before it acquired its present connotation, the second explained as ‘maximalist,’ though it also contains the sense of belonging to the majority. ‘Cheka’ and the more recent ‘Ogpu’ are here fully explained as acrostic formations from Russian phrases of rather terrifying aspect, meaning respectively ‘extraordinary commission’ and ‘united state political administration.’ With these goes ‘cadet,’ the name of an eliminated Russian political party, which is a kind of pun on K.D., the initial letters, in Russian, of ‘constitutional democracy.’

No age has seen such a crop of acrostic words as the war and post-war periods. In fact, the infinite multiplication of new organizations with long and complicated descriptions made such a device almost necessary. To Englishmen the most impressive of all is ‘Dora,’ a lady of whom the Supplement’s earliest quotation prophesies, ‘You will become well acquainted with her.’ Originally a convenient description of the very essential ‘Defence of the Realm Act’ of August 1914, it survives as the name of an uncomely harridan who forbids the patient British public to get a drink when it is thirsty or to buy a much-needed toothbrush after 8 P.M. Visitors from Prohibition countries with vague ideas of an ‘alcoholiday ’ have disliked the lady even more than we do.

The period of ‘reconstruction,’ a word first used in its current sense at the conclusion of the American Civil War, gave birth to many new words or new senses. At the end of the World War ‘ pivotal ’ men — those essential to various industries — were hastily ‘demobbed’ and attempts were made to supply much-needed man power for the building and other trades by ‘diluting’ the skilled-trade unions with partially qualified workers who were illogically called ‘dilutees,’ as though they themselves were to be ‘diluted.’ Later came, with financial slumps and chaos, the various methods of monkeying with the monetary buzz saw which made ‘inflation’ a household word, gave a new sense to ‘deflation,’ and created the new term ‘reflation’ (1932).

The original Dictionary was not very hospitable to proper names, but the Supplement is, as explained in the Preface, ‘more generous.’ ‘Cassandra,’ prophetess of evil, ‘Jeremiah,’ woeful complainer, and perhaps hundreds of similar types, are now included. Especially numerous are the ‘-isms’ and ‘-ists’ with which celebrities or nonentities are constantly endowing the language. It is a testimony to the alertness of the editors that ‘Hitlerism’ is duly booked for 1930, along with the much earlier ‘Leninism,’ ‘Trotskyism,’ and the comparatively recent ‘Stalinism’ (1927), and even ‘ Volsteadism’ as a variant name for Prohibition. It is interesting to note that ‘Marxist,’ a sort of ancestor of the whole brood, is recorded for 1886 — obviously a word which the original Dictionary might well have included.

This element of vocabulary is, next to the scientific, the most worrying to the lexicographer. In a paper recently read to the English Philological Society, I lamented the absence from the Oxford Dictionary of the word ‘Comstockery,’ exaggerated prudishness. Dr. Onions, who happened to be present, interjected the information that it would be found in the Supplement, with a quotation from Mr. Bernard Shaw. Here it is (1905): ‘Comstockery is the world’s standing joke at the expense of the United States.’ Anthony Comstock is pretty well forgotten as an individual, but will survive figuratively as the companion of ‘ Dora ’ and ‘Mrs. Grundy.’ One misses from the Supplement the much more pleasing ‘ Birrellism,’ or literary gossip in the charming style of Augustine Birrell, who died at a very advanced age in November 1933. ‘Boswellize,’ to write biography from the adorer’s point of view, is recorded for 1921, but the Supplement has just missed ‘deboswellize,’ used in reference to Mr. Kingsmill’s new Life of Dr. Johnson. This suggests the expressive Americanism ‘debunk’ (1927), best explained as the opposite of ‘whitewash.’ Among comparatively recent characters in fiction who have become recognized types we find Stevenson’s ‘ Jekyll ’ and ‘Hyde,’ and, of course, ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ even used as a verb; but why not ‘ Watson ’?

V

Apart from purely scientific words, or new compounds expressing new ideas, such as Freud’s ‘psychoanalysis,’ or the ‘robot’ that we owe to Karel Capek, modern importations are largely concerned with the less ceremonial side of language. This applies especially to the enormous American contribution of the last twenty or thirty years, the most vivifying influence that colloquial English has ever undergone, though it suggests to Mr. Dooley the reflection that ‘when we Americans are done with the English language it will look as if it had been run over by a musical comedy. At a luncheon given on November 21, 1933, the president of Magdalen College, Oxford, described these new American idioms as ‘irresistible in any lexicon, so impudent, so fresh and so near the truth, though Dr. Johnson would have rejected them as “not yet refined from the grossness of domestic use.’” Not that the American contribution is purely slang. ‘Welfare,’ as in ‘child welfare,’ ‘welfare centre,’ and so forth, was first used in this special sense in Ohio in 1904. ‘Uplift,’ with which neither the Dictionary nor the Supplement deals quite satisfactorily, is now rather ironical. ‘Moron, first adopted by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-minded in 1910,’ was, according to my information, coined by Dr. H. H. Goddard of Columbus, Ohio. It is a useful term, of an elastic connotation which inspired the poet to sing: —

But one might hazard the opinion that 99 per cent of the American contribution is distinctly slangy. Opening the Supplement at random, we are confronted at once by the ‘jay-walker,’ the most serious traffic problem of the day, and the mysterious ‘jazz,’ which reached England in 1918. A second dip makes one wonder why, of all vegetables, the American ‘ bean ’ should lend itself to such wide figurative use, and a third makes one marvel at the extraordinary range of senses acquired in America by the word ‘dope,’ almost as absurdly overworked as ‘proposition.’ It would be interesting to trace the process by which the color ‘yellow’ has become linked with a cowardly temperament, and it is a tribute to the widespread influence of the American language that Soviet Russia has adopted the word, or rather its Russian equivalent, as a description of ‘ labor organizations which hesitate to go the whole hog.

Modern American seems to be particularly rich in synonyms for humbug or ‘eyewash’ — ‘bunk,’ an abbreviation of ‘ bunkum’; ’hokum,’for which the Supplement suggests a ‘blending of hocus-pocus and bunkum’; ‘ballyhoo,’ originally the inspiring invitation of the barker at what Mr. Barnum first described as a ‘sideshow’; and ‘boloney,’ which the Supplement has unfortunately overlooked. This last word must surely be for ‘bologna’ — Bologna sausage (whence also the English ‘polony,’ dating from the eighteenth century), influenced perhaps by the contemptuous sense associated with the German Wurst.

The influence of German on modern American vocabulary and construction is a fact recognized by philologists. Curious examples are ‘fresh ’ (German frech, impudent) and ‘dumb’ (German dumm, stupid), now familiar colloquialisms with young England.

VI

Probably the two writers who have done most to familiarize the British public with American colloquialisms are Mr. P. G. Wodehouse and the late Edgar Wallace. It is, for instance, from the former that the Supplement quotes its first example of ‘fifty-fifty,’ in the sense of sharing equally. But the great interest of modern youth, and even of modern maturity, is crime in all its aspects. If Europe is more or less convinced that the population of the United States is largely composed of ‘gangsters,’ ‘bootleggers,’ ‘hi-jackers,’ ‘racketeers,’ occupied in ‘ bumping off,’ ‘taking for a ride,’ ‘putting on the spot,’ and finally undergoing the ‘third degree,’ as an inducement to ‘come clean,’ ‘spill the beans,’ or ‘shoot the works,’ the responsibility rests with the American film and the American crook novel. It is also strange to reflect that the whole vocabulary connected with resistance to Prohibition will henceforth be of purely academic interest. One is surprised to find that the ‘speak-easy,’ in which ‘easy’ is equivalent to softly, flourished as early as 1889 in those ‘dry ’ regions where the ‘ bootlegger ’ (1890) was a welcome emissary from the outer world. One is given to understand that this benefactor retailed sound ‘licker’ and not ‘hooch.’ The last word, from the language of the Alaskan Indians, is recorded in its full form ‘hoochinoo’ for 1899, while the shortened form ‘hooch’ appears in 1903.

This tendency to shorten is characteristic of English on both sides of the Atlantic. Few words have been more welcome in England than ‘pep,’ for ‘pepper,’ recorded in American for 1915, but usually printed in inverted commas in England until the last few years. ‘Fan,’ for ‘fanatic,’ dated 1889 in America, with special reference to baseball, also had the inverted commas in English from 1914 to 1920. It is now fully acclimatized.

Quite apart from deliberate shortening, the monosyllable seems to be peculiarly sympathetic to the English tongue. How can a theatrical failure be better described than as a ‘flop,’ or intuitive knowledge as a ‘hunch,’ and was ever a more useful word imported than ‘snag,’ originally an underwater obstacle in an uncharted stream? I imagine that the opposite of a ‘flop’ is a ‘wow,’ for which the Supplement quotes Edgar Wallace, who, however, finds it necessary to explain the word. As for ‘blurb’ (1924, ‘of unknown origin’), which the late Poet Laureate, Dr. Robert Bridges, described as an ‘admirable word, quite indispensable,’ one is puzzled to know how we expressed this particular variety of ‘hokum’ in earlier days.

VII

Modern colloquial English is being remade by our young people, and these young people are, as already suggested, peculiarly sensitive to the charms of American slang. As this strange tongue is said to change almost daily, it is probable that they are seldom up-todate, and that the English maiden of ten who expresses ironic incredulity with ‘Oh yeah?’ or ‘Sez you?’ is really employing the archaic. Occasionally we are only resuming possession of our own. ‘Hick,’ a country bumpkin, was used in one of Sir Richard Steele’s plays in 1702, and even ‘hike,’ recently reimported, was familiar English about 1800. I find, by the way, no mention in the Supplement of ‘hitch-hike,’ used, I understand, in America of hiking varied by lifts, legal or illegal. ‘Jag,’ a drinking bout, which I had imagined to be American, appears to have been familiar rustic English in the seventeenth century, but the synonymous ‘bender,’ dated 1827, is pure United States, and unknown (the word, I mean) in the United Kingdom.

I will end with one or two miscellaneous remarks. Before the American detective made his triumphant appearance in fiction and on the films, the English detective used to ‘check’ a statement; he now ‘checks up on’ it, which seems really over-conscientious. No longer does he ‘search’ a prisoner; he ‘frisks’ him. Instead of consigning him to a police-station cell he puts him in the ‘cooler’ (I am not sure whether this is English or American, and the Supplement is silent about it). Both detectives and criminals now carry ‘gats. ’ Such is the impression one gets from detective fiction, but, in a famous murder trial of a few years ago, Scotland Yard’s representative stated that he did not know what a ‘gat’ was.

A curious example of replacement is the gradual supplanting of English ‘ tin’ by American ‘can,’ as in ‘canned lobster,’ or even ‘canned music’ (not noted by the Supplement). An instance of America’s ready acceptance of a word which has hardly caught on in England is ‘sheik,’ a lady-killer of the cave-man type. The Supplement records him, but omits the obvious etymology from Mrs. E. M. Hull’s novel, nor does it mention ‘sheiked up,’ — dressed to kill, — which I have seen in American fiction. The recent advertisement by a famous London tailor of ‘white waistcoats for chic sheikhs’ suggests that here again England is eagerly following the American lead.

An American word that has not been very successful in England, although it has had some revival since the World War, is ‘mugwump.’ This Indian word, frequently used by Eliot in the Massachusetts Bible (1661-63), has been recently explained by an English nobleman as ‘an animal that sits on the fence, with its mug on one side and its wump on the other.’