A Word About English

It Rocks.

Okay, that’s two words. Maybe you think I said one thing and did another, which would be lying.

Possibly, you thought I meant “a word” as in a conversation: “Can I have a word with you?” You would be correct in this second interpretation.

A word, especially in English, is a very tricky thing.

Only in English do we have so many words that mean almost the same thing, and so many words that have so many meanings all in one word. We have lots of words that sound alike but mean different things. We have words we didn’t have a year ago but nearly everyone knows what they mean now. We don’t care a bit about stealing words from other languages; if it fits, we use it.

In many ways, this makes the English language pretty cool.

Just look at that last sentence. It uses two words that have taken on entirely new meanings over the relatively recent decades. “Pretty” can mean “very” and not just “attractive.” “Cool” now also means, variously, “neat”, “hip”, “calm”, “desirable”, as well as a low temperature. It is interesting how “neat” has also taken on a new meaning in the last 100 years; it no longer just means “tidy”, but also means “good”. “Hip” is a word that in the mid-1900s came to mean more than just that seductive convex shape of a woman’s body.

How is a person supposed to keep up? Keep your cool, man. It’s groovy.

Let’s go back to the possibly that I wrote a lie at the beginning of this rant. Look the word up in your dictionary. I have two at my desk, a 1968 edition Funk & Wagnall’s Standard College and a 1981 Webster’s New Collegiate. In both, to tell a falsehood as the definition of lie is a bunch of places down the list of possible meanings. For example, one can lie, as on a bed, have a bad lie as in golf, or lie at anchor in a harbor.

Do you think anchors lie? I do. Research Dan Rather if you don’t believe me.

One of the great American wonders is the Grand Canyon in the American Southwest. But, did you know that its name isn’t even of English origin? It wasn’t in the lexicon in 1776; hell, it didn’t even make in until 1834 or so. Canyon is a Spanish word. Hey, canyon is exactly what the thing is so it’s the perfect word for the place, and we are just fine with calling it that. Besides, it wouldn’t be quite so impressive if we called it the Grand Ditch.

Speaking of rivers—we were sort of, because the Grand Canyon is formed by the Colorado River—one of my favorite names for a river is one in Washington State called the Skookumchuck River. Go ahead and Google it if you don’t believe me it exists. By the way, did you know that google was a real word before that clever search engine company appropriated it? It may also be spelled googol, and means 1 followed by 100 zeros, which is a very big number, but not as big as a googolplex, which is 1 followed by a google of zeros (or10 to the google power). Of course, now google is not only a number and the name of a company but is also a word meaning to search on the internet no matter what engine you use.

How about Internet? It is a word that didn’t exist the year I was born. It is completely made up, like telephone, broadcast and diode. Because, well, Benjamin Franklin and pals didn’t have anything like it, so how could they have a word for it? Ben did invent bifocals, so he did get to create his own technology-based word.

I get grumpy when I hear people say something like, “I am really anxious to see what I got for Christmas.” What, gifts scare you? “Anxious” implies fear, trepidation, and foreboding. Don’t they really mean they are “eager” for their gifts? Eager implies hopeful anticipation. I am eager for my tax refund but anxious about doing my tax return. Saying irregardless doesn’t bother me nearly as much.

I read somewhere that the accent of New England today is very close to that of Shakespeare’s time. I don’t remember where I read that, or if it is even true. I suppose the first thing one must ask is who is around today who remembers what it sounded like when Henry VIII was lopping off heads and Elizabeth was lying with Sir Walter Raleigh. It does provide a bit of a segue to what English sounds like. (Remind me to come back to seque later, because to digress now would be to violate the principles of what segue means.)

In college I learned that English is generally recognized to come in three distinct flavors. Old English is the language on hand before The Norman Invasion. A mixture of Saxon, Nordic, and others was very German sounding. Middle English followed, which developed after William the Conqueror did. Modern English followed, which, surprisingly, is what Shakespeare spoke, though you won’t convince many students of that as they struggle through the plays and sonnets.

I can’t read or pronounce Old English, so we won’t even go there.

I can read and pronounce Middle English, because I had a Chaucer professor who was a sadist and made me learn it. Don’t tell anybody that I rather enjoyed the process. Anyway, the cool part about Chaucer was that most critics for a very long time thought he was a lousy poet. His poems didn’t even rhyme for crying out loud. His principal and famous work was The Canterbury Tales, and he is one of the first old guys whose stuff survived and was readily available. However, it sounded terrible when you read it aloud, and confirmed for the modern critics that they really were barbarians in the 14th century.

Up until someone said, “Hey, what if we change the sound of the vowels just a bit?” Thus was born the English pronunciation transformation know as the Great Vowel Shift. How cool is that? Change just one letter and you have every grumpy Chaucer student's dream for ridiculing that which gives them pain.

Before the Great Vowel Shift, the Middle English “A” sounds like “ah.” “E” sounds like the A as in say, “I” sounds like e, as in he, she, and be. You get the picture. Then some other guy said, what if they pronounced the “gh” in sight, night and fright? In fact, what if they pronounced all the letters in a word, and didn’t leave any of them silent? In this way, “knight” is pronounced with a hard K to begin, followed by the N, then a soft I to E sound, followed by the GH as a sort of “kuh” sound with a finishing “T”. Think of it as five syllables instead of today it would only sound like one syllable. A simple word like "time" would be pronounced as teema (in this case the e has a soft A sound). Suddenly, Chaucer rhymes, has meter, and, voila, is a great poet!

And, he told some racy tales, too. They don’t teach the good ones in high school, that’s for sure.

I’m done ranting on this subject for now. Except, if you don’t like English, you don’t know shit. That word has its own surprising origin that has nothing to do with manure stowed on sailing ships as a spate of emails suggest.

Did we talk about alliteration? Forget segue, I’m tired and need to stop.