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VOL. 1, 2008 |
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Wanna be confused?
Try speaking our language
By SID FRIGAND
of TheColumnists.com
It is not customary for Almanac to receive three queries in one week on the vagaries and idiosyncrasies of modern English. We shall answer them together:
Q-1: Mr. Solomon
Grundy, of Faith, S. Dakota writes: “Why in heck can’t
we say feck and reck as the opposites of feckless and reckless?
I think my fine teenage kids are feck and reck--if those were
once acceptable words. Why do we accent the negatives and eliminate
the positives?”
Q-2: Ms. Marjorie
Daw of Hope, Ark. writes: “I am a French-woman now living
with my husband in Arkansas. After three years in America, I
am still very puzzled by your language. Words that seem to be
opposites are not. I was told that undertake is not the opposite
of overtake. And, even more confusing, a person who undertakes
a course of action is certainly not an undertaker. Do you not
have an official arbiter for English as we French do with the
Académie Française?
Q-3: Mr. Jack Horner
of Charity Island, Mich. writes: “When we were little babies,
one of the first things we were taught was the difference between
up and down --remember the highchair lessons: ‘hands up,
hands down?’ That was then. Now hands up is a command at
the point of a gun, and hands down means an easy accomplishment.
In fact, sometimes up and down words mean the same thing. When
we went to school, the teacher would ask us all to sit down and
then remind us to sit up–and drink up and drink down are
synonyms. How do you explain all of this?
A: Let us begin
by congratulating the good folk of Faith, Hope and Charity Island
for their penetrating observations. To consider first the last
question posed by Mme. Daw, the answer is “no.” English
is not the official language of the United States* and there
really isn’t anybody that enforces the “King’s
English” in the U.K. Of all the major languages in the world,
English is uniquely unregulated by some official body. And so,
words like reck and feck faded from modern use (although they
are still accounted for in unabridged dictionaries moldering
on the dusty shelves of public libraries). Want to call your
kids reck and feck? Go to it, Mr. Grundy, they were real words–antonyms
of reckless and feckless. England’s virgin Queen Elizabeth
would know exactly what you mean. While we are considering lost
positives, remember hapless, shiftless and unless came from hap
(a good old Norse** word meaning
good fortune), shift (its old meaning connoted the ability to
take on responsibility) and survives in the phrase “to shift
for oneself,” and unless comes from a 16th century corruption
of onless, a qualifier for not being ‘right on.’
Most puzzling are the illogical juxtapositions among English
words with prefixes or endings such as up-down, over-under and
in-out. Some quizzical examples follow:
up-down, e.g. before the shake-up came a shakedown;
throw down a quart of red-eye and then throw-up;
you can run up medical bills when you feel rundown;
count on the sheriff to show up for the showdown;
buckle up in the car and buckle down at school;
live up to expectations and live down the past;
a cop writes up a ticket after he writes down your
license number; can you pin down the date when pin-ups
became popular? Turn up at the bank and be turned down
for a loan; a candidate can talk up his credentials
while talking down to the plain folk; and yes, he can
bring down the house if he brings up universal
health care and old age assistance.
In-out, e.g.: the quarterback was all-in after his all
out effort; if a comedian draws out his routine, he’s
not likely to draw in a crowd; when your legs give
out, give in and sit down; two marines had a falling
out just before they were falling in for inspection;
the doctor promised to fill in all the details after she
filled out some forms; he prayed silently awaiting the
outcome of his income tax audit; she worried about
how much her outlay would be for her dental inlay;
he was sure that his in-laws were all outlaws;
the director praised his outstanding stand-in,
and everyone should know that in-house is not the opposite
of outhouse.
Over-under, e.g.: work under a Mafia Don and you will
work-over a lot of deadbeats; applying an undercoat
while painting is wise, but wearing an overcoat while
you paint is not; throwing overhand is okay for a pitcher,
but he better not get involved in any underhanded arrangements;
the same pitcher could also throw underhand and hand
over the ball to his reliever; it’s difficult to write
over crayon,
but is it easier to underwrite a loan?
Okay, get the picture? English is not logical language. Actually,
it is a stew of many languages, ever-changing and spiced with
words and phrases borrowed or bastardized from other tongues.** Simple English
phrases become a linguistic United Nations.
We Americans are quick to swipe new words
and phrases from our overseas experiences and street-talk. We
use snafu (which was borrowed from a scatological and sardonic
WWII military phrase) as a legitimate word that appears in our
desk dictionaries. Other WWII borrowings like honcho (Japan)
and blitzkrieg and blitz (German) hang on to suit
our purposes.
Street talk is even more baffling: if something is clever or
appealing, teenagers often say it is neat. More recently, they
described a hot item as cool. And now, if someone or something
is really good they call it bad. In the world of rap-talk, the
word for prostitute is ho’, so it is quite possible to cause
confusion among gardeners if we say, “a rake is attracted
to a ho’.”
Professor Polly Hedron, Oxford’s distinguished philologist,
tells us that in primordial times, the British Isles were connected
to the European land mass and it was easy for the Neanderthals
to lumber westward in search of game, fish and chips. After the
great flood made Britain an isle, crossing the channel became
a challenging seafaring sport for invaders from all over the
Western world. The indigenous tribes were driven to near extinction
by fierce invading Gaels from northern Spain and southern France,
who dominated what we now call the U.K. for about 500 years.
According to Dr. Hedron, relics of the
ancient Gaelic tongues still hang on in Ireland, Scotland and
Wales. “Other words essential to some Gaelic mores, continue
to thrive in Modern English,” she noted, “Examples
include clobber, smashing, smithereens and, oh yes, whiskey,”
In 54 B.C. Julius Caesar, fixated about conquering all of Gaul,
led his troops across the Channel only to depart after a relatively
brief period, bored, homesick and bothered by pesky, pugnacious
and near-naked Celtic warriors*** wearing blue body paint.
Almost a hundred years later Cassius sent a larger force of Roman
legions to subdue the natives. This time they hung around 300
years, long enough to establish trade and commerce--the center
of which was a town the Romans called Londinium (sound familiar?).
The impact of Roman occupation left a lasting
language legacy–-especially in administrative, commerce
and religious terms. The Roman missionaries, scared witless by
the frantic antics of the Druids, brought Christianity to Britain
to stay. So words like judge, legislator, priest, altar, mint
and money are still with us.
Over the ensuing centuries, crossing the channel became a sporting
event: the Vikings scooted over from Scandinavia–-some hit
and ran, some stayed on; then the Germanic Angles, Saxons and
Jutes came storming in and decided to put down stakes in Britannia.
To complete the onslaught, the Normans invaded in 1066 to further
complicate matters. The manners and mores of the French Court
leeched their way into the lingua franca of the peasantry.
Farm animals–e.g. swine, cow, calf --kept their Teutonic
character, but put their cooked meat on the table and you have
pork, beef and veal (all French derived).
To communicate in this polyglot setting the Brits, over the centuries,
spoke an always evolving and easy speak language. Goodbye to
Latin declensions, ta-ta Teutonic cases and numbers and au
revoir to French genders for every noun. Written English
was by and large phonetic. One scholar noted, for example, that
William Shakespeare’s name was spelled at least 20 different
ways during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Maybe there is some wisdom in not teaching a language for six
or seven centuries: all kids were left behind.
________________________
* Henry Morgan, a witty radio commentator in the 1950-60 era, once observed: “What’s all this blather about the Indians being the first Americans? They couldn’t speak a word of English until we came here.”
**
During the 8th Century, the Vikings carried out countless invasions
of the British Isles. They were there so frequently that the
Brits, whose language was already a pot-pourri of Celtic, Anglo-Saxon
and bits and pieces of Latin, figured, “What in hell, we
may as well borrow their bloody words.” So, for example,
while the word ‘shirt’ was already used to describe
a garment, they also borrowed the same word in Norse, ‘skirt’
and gave it to the ladies. Chances are, when you see a word starting
with the letters ‘sk’ – we swiped them from the
Scandinavians.
According to Dr.Webb Blogga, the distinguished historian from
Norway’s Fjord Foundation, the Viking marauders were supposed
to adhere to the famed Norse Code, promulgated in 712 A.D. by
Erik the Rotten. “The code was simple,” Dr. Blogga
explained; “‘Pillage the villages, steal the cattle
and rape the women.’ According to reliable sagas, Erik the
Rotten beheaded an entire raiding party because they mixed up
the simple tenets of his code.”
*** British
historian, Sir Basil Pesto, recently noted in his sprightly journal
‘Back When’: “To Caesar’s chagrin, rumors
got back to Rome that Caesar fled from Britannia, humiliated
by two ferocious tribal kings, Patenias and Michenatis. When
Caesar returned home and learned about these stories, he ordered
his legions to capture the two warlords. After several bloody
battles, the grossly outnumbered warriors were wrested into chains
and hauled back to Rome in a donkey cart., Rather than being
taunted by the crowds who lined the streets, the Romans cheered
the two as heroes. Angered by their celebrity, Caesar ordered
them to be jailed in solitary cells while awaiting their fate
in the Coliseum, where near-starved and ravenous lions strained
at their fetters to devour anything in sight.
“The next morning, before tens of thousands of blood-thirsty
Romans, the two warriors met in the middle of the arena. ‘My
friend Michenatus, how did fare last night?’ asked Patenius.
‘ Do you see that gorgeous woman sitting next to Caesar?’
his comrade in arms replied ‘ Well, she came to my cell
after midnight, and without saying a word she stripped off her
robe and--Oh, I’ll finish the story later, here come them
friggin’ lions!””
“This story” Sir Basil wrote,” was first recorded
in 76 A.D. by the Roman philosopher/historian, Incubus the Elder.”
Sir Basil maintains that this account is the world’s first
Pat and Mike story.
©2008 by Sid Frigand . The cartoon is from IMSI's Master
Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA. This column first posted March 10, 2008.
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