Posts Tagged ‘disctionary’
“Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. They disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed – fading away like water on stone.”*…
Tales of love and adventure from 1,000 years ago reveal a dazzling range of now-extinct English pronouns. They capture something unique about how people once thought about “two-ness.” Sophie Hardach on why they died out…
Which word would you use to refer to yourself? “I”, presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? “We”, of course, in the plural.
But how about you and one other person?
In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use “we” or “the two of us”.
But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: “wit”.
This term, once also used affectionately to describe the closeness between two people, is one of many personal pronouns that have been lost or transformed amid huge social and political change over the centuries. The English language has become simplified – but at times this has left gaps, creating confusion.
“Wit” means “we two” in Old English, a Germanic language spoken in England until about the 12th Century, which evolved into the English we speak today. Now completely lost, “wit” was part of an extinct group of pronouns used for exactly two people: the dual form, which also includes “uncer” or “unker” (“our” for two people) and “git” (“you two”). That dual form vanished from the English language around the 13th Century. (You can hear how some of these were pronounced in the short clips later in this article.)
“There’s a whole history in the [personal] pronouns”, including the impact of Viking and Norman invasions on the English language alongside shifting norms and customs that have changed how we talk, says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.
Many Old English pronouns are still in use, says Birkett. Our oldest English personal pronouns include “he” and “it”, as well as “we”, “us”, “our”, “me” and “mine”, Birkett says. They have made it through more than 1,000 years of history and upheaval, almost intact.
“‘He’ definitely is a very old English form, and also ‘hit’, which lost the ‘h’ and became ‘it’,” Birkett says. The Old English “Ic” has also been resilient, losing only one letter, to become the modern English “I”.
But other pronouns were cast off – such as the once-common dual form. “It’s fairly widespread in Old English texts. Particularly in poetry, we get the use of ‘wit’ and ‘unc’ for ‘us two, the two of us’,” says Birkett…
Fascinating- read on: “Wit, unker, git: The lost medieval pronouns of English intimacy.”
* Robert Macfarlane, The Lost Words
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As we choose our words, we might recall that it was on this date in 1828 that Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language. Published in two quarto volumes, it contained 70,000 entries, as against the high of 58,000 of any previous dictionary. Webster, who was 70 at the time, had published his first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language, in 1806, and had begun then the campaign of language reform (motivated by both nationalistic and philological concerns) that initiated the formal shift of American English spelling (center rather than centre, honor rather than honour, program rather than programme, etc.). His 1828 dictionary cemented those changes, and continued his efforts to include technical and scientific (not just literary) terms.
“I’ve been accused of vulgarity. I say that’s bullshit.”*…
The author of A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue
Thirty years after Dr Johnson published his great Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Francis Grose put out A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), a compendium of slang Johnson had deemed unfit for his learned tome. Grose was not one for library work. He preferred to do his lexicography in the sordid heart of after-hours London. Supported by his trusty assistant Tom Cocking, he cruised the watering holes of Covent Garden and the East End, eating, boozing, and listening. He took pleasure in hearing his name punningly connected to his rotund frame. And he produced a book brimming with Falstaffian life.
In Vulgar Tongues (2016), Max Décharné called Grose’s dictionary, “A declaration in favour of free speech, and a gauntlet thrown down against official censorship, moralists and the easily offended.” While a good deal of the slang has survived into the present day — to screwis to copulate; to kick the bucket is to die — much would likely have been lost had Grose not recorded it. Some of the more obscure metaphors include a butcher’s dog, meaning someone who “lies by the beef without touching it; a simile often applicable to married men”; to box the Jesuit, meaning “to masturbate; a crime, it is said, much practised by the reverend fathers of that society”; and to polish meaning to be in jail, in the sense of “polishing the king’s iron with one’s eyebrows, by looking through the iron grated windows”. Given this was the era of William Hogarth’s famous painting Gin Lane (1751), it’s not surprising to find the dictionary soaked through with colourful epithets for the juniper-based liquor: blue ruin, cobblers punch, frog’s wine, heart’s ease, moonshine, strip me naked. The Grose dictionary also contains hundreds of great insults, like bottle-headed, meaning void of wit, something you can’t say about its author.
Via Public Domain Review; read the Dictionary at the Internet Archive.
* Mel Brooks
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As we choose our words carefully, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (or, in more recent editions, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) was published in the U.S. Routinely listed among the greatest American novels, it was one of the first to be written in vernacular English.
Upon issue of the American edition in 1885 several libraries banned it from their shelves. The early criticism focused on what was perceived as the book’s crudeness. One incident was recounted in the newspaper the Boston Transcript:
The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type. He regards it as the veriest trash. The library and the other members of the committee entertain similar views, characterizing it as rough, coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.
Writer Louisa May Alcott criticized the book’s publication as well, saying that if Twain “[could not] think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them.”
Twain later remarked to his editor, “Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!” [source]
Cover of the first U.S.edition
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