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The Nineteenth Century and After
211. Influences Affecting the Language.
The events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries affecting the English-speaking
countries have been of great political and social importance, but in their effect on the
language they have not been revolutionary. The success of the British on the sea in the
course of the Napoleonic Wars, culminating in Nelson’s famous victory at Trafalgar in
1805, left England in a position of undisputed naval supremacy and gave it control over
most of the world’s commerce. The war against Russia in the Crimea (1854–1856) and
the contests with princes in India had the effect of again turning English attention to the
East. The great reform measures—the reorganization of parliament, the revision of the
penal code and the poor laws, the restrictions placed on child labor, and the other
industrial reforms—were important factors in establishing English society on a more
democratic basis. They lessened the distance between the upper and the lower classes and
greatly increased the opportunities for the mass of the population to share in the
economic and cultural advantages that became available in the course of the century. The
establishment of the first cheap newspaper (1816) and of cheap postage (1840) and the
improved means of travel and communication brought about by the railroad, the
steamboat, and the telegraph had the effect of uniting more closely the different parts of
Britain and of spreading the influence of the standard speech. During the first half of the
twentieth century the world wars and the troubled periods following them affected the
life of almost everyone and left their mark on the language. At the same time, the growth
in importance of some of England’s larger colonies, their eventual in-dependence, and the
rapid development of the United States have given increased significance to the forms of
English spoken in these territories and have led their populations to the belief that their
use of the language is as entitled to be considered a standard as that of Great Britain.
Some of these events and changes are reflected in the English vocabulary. But more
influential in this respect are the great developments in science and the rapid progress that
has been made in every field of intellectual activity in the last 200 years. Periods of great
enterprise and activity seem generally to be accompanied by a corresponding increase in
new words. This is the more true when all classes of the people participate in such
activity, both in work and play, and share in its benefits. Accordingly, the great
developments in industry, the increased public interest in sports and amusements, and the
many improvements in the mode of living, in which even the humblest worker has
shared, have all contributed to the vocabulary. The last two centuries offer an excellent
opportunity to observe the relation between a civilization and the language which is an
expression of it.
212. The Growth of Science.
The most striking thing about our present-day civilization is probably the part that
science has played in bringing it to pass. We have only to think of the progress that has
been made in medicine and the sciences auxiliary to it, such as bacteriology,
biochemistry, and the like, to realize the difference that marks off our own day from that
of only a few generations ago in the diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and cure of disease.
Or we may pause to reflect upon the relatively short period that separates the Wright
brothers, making history’s first powered and controlled airplane flight, from the landings
of astronauts on the moon, the operation of a space shuttle, and the voyages of spacecraft
past the outer planets of the solar system. In every field of science, pure and applied,
there has been need in the last two centuries for thousands of new terms. The great
majority of these are technical words known only to the specialist, but a certain number
of them in time become familiar to the layperson and pass into general use.
In the field of medicine this is particularly apparent. We speak familiarly of anemia,
appendicitis, arteriosclerosis, difftcult as the word is, of bronchitis, diphtheria, and
numerous other diseases and ailments. We use with some sense of their meaning words
like bacteriology, immunology, orthodontics, and the acronym AIDS (acquired immune
deficiency syndrome). We maintain clinics, administer an antitoxin or an anesthetic, and
vaccinate for smallpox. We have learned the names of drugs like aspirin, iodine, insulin,
morphine, and we acquire without effort the names of antibiotics, such as penicillin,
streptomycin, and a whole family of sulfa compounds. We speak of adenoids, endocrine
glands, and hormones and know the uses of the stethoscope, the EKG
(electrocardiogram), and the CAT scan (computerized axial tomography). We refer to the
combustion of food in the body as metabolism, distinguish between proteins and
carbohydrates, know that a dog can digest bones because he has certain enzymes or
digestive fluids in his stomach, and say that a person who has the idiosyncrasy of being
made ill by certain foods has an allergy. Cholesterol is now a part of everyone’s
vocabulary, and there is an awareness that some fats are polyunsaturated. All of these
words have come into use during the nineteenth and, in some cases, the twentieth
century.
In almost every other field of science the same story could be told. In the field of
electricity words like dynamo, commutator, alternating current, arc light have been in
the language since about 1870. Physics has made us familiar with terms like calorie,
electron, ionization, ultraviolet rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity, though we don’t
always have an exact idea of what they mean. The development of atomic energy and
nuclear weapons has given us radioactive, hydrogen bomb, chain reaction, fallout, and
meltdown. In recent years laser, superconducting supercollider, quasar, and pulsar have
come into common use; and black holes, quarks, the big bang model, and superstrings
have captured the popular imagination. Chemistry has contributed so many common
words that it is difficult to make a selection—alkali, benzine, creosote, cyanide,
formaldehyde, nitroglycerine, radium, to say nothing of such terms as biochemical,
petrochemical, and the like. The psychologist has taught us to speak of schizophrenia,
extrovert and introvert, behaviorism, inhibition, defense mechanism, inferiority complex,
bonding, and psychoanalysis. Originally scientific words and expressions such as ozone,
natural selection, stratosphere, DNA (for deoxyribonudeic acid) became familiar through
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the popularity of certain books or scientific reports in magazines and newspapers. Among
the most publicized events since the 1960s have been the achievements of space and
engineering in the exploration of space. In addition to astronaut and cosmonaut, space
science has given us dozens of new words, especially compounds like spacecraft, space
shuttle, launch pad, countdown, blast off, flyby, command module. Consciously or
unconsciously, we have become scientifically minded in the last few generations, and our
vocabularies reflect this extension of our consciousness and interest.
213. Automobile, Film, Broadcasting, Computer.
Scientific discoveries and inventions do not always influence the language in proportion
to their importance. It is doubtful whether the radio and motion pictures are more
important than the telephone, but they have brought more new words into general use.
Such additions to the vocabulary depend more upon the degree to which the discovery or
invention enters into the life of the community. This can be seen especially in the many
new words or new uses of old words that have re-sulted from the popularity of the
automobile and the numerous activities associated with it. Many an old word is now used
in a special sense. Thus we park a car, and the verb to park scarcely suggests to the
average driver anything except leaving his or her car along the side of a street or road or
in a parking space. But the word is an old one, used as a military term (to park cannon)
and later in reference to carriages. The word automobile is new, but such words as sedan
(saloon in Britain) and coupe are terms adapted from earlier types of vehicles. The
American truck is the British lorry to which we may attach a trailer. We have learned
new words or new meanings in carburetor, spark plug (British sparking plug), choke,
clutch, gearshift (British gear lever), piston rings, differential, universal, steering wheel,
shock absorber, radiator, hood (British bonnet), windshield (in Britain windscreen),
bumper, chassis, hubcap, power steering, automatic transmission, and turbocharger. We
engage cruise control, have a blowout, use radial tires, carry a spare, drive a convertible
or station wagon (British estate car), and put the car in a garage. We may tune up the
engine or stall it, or we may skid, cut in, sideswipe another car and be fined for speeding
or running a traffic light. We must buy gas in America and petrol in Britain. Many more
examples could be added to terms familiar to every motorist, to illustrate further what is
already sufficiently clear, the way in which a new thing that becomes genuinely popular
makes demands upon and extends the resources of the language.
The same principle might be illustrated by film, radio, and television. The words
cinema and moving picture date from 1899, whereas the alternative motion picture is
somewhat later. Screen, reel, film, scenario, projector, closeup, fade-out are now
common, and although the popularity of three-D (or 3-D) as a cinematic effect was shortlived, the word is still used. The word radio in the sense of a receiving station dates from
about 1925, and we get the first hint of television as early as 1904. Since many of the
terms from radio broadcasting were applicable in the later development of television, it is
not surprising to find a common vocabulary of broadcasting that includes broadcast
itself, aerial, antenna, lead-in, loudspeaker, stand by, and solid-state. Words like
announcer, reception, microphone, and transmitter have acquired special meanings
sometimes more common than their more general senses. The abbreviations FM (for
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frequency modulation) and AM (for amplitude modulation) serve regularly in radio
broadcasting for the identification of stations, while terms associated with television
include cable TV, teleprompter, videotape, VCR, and DVD. The related development of
increasingly refined equipment for the recording of sound since Thomas Edison’s
invention of the phonograph in 1877 has made the general consumer aware of stereo and
stereophonic, quad and quadraphonic, tweeter, woofer, tape deck, reel-to-reel, and
compact disc or CD.
The first electronic digital computers date from Word War II, and a few terms have
been in general use since then. New meanings of program, language, memory, and
hardware are familiar to people who have never used a computer. With the widespread
manufacturing and marketing of personal computers during the 1980s, a much larger
number of English speakers found the need for computer terms in their daily work: PC
itself, RAM (random-access memory), ROM (read-only memory), DOS (disk operating
system), microprocessor, byte, cursor, modem, software, hacker, hard-wired, download,
and new meanings of read, write, mouse, terminal, chip, network, workstation, windows,
and virus. The use of bug for a problem in running a computer program is sometimes
traced in computer lore to an actual moth residing in the Mark II at Harvard in 1945. It
was discovered by Grace Hopper and is taped in the logbook for September 9, 1945. As it
turns out, however, the 1972 Supplement to the OED records bug for a problem in
technology as early as 1889, by Thomas Edison working on his phonograph. Admiral
Hopper may have a stronger claim to the first use of debug.
214. The World Wars.
As another example of how great developments or events leave their mark upon language
we may observe some of the words that came into English between 1914 and 1918 as a
direct consequence of World War I. Some of these were military terms representing new
methods of warfare, such as air raid, antiaircraft gun, tank, and blimp. Gas mask and
liaison officer were new combinations with a military significance. Camouflage was
borrowed from French, where it had formerly been a term of the scene-painter’s craft, but
it caught the popular fancy and was soon used half facetiously for various forms of
disguise or misrepresentation. Old words were in some cases adapted to new uses. Sector
was used in the sense of a specific portion of the fighting line; barrage, originally an
artificial barrier like a dam in a river, designated a protective screen of heavy artillery or
machine-gun fire; dud, a general word for any counterfeit thing, was specifically applied
to a shell that did not explode; and ace acquired the meaning of a crack airman,
especially one who had brought down five of the enemy’s planes. In a number of cases a
word that had had only limited circulation in the language now came into general use.
Thus hand grenade goes back to 1661 but attained new currency during the war. Other
expressions already in the language but popularized by the war were dugout, machine
gun, periscope, no man’s land, and even the popular designation of an American soldier,
doughboy, which was in colloquial use in the United States as early as 1867. Blighty was
a popular bit of British army slang, derived from India and signifying Britain or home,
and was often applied to a wound that sent a man back to Britain. Other expressions such
as slacker, trench foot, cootie, and war bride were either struck off in the heat of the
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moment or acquired a poignant significance from the circumstances under which they
were used.
It would seem that World War II was less productive of memorable words, as it was of
memorable songs. Nevertheless it made its contribution to the language in the form of
certain new words, new meanings, or an increased currency for expressions that had been
used before. In connection with the air raid, so prominent a feature of the war, we have
the words and expressions alert (air-raid warning), blackout, blitz (German Blitzkrieg,
literally ‘lightning war’), blockbuster, dive-bombing, evacuate, air-raid shelter. The
words beachhead, parachutist, paratroop, landing strip, crash landing, roadblock, jeep,
fox hole (as a shelter for one or two men), bulldozer (an American word used in a new
sense), decontamination, task force (a military or naval unit assigned to the carrying out
of a particular operation), resistance movement, and radar are not in the first edition of
the OED or its 1933 Supplement. To spearhead an attack, to mop up, and to appease
were new verbs or old verbs with a new military or political significance. Flak
(antiaircraft fire) was taken over from German, where it is an abbreviation of
Fliegerabwehrkanone, ‘antiaircraft gun’. Commando, a word that goes back to the Boer
War, acquired a new and specialized meaning. Some words that were either new or that
enjoyed great currency during the war—priority, tooling up, bottleneck, ceiling (upper
limit), backlog, stockpile—have become a part of the vocabulary of civilian life, while
lend-lease has passed into history. The aftermath of the war gave us such expressions as
iron curtain, cold war, fellow traveler, front organization, police state, all with a very
special connotation.
215. Language as a Mirror of Progress.
Words, being but symbols by which people express their ideas, are an accurate measure
of the range of their thoughts at any given time. Words obviously designate the things a
culture knows, and just as obviously the vocabulary of a language must keep pace with
the advance of the culture’s knowledge. The date when a new word enters the language is
in general the date when the object, experience, observation, or whatever it is that calls it
forth has entered public consciousness. Thus with a work like the OED, which furnishes
us with dated quotations showing when the different meanings of every word have arisen
and when new words first appear in the language, we could almost write the history of
civilization merely from linguistic evidence. When in the early part of the nineteenth
century we find growing up a word like horsepower or lithograph, we may depend upon
it that some form of mechanical power that needs to be measured in familiar terms or a
new process of engraving has been devised. The appearance in the language of words like
railway, locomotive, turntable about 1835 tells us that steam railways were then coming
in. In 1839 the words photograph and photography first appear, and a beginning is made
toward a considerable vocabulary of special words or senses of words such as camera,
film, enlargement, emulsion, focus, shutter, light meter. Concrete in the sense of a
mixture of crushed stone and cement dates from 1834, but reinforced concrete is an
expression called forth only in the twentieth century. The word cable occurs but a few
years before the laying of the first Atlantic cable in 1857–1858. Refrigerator is first
found in English in an American quotation of 1841. The words emancipation and
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abolitionist have for every American specific meanings connected with the efforts to
abolish slavery, efforts that culminated in the Civil War. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century an interesting story of progress is told by new words or new meanings
such as typewriter, telephone, apartment house, twist drill, drop-forging, blueprint,
oilfield, motorcycle, feminist, fundamentalist, marathon (introduced in 1896 as a result of
the revival of the Olympic games at Athens in that year), battery and bunt, the last two
indicating the growing popularity of professional baseball in America.
The twentieth century permits us to see the process of vocabulary growth going on
under our eyes, sometimes, it would seem, at an accelerated rate. At the turn of the
century we get the word questionnaire, and in 1906 suffragette. Dictaphone, raincoat,
and Thermos became a part of the recorded vocabulary in 1907 and free verse in 1908.
This is the period when many of the terms of aviation came in, some still current, some
reflecting the aeronautics of the time—airplane, aircraft, airman, monoplane, biplane,
hydroplane, dirigible. Nose-dive belongs to the period of the war. About 1910 we began
talking about the futurist and the postimpressionist in art, and the Freudian in
psychology. Intelligentsia as a designation for the class to which superior culture is
attributed, and bolshevik for a holder of revolutionary political views were originally
applied at the time of World War I to groups in Russia. At this time profiteer gained a
specialized meaning. Meanwhile foot fault, fairway, fox trot, and contract bridge were
indicative of popular interest in certain games and pastimes. The 1933 supplement to the
OED records Cellophane (1921) and rayon (1924), but not nylon, deep-freeze, airconditioned, or transistor; and it is not until the first volume of the new supplement in
1972 that the OED includes credit card, ecosystem, existentialism (1941, though in
German a century earlier), freeze-dried, convenience foods, bionics, electronic computer,
automation, cybernetics, bikini, discotheque. Only yesterday witnessed the birth of
biofeedback, power lunch, fractal, chaos theory, and cyberspace. Tomorrow will witness
others as the exigencies of the hour call them into being.
216. Sources of the New Words: Borrowings.
Most of the new words coming into the language since 1800 have been derived from the
same sources or created by the same methods as those that have long been familiar, but it
will be convenient to examine them here as an illustration of the processes by which a
language extends its vocabulary. It should be remembered that the principles are not new,
that what has been going on in the last century and a half could be paralleled from almost
any period of the language.
As is to be expected in the light of the English disposition to borrow words from other
languages in the past, many of the new words have been taken over ready-made from the
people from whom the idea or the thing designated has been obtained. Thus from the
French come apéritif, chauffeur, chiffon, consommé, garage; from Italian come ciao,
confetti, and vendetta, and from Spanish, bonanza, canyon, patio, rodeo, barrio,
machismo, and cantina. In the Southwestern United States and increasingly throughout
the country, the dinner table is enriched and spiced by borrowings from Mexican
Spanish. Although chili has been in the language since the seventeenth century, most of
the culinary terms date from the modern period: enchilada, fajita, jalapeño, nachos, taco,
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tortilla, tostada; and through Spanish from the Native American language Nahuatl,
guacamole and tamale. German has given us angst, festschrift, gestalt, schadenfreude,
weltanschauung, zeitgeist, and zither. From Russia have come troika, vodka, and, with
momentous political and economic changes, glasnost and perestroika. Goulash is a
Magyar word, and robot is from Czech. Asia is represented by karma, loot, and thug
from India; pajamas (British pyjamas) from Persia; yin, yang, t’ai chi, and chow mein
from China; and geisha, haiku, Noh, sake, samurai, sayonara, shogun, sushi, soy, and yen
from Japan. The cosmopolitan character of the English vocabulary, already pointed out,
is thus being maintained, and we shall see in the next chapter that America has added
many other foreign words, particularly from Spanish and the languages of the Native
Americans.
217. Self-explaining Compounds.
A second source of new words is represented in the practice of making self-explaining
compounds, one of the oldest methods of word formation in the language. In earlier
editions of this book such words as fingerprint (in its technical sense), fire extinguisher,
hitchhike, jet propulsion, the colloquial know-how, lipstick, steamroller, steam shovel,
and streamline were mentioned as being rather new. They have now passed into such
common use that they no longer carry any sense of novelty. This will probably happen,
indeed has already happened, to some of the more recent formations that can be noted,
such as skydiving, jet lag, house sitter, lifestyle, hatchback, greenhouse effect, acid rain,
roller blades, junk food, e-mail, and the metaphorical glass ceiling. Many of these betray
their newness by being written with a hyphen or as separate words, or by preserving a
rather strong accent on each element. They give unmistakable testimony to the fact that
the power to combine existing words into new ones expressing a single concept, a power
that was so prominent a feature of Old English, still remains with us.