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ВВЕДЕНИЕ

    Учебное пособие “Хрестоматия по теории и практике перевода. Часть I.” содержит аутентичные научные и научно-популярные тексты на английском языке по основным дидактическим единицам таких филологических дисциплин, как «История английского языка», «Лексикология английского языка», необходимые в ходе изучения дисциплины «Теория и практика перевода».

 Выпускаемое пособие может активно использоваться студентами специальности «Иностранный язык», как для самостоятельной, так и аудиторной работы для развития навыков и умений устного и письменного перевода. Оно необходимо для студента-филолога, поскольку способствует расширению лексического запаса и закреплению общетеоретических и общекультурных знаний.

Данное учебное пособие актуально для обучения студентов по профилю «Иностранный язык с дополнительной специальностью «Дошкольная педагогика и психология» с квалификацией бакалавра и направлено на формирование следующих компетенций:

· владеет культурой мышления, способен к обобщению, анализу, восприятию информации, постановке цели и выбору путей её достижения (ОК-1);

· способен понимать значение культуры как формы человеческого существования и руководствоваться в своей деятельности современными принципами толерантности, диалога и сотрудничества (ОК -3);

· способен логически верно вести устную и письменную речь (ОК-6);

· владеет одним из иностранных языков на уровне, позволяющем получать и оценивать информацию в области профессиональной деятельности из зарубежных источников (ОК-10);

· способен использовать навыки публичной речи, ведения дискуссии и полемики (ОК-16);

· способен использовать систематизированные теоретические и практические знания гуманитарных, социальных и экономических наук при решении социальных и профессиональных задач (ОПК-2);

· владеет основами речевой профессиональной культуры (ОПК-3);

· владеет одним из иностранных языков на уровне профессионального общения (ОПК-5);

· способен к подготовке и редактированию текстов профессионального и социально значимого содержания (ОПК-6);

· способен к использованию отечественного и зарубежного опыта организации культурно-просветительской деятельности (ПК-10).

ENGLISH   LEXICOLOGY

Text 1

The first American pilgrims happened to live in the midst of perhaps the most exciting period in the history of the English language - a time when 12,000 words were being added to the language and revolutionary activities were taking place in almost every realm of human endeavor. It was also a time of considerable change in the structure of the language. The 104 pilgrims who sailed from Plymouth in 1620 were among the first generation of people to use the s form on verbs, saying has rather than hath, runs rather than runneth. Similarly, thee and thou pronoun forms were dying out. Had the pilgrims come a quarter of a century earlier, we might well have preserved those forms, as we preserved other archaisms such as gotten.

The new settlers in America obviously had to come up with new words to describe their New World, and this necessity naturally increased as they moved inland. Partly this was achieved by borrowing from others who inhabited or explored the untamed continent. From the Dutch we took landscape, cookie, and caboose. We may also have taken Yankee, as a corruption of the Dutch Jan Kees ("John Cheese"). The suggestion is that Jan Kees was a nonce name for a Dutchman in America, rather like John Bull for an Englishman, but the historical evidence is slight. Often the new immigrants borrowed Indian terms, though these could take some swallowing since the Indian languages, particularly those of the eastern part of the continent, were inordinately agglomerative. As Mary Helen Dohan notes in her excellent book on the rise of American English, Our Own Words, an early translator of the Bible into Iroquoian had to devise the word kummogkodonattootummooetiteaonganunnonash for the phrase "our question." In Massachusetts there was a lake that the Indians called Chargoggagomanchaugagochaubunagungamaug, which is said to translate as "You fish on that side, we'll fish on this side, and nobody will fish in the middle." Not surprisingly, such words were usually shortened and modified. The English-sounding hickory was whittled out of the Indian pawcohiccora. Raugraoughcun was hacked into raccoon and isquonterquashes into squash. Hoochinoo, the name of an Indian tribe noted for its homemade liquor, produced hooch. Some idea of the bewilderments of Indian orthography are indicated by the fact that Chippewa and Ojibway are different names for the same tribe as interpreted by different people at different times. Sometimes words went through many transformations before they sat comfortably on the English-speaking tongue. Manhattan has been variously recorded as Manhates, Manthanes, Manhatones, Manhatesen, Manhattae, and at least half a dozen others. Even the simple word Iowa, according to Dohan, has been recorded with sixty-four spellings. Despite the difficulties of rendering them into English, Indian names were borrowed for the names of more than half the American states and for countless thousands of rivers, lakes, and towns. Yet Americans borrowed no more than three or four dozen Indian words for everyday objects - among them canoe, raccoon, hammock, and tobacco.

From the early Spanish settlers, by contrast, we took more than 500 words - though many of these, it must be said, were Indian terms adopted by the Spaniards. Among them: rodeo, bronco, buffalo, avocado, mustang, burro, fiesta, coyote, mesquite, canyon, and buckaroo. Buckaroo was directly adapted from the Spanish vaquero (a cowboy) and thus must originally have been pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Many borrowings are more accurately described as Mexican than Spanish since they did not exist in Spain, among them stampede, hoosegow, and

cafeteria. Hoosegow and jug (for jail) were both taken from the Mexican-Spanish juzgado, which, despite the spelling, was pronounced more or less as "hoosegow." Sometimes it took a while for the pronunciation to catch up with the spelling. Rancher, a term borrowed from the Spanish rancho, was originally pronounced in the Mexican fashion, which made it something much closer to "ranker".

From the French, too, the colonists borrowed liberally, taking the names for Indian tribes, territories, rivers, and other geographical features, sometimes preserving the pronunciation (Sioux, Mackinac) and sometimes not (Illinois, Detroit, Des Plaines, Beloit). We took other words from the French, but often knocked them about in a way that made them look distinctively American, as when we turned gaufre into gopher and chaudiere into chowder. Other New World words borrowed from the French were prairie and dime.

Text 2

Often words reach us by the most improbable and circuitous routes. The word for the American currency, dollar, is a corruption of Joachimsthaler, named for a sixteenth-century silver mine in Joachimsthal, Germany. The first recorded use of the word in English was in 1553, spelled daler, and for the next two centuries it was applied by the English to various continental currencies. Its first use in America was not recorded until 1782, when Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on a Money Unit for the United States, plumped for dollar as the name of the national currency on the ground that "the [Spanish] dollar is a known coin and the most familiar of all to the mind of the people." That may be its first recorded appearance, but clearly if it was known to the people the term had already been in use for some time. At all events, Jefferson had his way: In 1785 the dollar was adopted as America's currency, though it was not until 1794 that the first dollars rolled off the presses. That much we know, but what we don't know is where the dollar sign ($) comes from. "The most plausible account," according to Mario Pei, "is that it represents the first and last letters of the Spanish pesos, written one over the other." It is an attractive theory but for the one obvious deficiency that the dollar sign doesn't look anything like a p superimposed on an s.

Perhaps even more improbable is how America came to be named in the first place. The name is taken from Americus Vespucius, a Latinized form of Amerigo Vespucci. A semiobscure Italian navigator who lived from 1454 to 1512, Vespucci made four voyages to the New World though without ever once seeing North America. A contemporary mapmaker wrongly thought Vespucci discovered the whole of the continent and, in the most literal way, put his name on the map. When he learned of his error, the mapmaker, one Martin Waldseemüller, took the name off, but by then it had stuck. Vespucci himself preferred the name Mundus Novus, "New World."

In addition to borrowing hundreds of words, the Mundus Novians (far better word!) devised many hundreds of their own. The pattern was to take two already existing English words and combine them in new ways: bullfrog, eggplant, grasshopper, rattlesnake, mockingbird, catfish. Sometimes, however, words from the Old World were employed to describe different but similar articles in the New. So beech, walnut, laurel, partridge, robin, oriole, hemlock, and even pond (which in England is an artificial lake) all describe different things in the two continents.

Settlers moving west not only had to find new expressions to describe features of their new outsized continent - mesa, butte, bluff, and so on - but also outsized words that reflected their zestful, virile, wildcat-wrassling, hell-for-leather approach to life. These expressions were, to put it mildly, often colorful, and a surprising number of them have survived: hornswoggle, cattywampus, rambunctious, absquatulate, to move like greased lightning, to kick the bucket, to be in cahoots with, to root hog or die. Others have faded away: monstracious, teetotaciously, helliferocious, conbobberation, obflisticate, and many others of equal exuberance.

Of all the new words to issue from the New World, the quintessential Americanism without any doubt was O.K. Arguably America's single greatest gift to international discourse, O.K. is the most grammatically versatile of words, able to serve as an adjective ("Lunch was O.K."), verb ("Can you O.K. this for me?"), noun ("I need your O.K. on this"), interjection ("O.K., I hear you"), and adverb ("We did O.K."). It can carry shades of meaning that range from casual assent ("Shall we go?" "O.K."), to great enthusiasm ("O.K.!"), to lukewarm endorsement ("The party was O.K."), to a more or less meaningless filler of space ("O.K., can I have your attention please?").

Text 3

It is a curious fact that the most successful and widespread of all English words, naturalized as an affirmation into almost every language in the world, from Serbo-Croatian to Tagalog, is one that has no correct agreed spelling (it can be O.K., OK, or okay) and one whose origins are so obscure that it has been a matter of heated dispute almost since it first appeared. The many theories break down into three main camps:

1. It comes from someone's or something's initials - a Sac Indian chief called Old Keokuk, or a shipping agent named Obadiah Kelly, or from President Martin Van Buren's nickname, Old Kinderhook, or from Orrins-Kendall crackers, which were popular in the nineteenth century. In each of these theories the initials were stamped or scribbled on documents or crates and gradually came to be synonymous with quality or reliability.

2. It is adapted from some foreign or English dialect word or place name, such as the Finnish oikea, the Haitain Aux Cayes (the source of a particularly prized brand of rum), or the Choctaw okeh. President Woodrow Wilson apparently so liked the Choctaw theory that he insisted on spelling the word okeh.

3. It is a contraction of the expression "Oll Korrect", often said to be the spelling used by the semiliterate seventh President, Andrew Jackson.

This third theory, seemingly the most implausible, is in fact very possibly the correct one - though without involving Andrew Jackson and with a bit of theory one thrown in for good measure. According to Allen Walker Read of Columbia University, who spent years tracking down the derivation of O.K., a fashion        developed among young wits of Boston and New York in 1838 of writing abbreviations based on intentional illiteracies. They thought it highly comical to write O.W. for "oll wright," O.K. for "oll korrect," K.Y. for "know yuse," and so on. O.K. first appeared in print on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Had that been it, the expression would no doubt have died an early death, but coincidentally in 1840 Martin Van Buren, known as Old Kinderhook from his hometown in upstate New York, was running for reelection as president, and an organization founded to help his campaign was given the name the Democratic O.K. Club. O.K. became a rallying cry throughout the campaign and with great haste established itself as a word throughout the country. This may have been small comfort to Van Buren, who lost the election to William Henry Harrison, who had the no-less-snappy slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too."

Although the residents of the New World began perforce to use new words almost from the first day they stepped ashore, it isn't at all clear when they began pronouncing them in a distinctively American way. No one can say when the American accent first arose - or why it evolved quite as it did. As early as 1791,       Dr. David Ramsay, one of the first American historians, noted in his History of the American Revolution that Americans had a particular purity of speech, which he attributed to the fact that people from all over Britain were thrown together in America where they "dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all."

But that is not to suggest that they sounded very much like Americans of today. According to Robert Burchfield, George Washington probably sounded as British as Lord North. On the other hand, Lord North probably sounded more American than would any British minister today. North would, for instance, have given necessary its full value. He would have pronounced path and bath in the American way. He would have given r's their full value in words like cart and horse. And he would have used many words that later fell out of use in England but were preserved in the New World.

The same would be true of the soldiers on the battlefield, who would, according to Burchfield, have spoken identically "except in minor particularities." Soldiers from both sides would have tended not to say join and poison as we do today, but something closer to "jine" and "pison." Speak and tea would have sounded to modern ears more like "spake" and "tay," certain and merchant more like "sartin" and "marchant."

Text 4

It has been said many times that hostility towards Britain at the end of the Revolutionary War was such that America seriously considered adopting another language. The story has been repeated many times, even by as eminent an authority as Professor Randolph Quirk of Oxford. ("At the time when the United States split off from Britain, for example, there were proposals that independence should be linguistically acknowledged by the use of a different language from that of Britain.") But it appears to be without foundation. Someone may have made such a proposal. At this remove we cannot be certain. But what we can say with confidence is that if such a proposal was made it appears not to have stimulated any widespread public debate, which would seem distinctly odd in a matter of such moment. We also know that the Founding Fathers were so little exercised by the question of an official language for the United States that they made not one mention of it in the Constitution. So it seems evident that such a proposal was not treated seriously, if indeed it ever existed.

What is certain is that many people, including both Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster, expected American English to evolve into a separate language over time. Benjamin Franklin, casting an uneasy eye at the Germans in his native Pennsylvania, feared that America would fragment into a variety of speech communities. But neither of these things happened. It is worth looking at why they did not.

Until about 1840 America received no more than about 20,000 immigrants a year, mostly from two places: Africa in the form of slaves and the British Isles. Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more than one million. Then suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval elsewhere, America's immigration became a flood. In the second half of the nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the pace quickened further in the early years of the twentieth century. In just four years at its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million Austro-Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens of thousands of other people from scores of other places.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In 1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German only.

Often, naturally, these people settled in enclaves. John Russell Bartlett noted that it was possible to cross Oneida County, New York, and hear nothing but Welsh. Probably the most famous of these enclaves - certainly the most enduring - was that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in southern Pennsylvania and spoke a dialect that came to be known, misleadingly, as Pennsylvania Dutch. (The name is a corruption of Deutsch, or German.) Some 300,000 people in America still use Pennsylvania Dutch as their first language, and perhaps twice as many more can speak it. The large number is accounted for no doubt by the extraordinary insularity of most Amish, many of whom even now shun cars, tractors, electricity, and the other refinements of modern life. Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of institutionalized broken English, arising from adapting English words to German syntax and idiom. Probably the best known of their expressions is "Outen the light" for put out the light. Among others:

It wonders me where it could be.          - I wonder where it could be.

Nice day, say not?                                - Nice day, isn't it?

What's the matter of him?                    - What's the matter with him?

It's going to give rain.                     - It's going to rain.

Come in and eat yourself.                    - Come and have something to eat.

Text 5

It is certainly true to say that America in general preserved many dozens of words that would otherwise almost certainly have been lost to English. The best noted, perhaps, is gotten, which to most Britons is the quaintest of Americanisms. It is now so unused in Britain that many Britons have to have the distinction between got and gotten explained to them - they use got for both - even though they make exactly the same distinction with forgot and forgotten. Gotten also survives in England in one or two phrases, notably "ill-gotten gains." Sick likewise underwent a profound change of sense in Britain that was not carried over to America. Shakespeare uses it in the modern American sense in Henry V ("He is very sick, and would to bed"), but in Britain the word has come to take on the much more specific sense of being nauseated. Even so, the broader original sense survives in a large number of expressions in Britain, such as sick bay, sick note, in sickness and in health, to be off sick (that is, to stay at home from work or school because of illness), sickbed, homesick, and lovesick. Conversely, the British often use ill where Americans would only use injured, as in newspaper accounts describing the victim of a train crash as being "seriously ill in hospital."

Other words and expressions that were common in Elizabethan England that died in England were fall as a synonym for autumn, mad for angry, progress as a verb, platter for a large dish, assignment in the sense of a job or task (it survived in England only as a legal expression), deck of cards (the English now say pack), slim in the sense of small (as in slim chance), mean in the sense of unpleasant instead of stingy, trash for rubbish (used by Shakespeare), hog as a synonym for pig, mayhem, magnetic, chore, skillet, ragamuffin, homespun, and the expression I guess. Many of these words have reestablished themselves in England, so much so that most Britons would be astonished to learn that they had ever fallen out of use there. Maybe was described in the original Oxford English Dictionary in this century as "archaic and dialectal." Quit in the sense of resigning had similarly died out in Britain. To leaf through a book was first recorded in Britain in 1613, but then fell out of use there and was reintroduced from America, as was frame-up, which the Oxford English Dictionary in 1901 termed obsolete, little realizing that it would soon be reintroduced to its native land in a thousand gangster movies.

America also introduced many words and expressions that never existed in Britain, but which have for the most part settled comfortably into domestic life there. Among these words and phrases are - and this really is a bare sampling - commuter, bedrock, snag, striptease, cold spell, gimmick, baby-sitter, lengthy, sag, soggy, teenager, telephone, typewriter, radio, to cut no ice, to butt in, to sidetrack, hangover, to make good (to be successful), fudge, publicity, joyride, bucket shop, blizzard, stunt, law-abiding, department store, notify, advocate (as a verb), currency (for money), to park, to rattle (in the sense of to unnerve or unsettle), hindsight, beeline, raincoat, scrawny, take a backseat, cloudburst, graveyard, know-how, to register (as in a hotel), to shut down, to fill the bill, to hold down (as in keep), to hold up (as in rob), to bank on, to stay put, to be stung (cheated), and even stiff upper lip. In a rather more roundabout way, so to speak, the word roundabout, their term for traffic circles, is of American origin. More precisely, it was a term invented by Logan Pearsall Smith, an American living in England, who was one of the members in the 1920s of the BBC Advisory Committee on Spoken English. This lofty panel had the job of deciding questions of pronunciation, usage, and even vocabulary for the BBC. Before Smith came along, traffic circles in Britain were called gyratory circuses. [Smith also wanted traffic lights to be called ­­top-and-goes and brainwave to be replaced by mindfall, among many other equally fanciful neologisms, but these never caught on.]

Text 6

    Of course, the traffic has not been entirely one way. Apart from the several thousand words that the British endowed Americans with in the first place, they have since the colonial exodus also given the world smog, weekend, gadget, miniskirt, radar, brain drain, and gay in the sense of homosexual. Even so, there is no denying that the great bulk of words introduced into the English language over the last two centuries have traveled from west to east.

And precious little thanks we get. Almost from the beginning of the colonial experience it has been a common assumption in Britain that a word or turn of phrase is inferior simply by dint of its being American-bred. In dismissing the "vile and barbarous word talented," Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed that "most of these pieces of slang come from America." That clearly was ground enough to detest them. In point of fact, I am very pleased to tell you, talented was a British coinage, first used in 1422. Something of the spirit of the age was captured in Samuel Johnson's observation in 1769 that Americans were "a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for any thing we allow them short of hanging." A reviewer of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) entreated Jefferson to say what he would about the British character, but "O spare, we beseech you, our mother-tongue." Another, noting his use of the word belittle, remarked: "It may be an elegant [word] in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for our part all we can do is to guess at its meaning. For shame, Mr. Jefferson!" Jefferson also coined the word Anglophobia; little wonder.

As often as not, these sneerers showed themselves to be not only gratuitously offensive but also etymologically underinformed because the objects of their animus were invariably British in origin. Johnson disparaged glee, jeopardy, and smolder, little realizing that they had existed in England for centuries. To antagonize, coined by John Quincy Adams, was strenuously attacked. So was progress as a verb, even though it had been used by both Bacon and Shakespeare. Scientist was called "an ignoble Americanism" and "a cheap and vulgar product of trans-Atlantic slang."

Americans, alas, were often somewhat sniveling cohorts in this caviling - perhaps most surprisingly Benjamin Franklin. When the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticized some of his Americanisms, Franklin meekly replied: "I thank you for your friendly admonition relating to some unusual words in the pamphlet. It will be of service to me. The pejorate and the colonize. . . I give up as bad; for certainly in writings intended for persuasion and for general information, one cannot be too clear; and every expression in the least obscure is a fault; The unshakable too, tho clear, I give up as rather low. The introducing new words, where we are already possessed of old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong. . . . I hope with you, that we shall always in America make the best English of this island our standard, and I believe it will be so." And yet he went right on introducing words: eventuate, demoralize, constitutionality. This servility persisted for a long time among some people. William Cullen Bryant, the editor of the New York Evening Post and one of the leading journalists of the nineteenth century in America, refused to allow such useful words as lengthy and presidential into his paper simply because they had been dismissed as Americanisms a century earlier. Jefferson, more heroically, lamented the British tendency to raise "a hue and cry at every word he [Samuel Johnson] has not licensed."

Text 7

The position has little improved with time. To this day you can find authorities in Britain attacking such vile "Americanisms" as maximize, minimize, and input, quite unaware that the first two were coined by Jeremy Bentham more than a century ago and the last appeared more than 600 years ago in Wycliffe's translation of the Bible. Loan as a verb (rather than lend) is often criticized as an Americanism, when in fact it was first used in England a full eight centuries ago. The stylebook of The Times of London sniffily instructs its staff members that "normalcy should be left to the Americans who coined it. The English is normality." In point of fact normalcy is a British coinage. As Baugh and Cable put it, "The English attitude toward Americanisms is still quite frankly hostile."

Indeed, it occasionally touches new peaks of smugness. In 1930, a Conservative member of Parliament, calling for a quota on the number of American films allowed into Britain, said: "The words and accent are perfectly disgusting, and there can be no doubt that such films are an evil influence on our language." More recently, during a debate in the House of Lords in 1978 one of the members said: "If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is." (We should perhaps bear in mind that the House of Lords is a largely powerless, nonelective institution. It is an arresting fact of British political life that a Briton can enjoy a national platform and exalted status simply because he is the residue of an illicit coupling 300 years before between a monarch and an orange seller.)

Even when they have not been actively hostile, the British have often struck an aloof, not to say fantastical, attitude to the adoption of American words. In The King's English (1931), the Fowler brothers, usually paragons of common sense in matters linguistic, take the curious and decidedly patronizing view that although there is nothing wrong with American English, and that it is even capable of evincing occasional flashes of genius, it is nonetheless a foreign tongue and should be treated as such. "The English and the American language and literature are both good things; but they are better apart than mixed." They particularly cautioned against using three vulgar Americanisms: placate, transpire, and antagonize.

Putting aside the consideration that without America's contribution English today would enjoy a global importance about on a par with Portuguese, it is not too much to say that this attitude is unworthy of the British. It is at any rate an arresting irony that the more dismissive they grow of American usages, the more lavishly they borrow them - to the extent of taking phrases that have no literal meaning in British English. People in Britain talk about doing something on a shoestring even though the word there is shoelace. They talk about the 64,000-dollar question, looking like a million bucks, having a megabucks salary, stepping on the gas (when they fuel their cars with petrol), and taking a raincheck even though probably not one Briton in a hundred knows what a raincheck is. They have even quietly modified their grammar and idiom to fit the American model. Ernest Gowers, in the revised edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, noted that under the influence of American usage the British had begun to change aim at doing into aim to do, haven't got to don't have, begun using in instead of for in phrases like "the first time in years," and started for the first time using begin to with a negative, as in "This doesn't begin to make sense." And these changes go on. Just in the last decade or so, truck has begun driving out lorry. Airplane is more and more replacing aeroplane. The American sense of billion (1,000,000,000) has almost completely routed the British sense (1,000,000,000,000 ).

Text 8

American spelling, too, has had more influence on the British than they might think. Jail rather than gaol, burden rather than burthen, clue rather than clew, wagon rather than waggon, today and tomorrow rather than to-day and to-morrow, mask rather than masque, reflection rather than reflexion, and forever and onto as single words rather than two have all been nudged on their way towards acceptance by American influence. For most senses of the word program, the British still use programme, but when the context is of computers they write program. A similar distinction is increasingly made with disc (the usual British spelling) and disk for the thing you slot into your home computer.

Although the English kept the u in many words like humour, honour, and colour, they gave it up in several, such as terrour, horrour, and governour, helped at least in part by the influence of American books and journals. Confusingly, they retained it in some forms but abandoned it in others, so that in England you write honour and honourable but honorary and honorarium; colour and colouring but coloration; humour but humorist; labour and labourer but laborious. There is no logic to it, and no telling why some words gave up the u and others didn't. For a time it was fashionable to drop the u from honor and humor - Coleridge for one did it - but it didn't catch on.

People don't often appreciate just how much movies and television have smoothed the differences between British and American English, but half a century ago the gap was very much wider. In 1922, when Sinclair Lewis's novel Babbitt was published in Britain it contained a glossary. Words that are commonplace in Britain now were quite unknown until the advent of talking pictures - among them grapevine, fan (in the sense of a sports enthusiast), gimmick, and phoney. As late as 1955, a writer in the Spectator could misapprehend the expression turn of the century, and take it to mean midcentury, when the first half turns into the second. In 1939, the preface to An Anglo-American Interpreter suggested that "an American, if taken suddenly ill while on a visit to London, might die in the street through being unable to make himself understood." That may be arrant hyperbole, designed to boost sales, but it is probably true that the period up to the Second World War marked the age of the greatest divergence between the two main branches of English.

Even now, there remains great scope for confusion, as evidenced by the true story of an American lady, newly arrived in London, who opened her front door to find three burly men on the steps informing her that they were her dustmen. "Oh," she blurted, "but I do my own dusting." It can take years for an American to master the intricacies of British idiom, and vice versa. In Britain homely is a flattering expression (equivalent to homey); in America it means "ugly." In Britain upstairs is the first floor; in America it is the second.…Presently means "now" in America; in Britain it means "in a little while." Sometimes these can cause considerable embarrassment, most famously with the British expression "I'll knock you up in the morning," which means "I'll knock on your door in the morning", which means to an American "I’ll make you pregnant in the morning." To keep your pecker up is an innocuous expression in Britain (even though, curiously, pecker has the same slang meaning there), but to be stuffed is distinctly rude, so that if you say at a dinner party, "I couldn't eat another thing; I'm stuffed," an embarrassing silence will fall over the table. (You may recognize the voice of experience in this.)

Such too will be your fate if you innocently refer to someone's fanny; in England it means a woman's pudenda. Other terms are less graphic, but no less confusing. English people bathe wounds but not their babies; they bath their babies. Whereas an American wishing to get clean would bathe in a bath-tub, an English person would bath in a bath. English people do bathe, but what they mean by that is to go for a swim in the sea. Unless, of course, the water is too cold (as it always is in Britain) in which case they stand in water up to their knees. This is called having a paddle, even though their hands may never touch the water.

Text 9

Sometimes these differences in meaning take on a kind of bewildering circularity. A tramp in Britain is a bum in America, while a bum in Britain is a fanny in America, while a fanny in Britain is - well, we've covered that. To a foreigner it must seem sometimes as if we are being intentionally contrary. Consider that in Britain the Royal Mail delivers the post, not the mail, while in America the Postal Service delivers the mail, not the post. These ambiguities can affect scientists as much as tourists. The British billion, as we have already seen, has surrendered to the American billion, but for other numbers agreement has yet to be reached. A decillion in America is a one plus thirty-three zeros. In Britain it is a one plus sixty zeros. Needless to say, that can make a difference.

In common speech, some 4,000 words are used differently in one country from the other. That's a very large number indeed. Some are well known on both sides of the Atlantic - lift/elevator, dustbin/garbage can, biscuit/cookie - but many hundreds of others are still liable to befuddle the hapless traveler. Try covering up the right- hand column below and seeing how many of the British terms in the left-hand column you can identify. If you get more than half you either know the country well or have been reading too many English murder mysteries.

American                                       British

baby's crib                                            cot

thread                                                   cotton (for sewing)

zucchini                                                courgette

to loaf                                                   to skive

goldbricker                                           skiver

cotton candy                                        candy floss

period                                                   full stop (punctuation)

quotation marks                                   inverted commas

idiot, boor                                            berk

skilled carpenter                                   joiner                                           

worn out                                              knackered

license plate                                          number plate

policeman                                             Old Bill

run away                                              scarper

to hurry along                                      to chivvy

pedestrian underpass                           subway

furniture removal truck                                 pantechnicon

(vehicle) overpass                                          flyover

newspaper editorial                              leading article

one-armed bandit                                           fruit machine

ladies' underwear                                           smalls

long-distance bus                                           coach

petty thief                                             spiv

to whine                                               to grizzle

to carry a heavy load                           to hump

antsy                                                    fidgety

cheesecloth                                           muslin

crosswalk                                             pedestrian crossing

downspout                                           drainpipe

duplex                                                  semi-detached house

lightning bug                                        glow-worm

pacifier                                                 baby’s dummy

parking (property)                                         grassy strip between pavement and street

realtor                                                  estate agent

station wagon                                       estate car

teeter-totter                                          see-saw

trunk (of car)                                        boot

VCR                                                     video recorder

yard                                                      garden

Text 10

It has been sometimes said that prudery reached such a height in the 19^th century that people took to dressing their piano legs in little skirts lest they rouse anyone to untimely passion. Thomas Pyles in his outstanding Words and Ways of American English tracked the story to a book called Diary in America, written in 1837 by an English traveler, Captain Frederick Marryat, and concluded that the story was told for comic effect and almost certainly was untrue. Rather more plausible was the anecdote recorded in the same book in which Marryat made the serious gaffe of asking a young lacy if she had hurt her leg in a fall. The woman blushing averted her gaze and told him that people did not use that word in America. “I apologized for my want of refinement, which was attributable to having been accustomed only to English society”, Marryat drolly remarked, and asked the lady what was the acceptable term for “such articles”. Limbs, he was told.

It was an age in which the most innocuous words became unacceptable at a rate that must have been dizzying. Stomach became a euphemism for belly and in its turn was considered too graphic and was replaced by tummy, midriff, and even breadbasket. The conventional terms for the parts of a chicken, such as breast, leg and thigh caused particular anxiety and had to be replaced with terms like drumstick, first joint and white meat. The names for male animals, such as buck and stallion, were never used in mixed company. Bulls were called sires, male animals, and, in a truly inspired burst of ridiculousness, gentleman cows. But it didn’t stop there. Euphemisms had to be devised for any word that had cock in it—haycock became haystack, cockerel became rooster—and for the better part of a century people with cock in their names, such as Hitchcock or Peacock, suffered unspeakable embarrassment when they were required to make introductions. Americans were rather more squeamish in these matters than the British, going so far as to change the old English titbit to tidbit.

Text 11

Users of electronic communication, despite their geographical dispersion, form a relatively cohesive, subcultural group and have been described as a ‘virtualspeech community’ (Paolillo, 1999). Much linguistic work has concentrated on documenting the in-group national and international vocabularies that are used in electronic communication. The six standard categories of semantic change (cf. Traugott, 2000) can be identified in the specialist Internet lexicon (or jargon) that has its roots in hacker usage:

· Broadening/Generalization/Extension: grep, a UNIX command meaning ‘Get REpeated Pattern,’ is now used widely as a verb with the meaning ‘to search.’

· Narrowing/Restriction: banner (top-centered graphic on a webpage), to compress (to reduce data size through the application of a mathematical algorithm).

· Amelioration: nerd, geek (which have acquired highly positive in-group connotations), a hack (a good and clever piece of work).

· Pejoration: tourist (an uninvited and usually nonparticipating guest on a discussion group), random (has a pejorative meaning of  ‘unproductive’, ‘undirected,’ e.g., ‘He is a random loser’).

· Metaphor: information superhighway, websurfing, nipple mouse, gopher (a software program designed ‘to gopher’ through information).

· Metonymy: a suit (someone involved in information technology who habitually wears suits and works in management, distinct from a real programmer or ‘techie’; pejorative), vanilla (‘ordinary’< vanilla ice cream, the default flavor in many countries, e.g., United States, United Kingdom).

Acronyms and abbreviations are a salient feature of what Crystal (2001) has called Netspeak, e.g., IRL ‘in real life,’ AFAIK ‘as far as I know,’ and BFN ‘bye for now.’ Media citations (from movies and computer games) have long been common in the in-group language of hackers and are moving into mainstream Netspeak: ‘all your base are belong to us’ is an expression used to declare victory or superiority (from a 1991 computer game; the citation spread through the Internet in 2001); ‘and there was much rejoicing’ can be used to acknowledge an accomplishment (from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Overlexicalization and the clustering of synonyms is another characteristic feature (e.g., nick, handle, screen name, and pseudo are all used to refer to the pseudonyms used by participants in chatrooms or newsgroups), as is the on-going creation of portmanteau neologisms (netiquette, newbie, progasm, screenagers, etc.). There are also conventions for the encoding of prosody and paralinguistic meaning: emoticons (smiley icons such as :-)), the use of capitals (to indicate shouting), and repetition of letters (for emphasis) are used to disambiguate written messages.

With regard to derivational morphology: the e prefix and the bot suffix (from ‘robot’) have established themselves as productive morphemes (e-loan, e-government, e-cards, e-books, annoybot, mailbot, etc.). In inflecting languages, such as German, a new and productive lexical class has emerged in the context of chat communication: nonfinite verb-last stems. These are used by participants to describe actions that are performed in the context of the conversation. The action descriptions are inserted in asterisks: *away sei* (*away be*; the full German infinitive of ‘to be’ is sein), *schnell zu dir renn* (*quickly run to you*; the full German infinitive of ‘to run’ is rennen;). Verbal stems (schluck ‘swallow,’ gἂhn ‘yawn’) have long been used in comics and also colloquially in German youth language. In English, on the other hand, action descriptions such as *nod* and *sigh* are structurally ambiguous and not necessarily identifiable as stems; moreover, inflected forms such as *shakes hand* are not unusual in English chat communication.

The lexical structure and character of nicknames (‘nicks’) is another aspect of the linguistics of Netspeak. In terms of semantic preferences, Bechar-Israeli (1996) identified six main semantic fields from which nicks are drawn: self-descriptors (<shydude>, <Dutchguy>, <irish>); technology (<Pentium>); real-world objects (<froggy>, <tulip>, <cheese>); play on words and sounds (<kukyMNSTR>, <whathell>); famous characters (<Elvis>, <Barbie>); and sex and provocation (<fuckjesus>, <sexpot>).

The language of text messaging/texting, which has become a popular form of interpersonal communication from the mid-1990s, is partially based on Netspeak, but shows a more radical use of abbreviations (e.g., ‘it’s prty low 4 sum 1 2 dump their b/f or g/f by sms’ ‘it is pretty low for someone to dump their boyfriend or girlfriend by sms’; special conventionalized abbreviations are also used in SMS, e.g., SWDYT ‘so what do you think?’). The trend toward letter reduction (mostly achieved through a technique called ‘consonant writing’) and a generally telegraphic style have usually been interpreted as a response to the limited number of characters (max. 160) per message, and the small and awkward keyboard. They have since developed into a characteristic feature of the genre. It is not yet clear how technological innovations, such as predictive text software (which ‘guesses’ words after only a few key strokes), and market-related changes, such as the introduction of flat rates (rather than charging users per character), have affected (and will affect) the language of texting.

Text 12

“Folk etymology” or “popular etymology” is the name given to a process of reanalysis. Speakers of a language, expecting their words to be partly motivated, find in them elements which they perceive as motivating the word, even where these elements have no historical presence. It is called “folk” or “popular” because it pays no attention to the knowledge of the erudite. It is called “etymology” because it appears to invent a new origin for a word, an origin which is contrary to fact. A better label would be “morphological reanalysis.”

A set of words particularly susceptible to folk etymology is loan words. Very often these obtain forms in the borrowing language which show something of the way they have been perceived, but owe little to the structure of the language from which the word is borrowed, except some superficial phonetic resemblance. Examples include English woodchuck from Ojibwa otchig, with nothing to do with either wood or throwing; Danish dialect kamelte (literally ‘camel tea’) from kamillete (‘chamomile tea’); German (Standard German) Hängematte (literally ‘hanging mat’) originally from Taino hamaca ‘hammock.’

The source word need not, however, be a foreign word; it can be native. Consider English titmouse, a kind of bird, from an earlier titmᾱse, with no link to mice, or German (Standard German) Maulwurf ‘mole’ (literally ‘mouth throw’) from an earlier moltwerf ‘earth thrower’ (compare English dialect mouldywarp). The same word turns up in one attested (but not established) instance in Danish as muldhvalp (literally ‘earth puppy’). Note also that folk etymology frequently leaves part of the original word unanalyzed: belfry, from an earlier berfry, analyzes the first element as related to bell, but leaves the -fry element meaningless.

The line between an instance of folk etymology and a malapropism is sometimes a thin one, but in principle a malapropism confuses two similar-sounding words (e.g., in an example from Sheridan’s character Mrs. Malaprop,  contiguous and contagious) while folk etymology is an error based on the supposed meaning of elements within the word (even if those elements are clearly absurd, like the mouse in titmouse) which spreads beyond the individual to a whole community. Both are often occasioned by the attempt to use exotic or difficult vocabulary whose form is not entirely accurately perceived.

Text 13

The basic word-formative relation is that of foundation, of the conditioning of one word by another: a foundated word (as a rule more complicated semantically and formally) is based on one or more other words (as a rule simpler semantically and formally), it is conditioned by these foundating words.

Very often the relation of foundation reflects the actual rise (origin) of the foundated word: the foundating naming unit is usually the basic one, the foundated unit is derived, but this is not necessary in principle.

This basic relation connects on the one hand every foundating word with all words based on it, and on the other hand every founded word with the relevant basic, foundating word(s).

Usually foundation is understood as an elementary pair of words connected directly by means of their relation. Along with this direct motivation, however, it is necessary also to take into account the relation of indirect, mediated foundation, since also such a relationship can become the model for the rise of a new word. The relation of foundation underlies further multidimensional bunches, one- dimensional (linear) series, branching chains and word-formative broods (paradigms), while unite all directly or indirectly synchronically foundated words with an ultimately foundating word (which is not foundated).

The relation of foundation comes close to the parallel relation of motivation, i.e. of the explanability of one word by another: the motivated word is elucidated by means of one or more motivating words in what concerns both its formal and semantic aspects (“singer” is motivated by “sing” and “-er”).

The notions of foundation and motivation can be understood as two different aspects of a single real relation. There is a casual relationship between the two aspects: what is more complex is elucidated by what is simpler.

In some cases it is not clear which one of the two formally and semantically related words is the foundating / motivating and which the founded / motivated one, i.e. how the foundation / motivation is oriented. This occurs either when formal criteria are lacking or conflict with the semantic criteria. In such a case the possibility of a bidirectional foundation / motivation should be taken into account (cf. “apple” ↔ “apple-tree”).

Text 14

Sterling.Originally a name of the English penny, the standard coin in which it was commonly stipulated that payment should be made; it was subsequently applied to the coinage of England in general, and metaphorically came to signify, of standard value, genuine, sound. “Denarius Angliae qui vocatur Sterlingus” – Stat. Edw. I. in Duс.“Moneta nostra, videlicet sterlingi, non deferatur extra regnum.” – Stat. David H. Scot. “In this year (1351) William Edginton – made the kyng to make a new coyne – destroying alle the elde sterlynges which were of gretter wight.” – Capgr. Chron. 214. “In centum marcis bonorum novorum et legalium sterlingoruni tredecim solid, et 4 sterling, pro qualibet marca computetis.” – Chart. H. III. in Duс. (Duc. – Ducange, Glossarium Mediᴂ et Intimᴂ Latinitatis). The origin of the name is unknown. Some suppose it to be from the coin having had a star on the obverse, the objection to which is that there is no evidence of any coin in which the star occupied a place sufficiently marked to give a name to the coin. There are indeed pennies of King John on which there is a star or sun in the hollow of a crescent with other emblems, but it is a very inconspicuous object. Others suppose that the name was given to coins struck at Stirling in Scotland. But the hypothesis most generally approved is that the coin is named from the Easterlings or North Germans, who were the first moneyers in England. Walter de Pinchbeck, a monk of Bury in the time of Ed. I., says, 'Sed moneta Anglise fertur dicta fuisse a nominibus opificum, ut Floreni a nominibus Florentiorum, ita Sterlingi a nominibus Esterlingorum nomina sua contraxerunt, qui hujusmodi monetam in Anglia primitus componebant.' The assertion however merits as little credit in the case of the Sterling as of the Florin. We do not even know when the name originated.     

Text 15

A small class of words is found in all languages analogous to, and many of them identical with, the English forms, mamma, papa, mammy, daddy, hahy, babe, pap (in the sense of breast, as well as of soft food for children), expressing ideas most needed for communication with children at the earliest period of their life. A long list of the names of father and mother was published by Prof. I.C.E.Buschman in the Trans, of the Berlin Acad, der Wiss. For 1852, a translation of which is given in the Proceedings of the Philology. It appears that words of the foregoing class are universally formed from the easiest articulations, ba, pa, ma, da, ta, na, or ab, ap, am, at, an. We find ma, me, mi, mu, mam, mama, meme, moma, mother, and less frequently nearly all the sameforms in the sense of father; pa, ba, pap, bap, bob, papa, baba, paba, fqfe, fabe, father; ba, baba, bama, fa, fafa, fawa, be, bi, bo, bibi, mother; ta,da, tat, tata, tad, dad, dada, dade, tati, titi, father; de, tai, dai, deda, tite, mother; nna, nan, nanna, ninna, nang, nape, father; na, mna, nan, nana, nene, neni, nine, nama, mother. In the same way the changes are rung on ab, aba, abba, avva, appa, epe, ipa, obo, abob, ubaba, abban, father; amba, abai, aapu, ibii, ewa, mother; at, aat, ata, atta, otta, aita, atya, father; hada, etta, ote, mother; anneh, ina, una, father-, ana, anna, enna, eenah, ina, onny, inan, iinina, ananah, mother. Isa Condamine mentions abba or baba, or papa and mama, as common to a great number of American languages differing widely from each other, and he adverts to a rational explanation of the origin of these designations. 'If we regard these words as the first that children can articulate, and consequently those which must in every country have been adopted by the parents who heard them spoken, in order to make them serve as signs for the ideas of father and mother.' — De Brosses, i. 215.

The speech of the mother may perhaps unconsciously give something of an articulate form to the meaningless cooings and mutterings of the infant, as the song of the mother-bird influences that of her young. At any rate these infantile utterances are represented in speech by the syllables ba, fa, ma, ta, giving rise to forms like English babble, maffle, fajfle, famble, tattle, to speak imperfectly like a child, to talk unmeaningly; OE. mamelen, babelen, to babble, mutter; mammer, to mutter; Gr. βαβaζω, to say ba, ba, to speak inarticulately (whence βαζω, to speak); Mod.Gr. μαμονλιζω, to mumble, mutter, &c. Accordingly the joyful or eager utterances of the child when taken up by the mother, or when offered the breast, would sound to her as if the infant greeted her by the name of mama, or as if it called for the breast by that name, and she would adopt these names herself and teach her child the intelligent use of them. Thus Lat. mamma, the infantile term for mother, has remained, with the dim. mamilla, as the name of the breast, and the same is the case with Fin. mamma, Du. mamme, mother, nurse, breast; mammen, to give suck. When one of the imitative syllables as ma had thus been taken up to designate the mother, a different one, as la, pa, or ta, would be appropriated by analogy as the designation of the father.

The name of the baby himself also is formed on the same imitative principle which gives their designation to so many animals, viz. from the syllables ba, ba, representing the utterance of the infant. The same principle applies to others of these infantile words. The nurse imitates the wrangling or drowsy tones of the infant, as she jogs it to sleep upon her knee, by the syllables na, na, la, la. To the first of these forms belongs the Italian lullaby, ninna nanna ; far la ninna nanna, to lull a child; ninnare, ninnellare, to rock, and in children's language nanna, bed, sleep. Far la nanna, andare a nanna, to sleep, to go to bed, go to sleep. In the Mpongwe of W. Africa nana, and in the Swahili of the Eastern coast lala, has the sense of sleep. The imitation gives a designation to the infant himself in It. ninna, a little girl; Milanese nan, nanin, a caressing term for an infant. Caro el mi nan, my darling baby. Sp. niño, a child. In Lat. nanus, a dwarf, the designation is transferred to a person of childish stature, as in Mod. Gr. νινίον, a young child, a simpleton, and in E. ninny it is transferred to a person of childish understanding. From the imitative la, la, are G. lallen, to speak imperfectly like a child, from whence, as in other cases, the sense is extended to speaking hi general in Gr. λαλέω, to chatter, babble, talk. From the same source are Lat. lallo, and E. lull, primarily to sing a child to sleep, then to calm, to soothe. In Servian the nurses’ song sounds lyu, lifu, whence lyulyuti, to rock; lyulyashka, a cradle.

Text 16

English retains probably the richest vocabulary, and most diverse shading of meanings, of any language. We can distinguish between house and home (as, for instance, the French cannot), between continual and continuous, sensual and sensuous, forceful and forcible, childish and childlike, masterful and masterly, assignment and assignation, informant and informer. For almost every word we have a multiplicity of synonyms. Something is not just big, it is large, immense, vast, capacious, bulky, massive, whopping, humongous. No other language has so many words all saying the same thing. It has been said that English is unique in possessing a synonym for each level of our culture: popular, literary, and scholarly - so that we can, according to our background and cerebral attainments, rise, mount, or ascend a stairway, shrink in fear, terror, or trepidation, and think, ponder, or cogitate upon a problem. This abundance of terms is often cited as a virtue. And yet a critic could equally argue that English is an untidy and acquisitive language, cluttered with a plethora of needless words. After all, do we really need fictile as a synonym for moldable, glabrous for hairless, sternutation for sneezing? Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity, as evidenced by our peculiar affection for redundant phrases, expressions that say the same thing twice: beck and call, law and order, assault and battery, null and void, safe and sound, first and foremost, trials and tribulations, hem and haw, spick-and-span, kith and kin, dig and delve, hale and hearty, peace and quiet, vim and vigor, pots and pans, cease and desist, rack and ruin, without let or hindrance, to all intents and purposes, various different.

Despite this bounty of terms, we have a strange — and to foreigners it must seem maddening — tendency to load a single word with a whole galaxy of meanings. Fine, for instance, has fourteen definitions as an adjective, six as a noun, and two as an adverb. In the Oxford English Dictionary it fills two full pages and takes 5,000 words of description. We can talk about fine art, fine gold, a fine edge, feeling fine, fine hair, and a court fine and mean quite separate things. The condition of having many meanings is known as polysemy, and it is very common. Sound is another polysemic word. Its vast repertory of meanings can suggest an audible noise, a state of healthiness (sound mind), an outburst (sound off), an inquiry (sound out), a body of water (Puget Sound), or financial stability (sound economy), among many others. And then there's round. In the OED, round alone (that is without variants like rounded and roundup) takes 7 ½ pages to define or about 15,000 words of text - about as much as is contained in the first hundred pages of this book. Even when you strip out its obsolete senses, round still has twelve uses as an adjective, nineteen as a noun, seven as a transitive verb, five as an intransitive verb, one as an adverb, and two as a preposition. But the polysemic champion must be set. Superficially it looks a wholly unassuming monosyllable, the verbal equivalent of the single-celled organism. Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words — the length of a short novel — to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

Generally polysemy happens because one word sprouts a variety of meanings, but sometimes it is the other way around - similar but quite separate words evolve identical spellings. Boil in the sense of heating a pan of water and boil in the sense of an irruption of the skin are two unrelated words that simply happen to be spelled the same way. So are policy in the sense of a strategy or plan and the policy in a life insurance policy. Excise, meaning "to cut," is quite distinct in origin from excise in the sense of a customs duty.

Text 17

Many other words owe their existence to mishearings. Button-hole was once buttonhold. Sweetheart was originally sweetard, as in dullard and dotard. Bridegroom was in Old English bryd-guma, but the context made people think of groom and an r was added. By a similar process an 1 found its way into belfrey. Asparagus was for 200 years called sparrow-grass. Pentice became penthouse. Shamefaced was originally shamefast (fast here having the sense of lodged firmly, as in "stuck fast"). The process can still be seen today in the tendency among many people to turn, for example, chaise longue into chaise lounge.

Sometimes words are created by false analogy or back-formation. One example of this is the word pea. Originally the word was pease, as in the nursery rhyme "pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold." But this was mistakenly thought to signify a plural and the word pea was back-formed to denote singularity. A similar misunderstanding gave us cherry (from cerise). Etymologically cherries ought to be both singular and plural - and indeed it once was. The words grovel and sidle similarly came into English because the original adverbs, groveling and sideling, were assumed to contain the participle -ing, as in walking and seeing. In fact, it was the suffix -ling, but this did not stop people from adding a pair of useful verbs to the language. Other back-formations are laze (from lazy), rove, burgle, greed (from greedy), beg (from beggar), and difficult (from difficulty). Given the handiness and venerability of the process, it is curious to note that language authorities still generally squirm at the addition of new ones to the language. Among those that still attract occasional opprobrium are enthuse and donate.

Text 18

Words are adopted. This is of course one of the glories of English — its willingness to take in words from abroad, rather as if they were refugees. We take words from almost anywhere — shampoo from India, chaparral from the Basques, caucus from the Algonquin Indians, ketchup from China, potato from Haiti, sofa from Arabia, boondocks from the Tagalog language of the Philippines, slogan from Gaelic. You can't get much more eclectic than that. And we have been doing it for centuries. According to Baugh and Cable as long ago as the sixteenth century English had already adopted words from more than fifty other languages - a phenomenal number for the age. Sometimes the route these words take is highly circuitous. Many Greek words became Latin words, which became French words, which became English words. Garbage, which has had its present meaning of food waste since the Middle Ages, was brought to England by the Normans, who had adapted it from an Italian dialectal word, garbuzo, which in turn had been taken from the Old Italian garbuglio (a mess), which ultimately had come from the Latin bullire (to boil or bubble).

Sometimes the same word reaches us at different times, having undergone various degrees of filtering, and thus can exist in English in two or more related forms, as with canal and channel, regard and reward, poor and pauper, catch and chase, cave and cage, amiable and amicable. Often these words have been so modified in their travels that their kinship is all but invisible. Who would guess that coy and quiet both have the same grandparent in the Latin quietus, or that sordid and swarthy come jointly from the Latin sordere (to be soiled or dirty), or that entirety and integrity come from the Latin integritus (complete and pure)?

Occasionally a single root gave birth to triplets, as with cattle, chattel, and capital, hotel, hostel, and hospital, and strait, straight, and strict. There is at least one quadruplet — jaunty, gentle, gentile, and genteel, all from the Latin gentiles —  though there may be more. But the record holder is almost certainly the Latin discus, which has given us disk, disc, dish, desk, dais, and, of course, discus. (But having said that, one native Anglo-Saxon root, bear, has given birth to more than forty words, from birth to born to burden.)

Often words change meanings dramatically as they pass from one nation to another. The Latin bestia has become variously biscia (snake) in Italy, bitch (female dog) in England, biche (female deer) in France, and bicho (insect) in Portugal.

Text 19

We in the English-speaking world are actually sometimes better at looking after our borrowed words than the parents were. Quite a number of words that we've absorbed no longer exist in their place of birth. For instance, the French do not use nom de plume, double entendre, panache, bon viveur, legerdemain (literally "light of hand"), or R.S.V.P. for répondez s'il vous plait. (Instead they write: "Prière de répondre.") The Italians do not use brio and although they do use al fresco, to them it signifies not being outside but being in prison.

Many of the words we take in are so artfully anglicized that it can be a surprise to learn they are not native. Who would guess that our word puny was once the Anglo-Norman puis né or that curmudgeon may once have been the French coeur méchant (evil heart), or that breeze, so English-sounding, was taken from the Spanish briza, or that the distress signal mayday was lifted from the French cry m'aider (meaning "help me")? Chowder came directly from the French chaudière (cauldron), while bankrupt was taken literally from the Italian expression banca rotta, meaning "broken bench." In the late Middle Ages, when banking was evolving in Italy, transactions were conducted in open-air markets. When a banker became insolvent his bench was broken up. Sometimes the foreign words came quietly, but other times they needed a good pummeling before they assumed anything like a native shape, as when the Gaelic sionnachuighim was knocked into shenanigan and the Amerind raugroughcan became raccoon.

This tendency to turn foreign sounds into native speech is common. In New York, Flatbush was originally Vlacht Bos and Gramercy Park was originally De Kromme Zee. British soldiers in World War I called Ypres Wipers and in the 1950s, American soldiers in Japan converted the song "Shi-i-Na-Na Ya-Ru" into "She Ain't Got No Yo-Yo."

Text 20

Often words spring seemingly from nowhere. Take dog. For centuries the word in English was hound (or hund). Then suddenly in the late Middle Ages, dog –a word etymologically unrelated to any other known word – displaced it. No one has any idea why. This sudden arising of words happens more often than you might think. Among others without known pedigree are jaw, jam, bad, big, gloat, fun, crease, pour, put, niblick (the golf club), noisome, numskull, jalopy, and countless others. Blizzard suddenly appeared in the nineteenth century in America (the earliest use is attributed to Davy Crockett) and rowdy appeared at about the same time. Recent examples of this phenomenon are yuppie and sound bites, which seem to have burst forth spontaneously and spread with remarkable rapidity throughout the English-speaking world.

Other words exist in the language for hundreds of years, either as dialect words or as mainstream words that have fallen out of use, before suddenly leaping to prominence – again quite mysteriously. Scrounge and seep are both of this type. They have been around for centuries and yet neither, according to Robert Burchfield, came into general use before 1900.

Many words are made up by writers. According to apparently careful calculations, Shakespeare used 17,677 words in his writings, of which at least one tenth had never been used before. Imagine if every tenth word you wrote were original. It is a staggering display of ingenuity. But then Shakespeare lived in an age when words and ideas burst upon the world as never before or since. For a century and a half, from 1500 to 1650, English flowed with new words. Between 10,000 and 12,000 words were coined, of which about half still exist. Not until modern times would this number be exceeded, but even then there is no comparison. The new words of today represent an explosion of technology – lunar module and myocardial infarction –rather than of poetry and feeling. Consider the words that Shakespeare alone gave us, barefaced, critical, leapfrog, monumental, castigate, majestic, obscene, frugal, radiance, dwindle, countless, submerged, excellent, fretful, gust, hint, hurry, lonely, summit, pedant, obscene, and some 1,685 others. How would we manage without them? He might well have created even more except that he had to bear in mind the practicalities of being instantly apprehended by an audience. Shakespeare's vocabulary changed considerably as he aged. Jespersen notes that there are some 200 to 300 words to be found in the early plays that are never repeated. Many of these were provincialisms that he later shed, but which independently made their way into the language later – among them cranny, beautified, homicide, aggravate, and forefathers. It has also been observed by scholars that the new terms of his younger years appeal directly to the senses (snow-white, fragrant, brittle) while the coinages of the later years are more often concerned with psychological considerations.

Text 21

Words change by doing nothing….That is, the word stays the same but the meaning changes. Surprisingly often the meaning becomes its opposite or something very like it. Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy. Brave once implied cowardice – as indeed bravado still does. (Both come from the same source as depraved.) Crafty, now a disparaging term, originally was a word of praise, while enthusiasm which is now a word of praise, was once a term of mild abuse. Zeal has lost its original pejorative sense, but zealot curiously has not. Garble once meant to sort out, not to mix up. A harlot was once a boy, and a girl in Chaucer's day was any young person, whether male or female. Manufacture, from the Latin root for hand, once signified something made by hand; it now means virtually the opposite. Politician was originally a sinister word (perhaps, on second thought, it still is), while obsequious and notorious simply meant flexible and famous. Simeon Potter notes that when James II first saw St. Paul's Cathedral he called it amusing, awful, and artificial, and meant that it was pleasing to look at, deserving of awe, and full of skillful artifice.

This drift of meaning, technically called catachresis, is as wide-spread as it is curious. Egregious once meant eminent or admirable. In the sixteenth century, for no reason we know of, it began to take on the opposite sense of badness and unworthiness (it is in this sense that Shakespeare employs it in Cymbeline) and has retained that sense since. Now, however, it seems that people are increasingly using it in the sense not of bad or shocking, but of simply being pointless and unconstructive.

According to Mario Pei, more than half of all words adopted into English from Latin now have meanings quite different from their original ones. A word that shows just how wide-ranging these changes can be is nice, which was first recorded in 1290 with the meaning of stupid and foolish. Seventy-five years later Chaucer was using it to mean lascivious and wanton. Then at various times over the next 400 years it came to mean extravagant, elegant, strange, slothful, unmanly, luxurious, modest, slight, precise, thin, shy, discriminating, dainty, and – by 1769 – pleasant and agreeable. The meaning shifted so frequently and radically that it is now often impossible to tell in what sense it was intended, as when Jane Austen wrote to a friend, "You scold me so much in a nice long letter . . . which I have received from you."

Text 22

This drift of meaning can happen with almost anything, even our clothes. There is a curious but not often noted tendency for the names of articles of apparel to drift around the body. This is particularly apparent to Americans in Britain (and vice versa) who discover that the names for clothes have moved around at different rates and now often signify quite separate things. A Briton going into a New York department store with a shopping list consisting of vest, knickers, suspenders, jumper, and pants would in each instance be given something dramatically different from what he expected. (To wit, a British vest is an American undershirt. An American vest is a British waistcoat. Their knickers are our panties. To them a jumper is a sweater, while what we call a jumper is to them a pinafore dress. Our suspenders are their braces. They don't need suspenders to hold up their pants because to them pants are underwear and clearly you don't need suspenders for that, so instead they employ suspenders to hold up their stockings.)

Sometimes an old meaning is preserved in a phrase or expression. Neck was once widely used to describe a parcel of land, but that meaning has died out except in the expression neck of the woods. Tell once meant to count. This meaning died out but is preserved in the expression bank teller and in the term for people who count votes. When this happens, the word is called a fossil. Other examples of fossils are the italicized words in the following list:

short shrift                                            newfangled

hem and haw                                        at bay

rank and file                                         spick-and-span

raring to go                                          to and fro

not a whit                                             kith and kin

out of kilter

Occasionally, because the sense of the word has changed, fossil expressions are misleading. Consider the oft-quoted statement "the exception proves the rule." Most people take this to mean that the exception confirms the rule, though when you ask them to explain the logic in that statement, they usually cannot. After all, how can an exception prove a rule? It can't. The answer is that an earlier meaning of prove was to test (a meaning preserved in proving ground) and with that meaning the statement suddenly becomes sensible — the exception tests the rule. A similar misapprehension is often attached to the statement "the proof of the pudding is in the eating."

Sometimes words change by becoming more specific. A forest was any area of countryside set aside for hunting, whether or not it was covered with trees. (In England to this day, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire is largely treeless, as are large stretches of the New Forest in Hampshire.) And worm was a term for any crawling creature, including snakes.

Text 23

We have six ways of making labyrinth into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. We have at least six ways of expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, il-, im-, ir-, un-, and non-. It is arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible, but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but impossible. Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless. Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.

Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of angry and hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in no other common words in English. Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, hazardous, and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wedlock and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form. Equally some common-seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for- is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should continue to thrive while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.

Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix -dom was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving us such useful locutions as officialdom and boredom and later more contrived forms like best-sellerdom. The ending -en is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.) and yet almost all such words are less than 300 years old.

Text 24

Original word New word                Original word     New word

editor                       edit                           peddler                     peddle

inspector         inspect                 burglar                     burgle

sculptor          sculpt                       beggar                      beg

juggler             juggle                       scavenger                 scavenge

swindler          swindle                     swashbuckler           swashbuckle

The words from this table were created by analogy to the words like writer, governor. The ending – pronounced e and spelled -er, -or, -ar – is interpreted as the agentive suffix meaning ‘‘someone who does x,’’ which derives nouns from the corresponding verbs. Since the words in the left-hand column are nouns, it was wrongly presumed that there must be an unsuffixed verb base from which they must have been derived, and speakers proceeded to recover it.

Back-formation tends to be sporadic and unsystematic. It is not possible to predict when and where it will happen. However, some morphological contexts seem more favorable to it than others. For instance, nouns ending in -ion are quite susceptible to having –ion removed to yield a verb:

intuit               intuition                             televise            television

resurrect         resurrection                           separate     separation

donate             donation                            administrate        administration

orientate         orientation                         liaise               liaison

emote                       emotion                        aggress            aggression

By contrast, certain other suffixes – such as -ity, as in electricity and divinity – do not lend themselves so readily to back-formation (cf.*ident and *tenac from identity and tenacity).

Text 25

There were a number of words in the English language that have historical mistakes. But what are they? You can’t tell them by their present appearance.

    It is strange but the words grammar and glamour are basically the same. Who would have thought that glamour is a corruption of grammar? It is fascinating, indeed, to follow the course of this transition. How is it that grammar, which to many learners of English is perhaps the dullest thing on earth, has become glamour, which to some people, at least, suggests all the most exciting things in life? It all goes back to Middle Ages.

    Grammar in those days meant Latin Grammar. All important documents, laws, contracts, treaties were written in Latin. But Latin Grammar was known only to some people; to the uneducated it seemed like magic. But those who learned grammar properly could write and interpret laws, could sign contracts; this was the way to the top, to the rank of lords, to the world of glamour.

One more example: the words apron and adder have modern spelling that they acquired due to a mistake. “Apron” came into English from French. In Middle French there was a word nape, a cloth, a tablecloth, a diminutive form of nape was naperon, a small cloth or apron. The word appears in English in the 14^th century as napron. It must be often difficult to tell in rapidly spoken English where the boundary between words falls, when an precedes a word beginning with a vowel. So within a period of a hundred years a napron came to be understood as an apron; this form has been preserved up today.

The same thing happened to adder. In Old and Middle English the word began with n: nadder, first, it was a name of a Biblical serpent, then a name of a small poisonous snake. The same confusion as in the case with apron took place and in the 14-15^th century the word nadder changed into an adder.

Text 26

    Speaking of apples, do you know popular sayings with apple? Here are a few of them.

    If you want to be healthy, remember: An apple a day keeps the doctor away. This proverb needs no comment.

    If you hear somebody mention Newton and the apple, he means a well-known story how in 1666 Newton saw an apple fall and it gave him an idea which resulted in his discovery of the laws of gravitation.

    If you speak of Prince Ahmed’s apple, you mean a cure for every disorder. This combination comes from The Arabian Nights story of Prince Ahmed; by the way, the Prince bought his apple at Samarkand.

If something is apple of discord, it is the cause of disagreement. The expression comes from a Greek myth. It happened at a wedding party where all gods and goddesses gathered. Discord, who had not been invited, decided to spoil the festivity. He threw on the table a golden apple for the most beautiful. Paris had to choose among three beauties: Hera, Pallas Athene and Aphrodite. It was difficult to name the winner. At last Paris gave the apple to Aphrodite. It caused argument and quarrel and even led to the fall of Troy.

    If you say that someone is the apple of your eye, you mean that you are extremely fond and proud of him.

If you want apples that will keep long, choose the sort called apple-john. This apple was called so because it ripens by St. John the Baptist’s Day, 24 June. Apple-johns may keep for two years and are best when shrivelled.

If you sleep in apple-pie bed, you sleep in a bed in which the sheets are so folded that a person can’t get his legs down. This expression appeared as a corruption of a French phrase: “nappe pliee”, “a folded sheet”.

If you upset the applecart or upset someone’s applecart, you do something which causes a plan or arrangement to go wrong.

If a room, desk, etc., is in apple-pie order, it is tidy and everything is in correct place.

If you are apple-polishing, you are trying to win favour by gifts or flattery. It comes from the practice of schoolchildren bringing shiny apples to their teachers.

If you are offered apples of Istakhar, you must beware they are “all sweetness on one side and all bitterness on the other”.

If you read about apples of Pyban in a book, you should know that, as John Mandeville says, apples of Pyban fed the pigmies with their smell only.

If somebody uses the comparison like an apple of Sodom, he means disappointment and disillusion. Apples of Sodom are fruit of the trees that grow on the shores of the Dead Sea. These trees “bear lovely fruit, but within are full of ashes” as ancient geographer Strabo describes them.

If you hear someone speaking about Adam’s apple, don’t expect to see a fruit. Adam’s apple is the lump that sticks out of the front of your neck below your throat. It is called so from the Biblical legend. Adam tasted a forbidden fruit given to him by Eve, a piece of the fruit stuck in his throat and remained there forever.

Text 27

Hypocorism.This type of back-formation is not motivated by analogy. It involves the truncation of a longer word without the excuse of there being an affix that is removed. Numerous languages have hypocoristic forms of nouns. They are especially prevalent in the familiar versions of personal names. Typically, hypocoristics are minimal words that have two syllables or two moras. In French, for example, Isabelle is reduced to Iza, Zabel, or Zabe.

Japanese also has hypocoristic versions of personal names. As seen in the following examples, they too have a bimoraic base, to which is added the familiar ending –tyan:

Akira                  Aki-tyan

Midori                Mii-tyan

Here are some examples of hypocorism in English:

Jennifer                    Jenny

Amanda                   Mandy

Anthony                   Tony

Margaret                  Maggie

Elizabeth                  Betty, Bessie

In English such truncation is also common and it is accompanied by the attachment of a -y or -ie suffix.

This process is also applicable to common nouns and is especially popular in Australian English:

barbecue                   barbie

breakfast                  brekky       

Australian                Aussie

postman                   postie

mosquito                  mozzie

The last example shows that the truncated word is not always a term of endearment.

Text 28

Many new back-formations are not well received and occasionally attract a considerable amount of negative comment. The morphological misanalysis that motivates them is viewed by some as a sure sign of a poor command of the language. That is true of the back-formation cohabitate, from cohabitation, which is used instead of the established word cohabit, or orientate, from orientation, which some use instead of the more established word orient.

At least in part, the problem here seems to be that the new cohabitate and orientate look odd, but in time everyone might get used to them. However, this is not certain. Some back-formations of long standing, like aggress and intuit (dating from 1575 and 1776 respectively, according to the OED), have not yet gained common currency. Many others have won acceptance. Resurrect and separate do not seem to us in any way odd and attract no comment. Resistance to back-formations seems strongest in cases where the new word competes with a synonymous established word that shares the same root, as in the cases of cohabitate and orientate.

Note, however, that some back-formations are not warmly embraced even when they are established. The reluctance to embrace them manifests itself in the somewhat restricted range of verbal inflections that they are allowed to take. For instance, many who will accept the back-formation self-destruct from self-destruction do not tolerate the word if it is given the -ed inflection (*he self-destructed). Likewise, while sightsee, housekeep, and daydream are acceptable, none of the sentences here, with the back-formation of these in the past tense, would be judged well formed:

a. *Jane sightsaw.

b. *We housekept.

c. *I daydreamed all afternoon.

Many back-formations live at the margins of grammar, where experimentation may result in jocular effects. When gruntled is formed from disgruntled, and couth from uncouth, the effect is normally intended to be humorous. Where the speaker or writer has no humorous intent, others may still ridicule their use of an odd-sounding back-formation. That is what happened when an officer of the law used the backformation allegate, which is derived from allegation, instead of the established word allege:

... an officer of a Florida court stated that a plaintiff had ‘allegated’ something. He then referred to the plaintiff as ‘the allegator,’ summoning up the vision, in a state in which alligators are common, of a reptile-plaintiff. (Block, 2004)

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