First, I have to admit to stealing the
title of this post directly from Isabel Coixet’s magnificent film The Secret Life of Words which
included this haunting song on mortality and everyone's need for an anchor in their lives.
OK, the serious stuff over, let’s get down
to business. As an ol-, ahem, mature and
experienced linguist, though not so cunning a linguist as to be able to hide a
rather salacious sexual innuendo in a text, I am indeed fascinated by the
secret lives of words. For example, did you know that the suffix –ly in adverbs
comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word lich or
lych meaning body? Hence the lych gate in
churchyard, The body of the deceased would pause there on its final journey
before entering the burial place. Compare that with the Latin suffix -mente or –ment for forming adverbs in Spanish or French. This suffix means mind - as we can see, the English word is not too far removed from the Latin either. Briefly therefore
we can conclude, as indeed did Salvador de Madariaga, that English is a
language of action while Latinate languages are languages of reflection. This, he
then went on to extrapolate, might also explain why English is a verb-driven
language while Latinate ones are noun-driven
Buddhists and others believe in the
transmigration and reincarnation of souls, a concept that I find, quite
frankly, ridiculous – but then again I would . I sold mine for a run of green traffic lights on the way home from the cinema. Words however do have
this ability to transmigrate and indeed transfigure themselves. I am not a
serious etymologist – I prefer my etymologies to be objets trouvés. Here is my latest favourite from – where else? – BBC Radio 4:
for years I had assumed that the word git
came from either the French gitain
or Spanish gitano meaning gypsy. Bearing
in mind the general impression of gypsies as rather discreditable fellows, it
would seem a good explanation, but no! It is in fact from the Arabic word for
pregnant camel and was brought back to GB by the troops serving in North Africa during WWII.
I was born and bred in Liverpool and as
such had a Liverpool accent. Vestiges of it
remain, but having lived in Spain
It was only recently, however, that one of
the great mysteries of my childhood was solved. I had - and still do have - cousins
in Gloucestershire and in summer my parents and I would frequently go on holiday
with my uncle, aunt and their children.
These cousins would sometimes, in their rather quaint sheep-shagging acent, call me a “skarskit”, a term I never understood until recently when, re-watching an old episode of Till Death Do us Part, I heard the ranting Cockney Alf Garrnett call his son-in-law, played by Anthony Booth, Cherie Blair’s dad, a "blasphemious skarskit" (approx. 1.50). Retranslating this into Standard English, I realised that what he was saying was “Scouse git”.
Another mystery solved.
A mine of useful information (continually expanded and updated) on the meanings and derivations of words is the Web site World Wide Words.
ReplyDeleteLanguage is a fascinating phenomenon whether you treat it as a linguist (tracing its origins, relationships and evolution) or as a behaviourist interested in how people use and abuse language and the intentions they have in doing so.
Anyone interested in etymology soon discovers that words become eroded and damaged just as the stones of ancient buildings do. They become traduced or lose their force, are deposed and replaced by upstart usurpers. Thus the lowly "worm" was once a mightier beast, a serpent, in fact, and the pungent verb "decimate" (meaning to kill one in 10 of the population as a punitive measure) is today heard more and more in the pale meaning of "destroy"...
Words become redundant and sink into extinction or perhaps survive only by clinging by their finger nails to a cliché phrase. One such is the word "dudgeon", which my mother never understood. She would often describe a person in a state of annoyance as being "in high dungeon".