English Class

by Terri McFadden

The English language is marvelous to behold. The vocabulary, at perhaps 750,000 words, is the largest of any language. Although its root Anglo-Saxon is firmly Germanic, Latin, French, Spanish, Old Norse and ancient Greek all have contributed to its development. Much of the change from Anglo-Saxon to Old English in the early centuries came from war and conquest. The Viking invasions of England in the 9^th century simplified and merged Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, as fighting changed to settlement. In 1066 the Normans brought their version of French to “Angle-land”, becoming the language of the upper classes. We have beef from the French boeuf to talk about the food on the table. We don’t say we eat cow, for that was an English word for the animal on the hoof – lower class labor versus upper class dining. These distinctions would have been obvious centuries ago. Time has blunted and blurred and we simply accept vocabulary and usage.

Conquests of a different sort can be seen as technology advances and in turn changes how we speak. The rapid changes are obvious to those of us born in the mid-twentieth century. Although we still ‘dial’ to make a phone call, rotary dials are long-gone. People still read the paper in the morning, even if they are looking at a screen. Many words have come into the language in the past 50 years, as a result of the quick change of technology – video, internet and e-mail are all relatively new additions to the language.

The rapid addition of words is nothing new for English. Five hundred years ago a similar technological revolution changed how we speak. Over time these changes have become obscure. It’s fascinating to see how words used in printing became integral to English.

The European invention of the printing press transformed western societies. (Moveable type was invented in Asia many years earlier.) Prior to Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable metal type, few books were published. Those that were published were written for scholars and generally in Latin. After 1440, printing presses spread rapidly all over Europe, enabling the mass production of books and other written material. The press encouraged the use of native languages, pushed middle class education and the ability to read.

What is fascinating is how the language of the printing press itself became part of spoken and written English. The wooden frame that held moveable type is a phrase, from a Greek word meaning speech. Eventually the word became used to mean a brief expression containing a single idea. If you’re clever enough you can quoin (coin) a phrase. The quoin was a metal device that tightened the phrase in place. Completed sentences were put into a chase. When it was time to print, it was time to cut to the chase – which in time came to mean get to the point. The printer hoped to make a good impression on the paper, and we hope our first impression is a good one. The synonyms, stereotype and cliché, are printer’s terms from English and French. They refer to frequently used phrases kept at the printer’s disposal so that he didn’t have to keep setting them in type. They came to be used to depict conventional, rather than creative, ideas. Mind your p’s and q’s is quaint term that was a staple of child rearing for generations. The term came to mean be on your best behavior or be careful of what you do, because in the printer’s tray the ‘p’ and the ‘q’ were next to each other, look alike and were easy to mix up.

Technology today is changing our world as fast or faster than the world of the 15^th century. We can only imagine what today’s words will come to mean as our amazing language absorbs and redefines, just as it has done for all its history.