THE RUDE STORY OF ENGLISH

TOM HOWELL
W I T H I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y G A B E F O R E M A N

McCLELLAND & STEWART

part one

The Hero

1. the not-rude not-story of english The story of the English language is actually quite cool. It contains some sad parts, but these are well dispersed among moments of beauty, hilarity, pauses for thought, lessons for us all, and ambiguous moral themes. It is, as the saying goes, all over the place. I picked up the tale piecemeal, reading parts in books and hearing other parts virally, by word of mouth, word of radio, word of PowerPoint, word of museum, and sometimes by word of silly song. In my experience, when somebody attempts to fit the whole storyline together into a single form, two big problems stick out. One, no hero. Two, not rude enough. The rough, barbarous, fragrant folks of olden times who began unravelling the yarn we now call English liked their stories to be full of rudeness and heroism. They wanted battles with monsters, meetings with mentors, wild sea voyages, magic, and a lonely characters tumbledown luck. I think they were on to something.
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Theres a good reason why stories about English tend to be unheroic. Its the numbers. Five billion humans today speak this language, plus all the dead ones who used to, and, on top of that, parrots. Each speaker has (or had) a different story about how English found them, depending on what boat they/their ancestors climbed into (or perched on), or which gang of thugs showed up in boats to pester which grandparents/put them in a cage, etc., and a single hero can glue together only so many plot lines. A central myth began to take shape two hundred years ago in the hands of scholars who called themselves philologists. Their name looks as if it could mean either lovers of study or students of love, depending on which end is the head and which the tail, but no, wrong, philologists were instead phillers of the log, lovers of the word. Their job involved reading the handwriting that has survived from days of yore, translating all the ancient words, and tracing what amounted to career paths that connected old speech to modern, or old to even older. The scholars would observe how a single word had switched jobs over time, either taking on a new meaning or losing an old one, and how its outward appearance changed, usually in tandem with travels through space or time. Such threads of tale could be entwined to link our present moment with our past, and so it is due to the philologists efforts that English has any story at all. Sadly, rather than finishing their work by sewing the different word-careers into a neat, metred, rhyming epic tale, the philologists fell victim to a plague of science envy. Roughly eight decades ago, most rebranded themselves as

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linguists, a name that is all tongue and no love, and they began wearing the used lab coats theyd found outside the chemistry department. The linguists set to dissecting various puzzles of speech into tinier and tinier pieces until no determined amateur could tell the bits apart, let alone put them all back together again. As a result, a properly informed account of Englishs life is now too difficult to tell around the campfire or at bedtime or while smoking pot at a housewarming, or wherever our crucial myths are supposed to live these days. I never bash experts. I wouldnt know what to bash them with. Id probably pick the wrong thing, like a chair, only to find out thats exactly what experts are trained to fight with, and Id be wriggling on my back before I saw them move. However, the story of English needs all the help it can get any idiot can see this and several have volunteered already. Im only piping up because I made two astounding discoveries, in the Christopher Columbus sense of finding things other people already knew about, and I believe my discoveries can cure our languages anguish in the story department. One century ago, in that golden age when philologists roamed the earth, the cream of their species found jobs with major dictionary projects such as the famous Oxford English Dictionary. In halls and offices filled with paper, pens, dust, and oak lecterns, the scholars conferred and created professional norms, such as a practice of telling the truth most of the time. They couldnt always stick to facts, because they lived in a dirty, messed-up world riddled with gaps. Ninety-five per cent of the universe is made of types of gap dark matter,

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anti-matter and so on and the same physics govern the realm of words, so upon finding a gap in the knowable universe, a philologist would attempt to fill it using a piece of wisdom handed down to him or her by elders in the form of a law. Grimms Law was one. Verners Law was another. As with physical laws, these rules extrapolated from past experiences and observations, helping a scholar predict the existence of objects, sounds, activity, and other forces that lie beyond the ken of a naked human eye. The wording of the laws doesnt matter right this minute because what counts is the result of philological practice, the slow spinning out of a semi-fictional parallel universe, which has been nicknamed the asterisk reality. This is their professions second-most inspiring and poetic artwork, after the Oxford English Dictionary itself. I grew up knowing about the Astrix reality, the world of the books populated by cartoon Gauls and Romans engaged in unevenly plausible scenarios drawn from facts and other speculations. The asterisk reality is exactly the same thing. In a philologists handwriting, an asterisk mark signals where material has been concocted to plug a hole in real-world evidence. For example, when someone at Oxfords dictionary department wanted to show that our modern word arse once had a job as an ancient Greek word, orsoz, the scholar needed to imagine a scene in which a German princess two thousand years ago was sitting on something locally known as her ars-oz. No documents exist to prove this occurred so the philologist added an asterisk in front of the word *arsoz and stuck it in the dictionary under the arse entry in a

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paragraph recounting the words life story. Generally, depending on the number of nearby facts available, and on how clever/lazy the philologist was, an asterisk might stand for anything from as good as true to probably-maybe to whatever, time for lunch. The * is the sign of the reconstructed form, explained Tom Shippey, who gave the asterisk reality its nickname. It was proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used widely ever since. In this entire process the thing which was perhaps eroded most of all was the philologists sense of a line between imagination and reality. In a sense, the nonexistence of the most desired objects of study created a romance of its own. Romance is typically a divisive word. Its a red stoplight to the hard-headed, but to a certain strain of artist or poet or sophomore or lover, its the other variety of red light, the type that means, Come closer, or perhaps, Desired object of study right this way. Soon after I discovered philologys looking-glass world, I also learned that it contains an asterisk hero who is perfect for the story of English, a demigod-like figure with one foot in the real universe and the other foot lost in dark matter. The heros existence, stretching that word for the moment, owes much to one of the alt-realitys minor contributors, J.R.R. Tolkien, the same person who helped write The Lord of the Rings movies. He worked at Oxfords dictionary department for two years, 1919 and 1920, until he grew tired of trying to remain plausible and wandered off to write about hobbits instead. While in the office, J.R.R. mostly

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investigated English words that began with the letter w, such as wolf and warg and wallop, from which he invented the ancient French verb *waloper (to wallop someone, obviously). He also doodled fake Saxon riddles in the margins. Even after quitting the dictionary, J.R.R. carried on philologizing and asterisking, going past mere words to imagine the people who spoke them and from these speculations emerged his stories of quests, elves, warriors, rings, and scary people on horses. Tolkien had read the old epics and knew that all good adventures need a single, socially isolated hero, so he collected several of these characters and kept them in reserve for later use in his fiction. Among the candidates was a man named Hengest. Tolkien didnt magic this man out of nothing. I remember Hengest from my high-school history classes in England. The ancient warrior had somehow gained a reputation for discovering Britain on behalf of the Angles, a tribe in northern Germany, thereby inventing the English language. (The word English may refer to the speech of Angles who crossed the water, but nobody uses it to name the German dialect spoken by those left behind on the mainland.) This historic coup makes Hengest highly desirable as an object of study, but hes a horrendously tough fish to hook back up into the world of facts. J.R.R. certainly tried his darndest. The professor based all of his asterisk-facts regarding Hengest on two poems, named Beowulf and The Fight at Finnesburg, ancient works from an oral tradition, set down on parchment a thousand years ago. The poems put Hengest in the company of Jutes, whose tribe supposedly lived next

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door to the Angles on whats now labelled the Jutish peninsula of modern Denmark. But theres a wrinkle. The Jutes name was once pronounced yooten, which also happened to be a Germanic word for magical giants. Strangely, the particular gang of Jutes that joined Hengest on his trip to Britain left no trash for modern archaeologists to dig up, raising the question of whether they were indeed magical giants or just very large humans with supernaturally tidy habits. Having visited the Danish province of Jutland myself, where I cultivated a rapport with the locals, I find the second interpretation easy enough to believe. However, if thats wrong and Hengests original life story did feature giants, any sober-minded adult might suspect the whole crowd of characters belongs to a fairytale. Its hard to tell from scraps of parchment. They almost never declare themselves as fiction or non-fiction. J.R.R. chose to believe that Hengest lived in real history and that the yooten were real Jutes from Jutland. Working from the claims of anonymous poets, the author-philologist sketched out a figure who was a masterless man, seeking warlike employment and any opportunity that luck might present to him.* Hengest (or *Hengest, really) seemed to be an expert swordsman, and, even more excitingly, the true prince of the Angle tribe, although he suffered a falling-out with his own people and became a loner. In this regard he resembled Aragorn, the wandering king of The Lord of the Rings, who travels far from home under a fake name.
* Finn and Hengest, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book was compiled from the professors notes by a younger colleague, Alan Bliss.

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Ostra cized, Hengest sailed to Britain in 449 ad primarily as a mercenary but soon changed his purpose, as Tolkien put it. The warrior decided to settle down on the island, make babies, and invite his fellow thugs to do the same. Events were conspiring to give our language a great foundational hero. Sadly, before Hengest could assume his full asterisk-self, urgent duties distracted J.R.R. Tolkien. The famous scholars beautiful plans for Hengest gradually sank under piles of other asterisks, along with student papers, grocery lists, orcs, etc. I consider this to be a grim moment in the story of English because it seems to me that Tolkien, too, was on to something.

copyright 2013 by tom howell illustrations copyright 2013 by gabe foreman All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Howell, Tom The rude story of English / Tom Howell ; Gabe Foreman, illustrator. Issued also in electronic format. isbn 978-0-7710-3983-6 (pbk.) 1. English language Obscene words History. 2. Swearing History. 3. English language Slang History. 4. English language History. 5. English language Etymology. I. Title. pe3724.o3h69 2013 427 c2011-904429-3

Typeset in Caslon by M&S, Toronto Printed and bound in the United States of America McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited One Toronto Street Toronto, Ontario m5c 2v6 www.randomhouse.ca 1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13

The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell

There are only two problems with the story of the English language: one, no hero. Two, not rude enough. In The Rude Story of English, recovering lexicographer Tom Howell swiftly remedies these and gives us a rousing account of our language without all the boring bits and with all the interesting parts kept in and reveals Englishs boisterous, at times obnoxious, character. From a haphazard beginning in 449 AD, when a legendary, fearsome Germanic warrior named Hengest tripped and fell onto British shores, the real story of English has been rife with accident, physical comedy, phallic monuments, rude behaviour, dubious facts, and an alarming quantity of poetry written by lawyers. Across vast distances of space and time, from the languages origins to its fast-approaching retirement, a moody and miraculously long-lived Hengest voyages to the pubs of Chaucers London, aboard pirate ships in the north Atlantic, to plantations in Barbados, bookstores in Jamaica, the chilly inlet of Quidi Vidi, Newfoundland, a private mens club in Australia, and beyond. Part Monty Python sketch, part Oxford English Dictionary, The Rude Story of English displays an exuberant love of language and a sharp, anti-authoritarian sense of humour. Entertaining and informative, it looks at English through its most uncomfortable, colourful, and off-putting parts, chronicling the story of the language as it has never been told before.

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