WHEN PAUL McCARTNEY and John Lennon first played ‘She Loves You’ (Yeah Yeah Yeah) to Paul’s dad, James, he complained about the Americanised slang: ‘Why don’t you sing “Yes Yes Yes”?’ he said. But the form ‘Yeah’ is much closer to what the word was in early Indo-European languages, as well as to other modern versions – for instance, oui, ja, da and haa in French, German and its Nordic cousins, Russian and its Slavic cousins and Hindi.
Some English scholars believe that ‘yes’ began as the emphatic form of yes; a simpler affirmative was yea. Many languages do this: for example, the insistent version of oui is si. These days, at least in southern England, if you want to underline a yes, you have to become verbose:‘Oh, but absolutely! Definitely! Certainly!’
In Scots and northern English dialect, aye is much more common – and if you’re being emphatic, och aye, which is ‘Oh yes’. There are many spurious explanations for the derivation of OK, from the unlikely (it comes from the Choctaw Native American okeh, meaning it is so), to the improbable (it’s a Bantu word from West Africa, waw-kay, meaning yes indeed) and the downright ridiculous (it’s an acronym for Orl Korrect, a favourite saying of US president Andrew Jackson, who was a famously bad speller). But by the mid-nineteenth century, OK was rapidly becoming the most popular word in America. It still is. The Choctaw, on the other hand, were busy being oppressed to the point of near extinction, and slavery was still practised in many states – neither an indigenous nor an African word was likely to become the fad of the New World.
It seems much more probable that the ‘och aye’ of the Scots settlers summed up the spirit of the pioneers; it was boiled down to a pair of initials as it swept the nation. OK?
NAY IS THE opposite of aye, because it’s not aye. In German it’s nein, in Norwegian nej, in French non and in many Slavic languages such as Croatian it’s ne. In fact, from Japan (where it’s nai) to Spain (where it’s no), neh words are negative. Ever becomes never, one none, owt nowt, either neither and ought (meaning anything) nought (nothing).
The Latin for wickedness was nefas: ne was not, and fas was divine law – so nefarious is villainous. Nefandous, on the other hand, means unspeakable and abominable, because fandus was Latin for ‘to be spoken’. And the Roman word negliger, or neglect, gives us negligee, a nightdress that is negligent about what it covers.
To go back on your word is to renege; to claim you never said it is to deny; to go over to the other side is to become a renegade. That’s not nice, which originally meant foolish: it compounded ne + scrire, to know. But being nasty is sometimes necessary, from ne + cedere, to give up. Nasty isn’t a neh word – it comes from the Indo-European word for dirt, nask.
All these Latin words suggest that the Romans were tireless people, forever expanding their lexigraphic frontiers. Actually, the administration of empire got in the way of the day’s serious business, which was sitting around relaxing. This is revealed by the roots of negotiation, which is neg + otiari, the opposite of being lazy (otiari is leisure). They were evidently trying to be nonchalant, or appearing not to care – that’s non plus the French chaloir, being concerned.
Almost any word can be negated by non. Nonpareil is having no equal – although it is also a size of type, a rose parakeet, a gorgeously coloured finch found in the Southern United States and several kinds of moth. A non sequitur is a conclusion, like this one, that doesn’t follow from what was said before.
Nonsuch Palace was the most ambitious, not to say megalomanic, of Henry VIII’s architectural whims. He wanted it to dwarf Hampton Court in scale and imagination, and he demolished a village in Surrey called Cuddington to build it. The work cost more than £100m in today’s money. It remained a royal palace for 130 years, until Charles II made a gift of it to his mistress, Barbara, Countess of Castlemaine. She pulled the place down and sold it off brick by brick, to pay off her gambling debts.
At the trial of another royal in 1820, Queen Caroline, who was accused of having an affair with her secretary Bartolomeo Pergami, all of the Italian witnesses replied ‘Non me’ to every question. The Georgian equivalent of ‘I plead the Fifth Amendment’, it was short for ‘Non me ricordo’, or ‘I don’t remember’. For years afterwards in English slang, a non me was a lie.
A THOUSAND YEARS ago, before the Norman Conquest, a Saxon smallholder had basic needs, and it was the duty of his lord to see that they were met: ‘A farmer ought to be given for the occupation of his land two oxen, one cow, six sheep and seven acres sown … and let him be given the tools for his work and the utensils for his house.’ These were his boor’s-right – not birthright, but the bare essentials due to a boor, or countryman (it’s a bad thing to be an English boor these days, but like the Dutch boer it simply meant farmer in the eleventh century). This was all enshrined in a document drawn up during the reign of Edward the Confessor, called the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum or The Rights of the Individual.
Those minimum requirements to keep a farm viable had hardly changed for millennia. In particular, one fact stands out: the farmer needed only one cow for milking, but two oxen for ploughing. A pair made the work much easier and faster – if they worked together, and not against each other.
But that was impossible for the Neolithic ploughman. It was hopeless to rein two bullocks separately to an ar, or a scratch-plough made from a stout branch, and hope that both animals would have the same ideas about where they wanted to go. Then some bright spark invented the yoke.
A yoke is a pair of wooden collars for cattle, connected by a chain. It makes them jumentous beasts, linked in harness. In Hindi, a yojan is the distance a ploughing pair can traverse before they have to be unyoked. It’s not an exact measurement … somewhere between four and ten miles.
The yoke became a symbol of domestication and then subjugation. Roman prisoners captured in battle were yoked and led in triumph like livestock. In the Middle Ages, milkmaids carried their pails on a yoke across their shoulders, which is probably how yokel became a sneer at country folk.
The Latin iungere became joindre in Old French: they both meant to join. That created joint and conjoin, junction and conjunction. A joiner is a woodworker and his craft is joinery, more ornamental than mere carpentry – but a jointer was a Victorian builder’s mate, who used bent iron rods to strengthen the corners of walls or who, later on, wired up the electrical connections in the junction box.
In law, a jointure is a joint tenancy, often shared by husband and wife. If the man dies, his widow becomes the jointress. Rejoinder is also a legal term, the name for the defendant’s response to the plaintiff’s claim, though it now means any sort of reply, especially a sharp one. To impose a rule, especially on yourself, is an enjoinder.
The composer Franz Liszt’s piano recitals were so dramatic and filled with such extraordinary flourishes that women wept and fainted. No recordings exist, but his amazing musical dexterity is attributed to the flexibility or hypermobility of his hands: his fingers were double-jointed. A phenomenon dubbed Lisztomania swept northern Europe in the 1840s – wherever he appeared, fans fought to touch him, snatched souvenirs such as discarded gloves and broken piano strings and begged for locks of his hair. One lady-in-waiting at a royal court wore a cigar butt that Liszt had stubbed out in the street. She hung it in a diamond-studded locket … apparently, it stank.
The jugulum in Latin is the collarbone, where a yoke sits, and so the main vein in the throat is the jugular. Jugulation is another word for strangling. And in Latin, iuxta meant next to, close enough to be touching. Of course that gives us juxtapose: to place side by side. But it is also the root of jostle and of jousting, where two knights tilt at each other on horseback. (The OED lists joust as a variant spelling; it prefers just and justing. The poet Edmund Spenser spelled it giust, and since he lived in the golden age of tournaments, perhaps he’s the best authority.)
In Sanskrit, there are four ages of history or yuga, yoking the years together. Yoga was the discipline of mind and body that joined the yogi with the divine, achieving holy union. Marriage is another holy union, the conjugal rite.
The Greek for a yoke was zeugos, which survives in scientific terminology such as zygote (a cell created when two gametes bond), but also in the figure of speech called zeugma.
Zeugma takes a verb and yokes it to two nouns. The more different the nouns, the more elegant the zeugma. Schoolchildren used to be taught this one: ‘He bolted the door and his dinner.’ Now, the most popular example comes from Star Trek: ‘You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit.’ That seems apt for a cabal of army officers forming a government … that is, a military junta.