The compounds at issue in this chapter differ from those of the last only inasmuch as each here includes one of the little indeclinable words or ‘particles’ that we met in Chapter 7: in, out, up, down, off, on, over, under, etc. We will therefore particularise these compounds as ‘particular’ compounds, remembering that this is not a designation known to anyone outside these pages. The reason for making this subcategory is that new examples of these particular compounds are a wonderful source of annoyance to the gripers. For our purposes, they deserve to be looked at on their own.
Consider the verbs to outsource, upsell, offshore, inbox, outreach, upstream, offline and input: is a single one of these embraced by the guardians of Good English? Even upload would probably strike their sensitive ears as a lumpy modern contrivance. And many reviled nouns are fashioned in the same manner. What griper likes an opt-in, a rollout, throughput, or, perhaps even worse, a workaround—as when a Department of Health document explains that it ‘provides suggestions of best practice and workarounds used by NHS organisations to produce reference costs from PLICS data’? This type of compound gives us adjectives too, so that we can have ongoing problems, upscale suburbs, an actor’s breakout role, the offline world. Football has coined its own example in the wantaway player—one who would like to shift team. As the Telegraph notes, ‘Brighton are again likely to make do without wantaway midfielder Liam Bridcutt’; and it is perhaps only a matter of time before wantaway is applied more broadly—to errant spouses, say, or MPs flirting with rival political parties. Kingsley Amis described ongoing (a word in play for at least 150 years by the time he passed judgement) as a ‘popular horror’ and explained that ‘nobody who uses it in ordinary conversation without some sort of jeer or sneer is to be trusted’. But should we also, therefore, just to be on the safe side, jeer and sneer at the fool who is sunny and outgoing? Not for the first time, it appears that the pool of hate-words obsessing our advisers is much smaller than it needs to be. The Economist Style Guide dutifully picks out two examples, and declares that upcoming is ‘better put’ as forthcoming (merely more antique); ongoing—one of its ‘horrible’ words—as continuing.
One wonders quite how Amis would have felt about the verbs to outbring, ingo and upcheer. First use of outbring is credited by the OED to King Alfred—King Alfred who actually named our language ‘English’. Ingo is credited to the Venerable Bede. And it was the Countess of Pembroke, sister of Sir Philip Sidney, who in the 1590s coined upcheer for one of her ravishing translations of the Psalms: ‘But my oreloaden soule thy selfe upcheare’. There are innumerable other words on this pattern lost in the back catalogue of our language. Is it not beguiling to know that, far away in the year 1000, the upspring of the day referred to the rising of the sun; of the night, to the rising of the stars?
The interest of literary figures in these particular compounds by no means ended with the Countess of Pembroke. In his 1819 poem Mazeppa, Byron wished to invoke the extremity of the excess punishment suffered by his titular hero, bound naked to a galloping horse. Faced with a three-syllable gap at the start of the line in question, what he invented for the job was overtortured: ‘he who dies’, says Mazeppa, ‘Can die no more than then I died. / O’ertortured by that ghastly ride’.** George Eliot seems to have been especially open to this type of splicing. She was quick to employ the then-new noun outlash; she revived the moribund outleap; she made outfling metaphorical. She converted instreaming from an adjective to a noun, and the medieval verb outshut into an adjective: ‘the moan of outshut winds’. Lewis Carroll, too, was inspired by such words when creating his celebrated lexicon of nonsense: ‘All mimsy were the borogoves; / And the mome raths outgrabe’.**
With this sort of history behind the subset of compounds we are now contemplating, it might be thought that critics would exercise caution when deriding new examples. After all, though a griper must wince at being told by the Scottish Government that ‘cross-sectional surveys’ should be able ‘to output income data’—not least because the griper finds the verb output preposterous**—how is it worse than an example we are more used to, e.g. another word ascribed to King Alfred: understand? As it happens, output, meaning ‘exclude’ or ‘expel’, has been in the language since the 1380s, and has been used in the sense the Scottish Government gives it above for over a hundred and fifty years. As for understand: a quibbling Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night makes a joke out of a word no purist would stop to question, alerting us to the funniness of its parts when she says, ‘My legs do better understand me, sir, than I understand what you mean’.
Bede’s ingo, dating from around 900, meant to go in, or ‘enter’. And that was it. But as we know, the particles we are discussing here can be interpreted in many ways, and it follows that the compounds that use them can be too. What might the verbs onlight, onopen and outbeard have meant? Graspably—though one would be unlikely to guess it—onlight, in the twelfth century, had the meaning ‘alleviate’; onopen, in the thirteenth century, meant ‘make intelligible’; and outbeard, a sixteenth-century coinage, meant ‘outdo through a show of defiance’. If these definitions do not come readily to mind when we look at the words now, then it should be no surprise to discover that compounds of this type are liable to change sense over time. We have already seen this with to output, for which the current meaning is relatively recent: what the Authorized Version of the Bible calls a soul that ‘shall be cut off from among his people’, an earlier version of the same line, from a Bible of the 1380s, gives as a soul that ‘shal be out putte from his peplis’ (Num. ix. 13). The verb overwork, in Old English, did not suggest driving to excess labour, but instead the act of decorating a surface. The noun outcome long ago meant the time of year when days lengthened and winter passed. And the adjective inbred was for many centuries free of all suggestion of a limited gene pool. When in 1592 Henry Smith, a miserable clergyman-poet, wittily exclaimed, ‘O sin-bred hurt! O inbred hell!’, he was referring to crimes committed entirely by himself.
Of course, these multiple meanings do not always neatly succeed one another. A compound of this type that has had many overlapping meanings is income. Income is far from being the twin of ingo. It is true that incuman started in Old English as a verb meaning to ‘come in’. It subsequently also became a noun meaning an ‘entrance’, or in other words, a ‘coming in’. The OED cites a 1566 translation of Horace that still used it in this sense: ‘At mine income, I lowted lowe, and muttred full demure’. In the seventeenth century, however, use of this word was greatly expanded, so that it suddenly became possible to describe how the faithful might dare to hope for incomes of God into their souls. Less desirably, an oncome, from 1175, also then later called an income, referred to a physical tumour, morbid swelling or unpleasant visitation. By the early sixteenth century, Tyndale could write in his translation of the New Testament of ‘incommers beynge falce brethren, which cam in amonge wother’ (Gal. ii. 4): there is a strand of British sensibility today that continues to use incomers in much this fashion (indeed, its use is currently on the rise). And immigrants in the Tudor period were also referred to simply as incomes.** By the mid 1500s, income had further begun to be used to mean an entry fee. Then at last, in a document of 1601—so the OED has it—we find the first use of income in the sense most commonly given to it now: revenue and earnings. An entrance, divine illumination, boils, immigrants and revenue: income demonstrates the huge latitude in the potential meanings of compounds formed on this pattern.
It should by now be apparent that these compounds are fundamental to English as we know it. (Would England even be England without the odd downpour?)** Words of this type are being generated all the time—leaving the huffers and puffers alienated by the cultural crossover, the arty mashup; enraged by businesses offshoring and inboxing; outraged by any such assemblage as the one in which Swansea University declares that grant-holders (in an echo of the Scottish Government’s wanting ‘to output income data’) ‘can input outcomes information’. In your assault on Good English, you could, as ever, settle for adopting the odd horrible example of such a word as it happens to come your way. But you could also upman** and attempt to interpret an old one anew. Better yet, you could endeavour to output and downstream your own novelties on this pattern. If you feel brave enough to try, you will find the language more than ready to accommodate your efforts; the gripers, anything but.