Having looked at how to lose bits of words in the act of combining two or more, let us now turn to those words that get squished, squashed and otherwise messed about with singly.
In the last chapter, we glancingly met ‘aphesis’ and ‘apocope’, where lexical matter disappears from the front or back of a word. When bits slip out of the middle, this is known in the trade as ‘syncope’, giving us, for example, bosun from boatswain, jetsam from jettison, and innards from inwards (the OED, in need of revision here, describes innards as a ‘Dial. and vulgar alteration’).
So far, these days, so acceptable. But what about this: ‘the city began coming to life: men yelling, their words untelligible’, or ‘To someone not familiar with computer systems, that sentence is as untelligible as “The mome raths outgrabe” ’?** What of the person who writes helpfully that silicates in car-engine coolants ‘will deteriate your water pump seals’? In October of 1834, The Westminster Review characterised deteriate as just the sort of ‘scrap’ those ignorant of Latin sometimes ‘catch from the lips of their superiors in education’: implicitly, the ignorant have half-heard and are now misspelling a word whose utility they deduced from hearing it correctly used by the educated. In 1926, Henry Watson Fowler also warned his readers about deteriate in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage. No doubt he would be wearily unsurprised to learn that it has not gone away: ‘economic conditions had deteriated’; ‘Ground glitter and other sources may deteriate the signals and their information contents’; ‘There is an irreversible downward trend ultimately at work in our universe where everything is deteriating’.**
Those who remain faithful to unintelligible and deteriorate will hardly be foxed by the quotations above; but as the compacted versions of these words become increasingly widespread, they will inevitably cause ever more gripers to fret and fume. Indeed, the merest suspicion of syncope, with its threatening taint of ‘inferior’ speech, is liable to give any true griper the horrors. Simon Heffer wrongly blames specialty on the Americans and declares that substituting specialty for speciality in British English is ‘pretentious or just silly’. For what it is worth, the word specialty has been bouncing around in English since long before America, as we now know it, had any English to corrupt—since 1330, to be precise; speciality did not come in until a century or more afterwards. Similarly, the word adaption worries many of our advisers. Kingsley Amis conceded that compared with adaptation, the short form seemed ‘sensible’, but he feared the ‘imputation of illiteracy’ if he should use it. The commentator R. H. Fiske more crudely rules that adaption is ‘misused’ for adaptation. He is right—again: for what it is worth—that, here, the word adaptation came first, according to the researches of the OED. He is right, but as adaption and adaptation both sprang into being during the back end of the life of Shakespeare, whether syncope strictly applies is hard to say.
Before you run away with the idea that sticking to the shortest form of a word will give you your best chance of irritating the gripers, see how Mr Fiske goes to town on orientate, deriding it as more ‘unwieldy and cacophonic than the less syllabic orient’. Some single words are taken to have been squished and squashed; others, to have had unnecessary bits trippingly added on or in. If Mr Fiske’s criticism is valid, why he did not describe the more syllabic adaptation as ‘cacophonic’ too is anyone’s guess. The short-form preventive is similarly recommended by him—as also by Bill Bryson—over the boggy preventative. (Ambrose Bierce wrote confidently in 1909, ‘No such word as preventative’; Richard Grant White, in 1870, that use of preventative was evidence ‘of an utter want of education and of a low grade of intelligence’.) Both forms date from the seventeenth century; they came into use within about three decades of each other. Meanwhile, all defenders of Good English loathe, detest and abhor mischievious. The shorter mischievous came into English in the late fourteenth century, when it meant ‘impoverished’ and ‘depressed’. But since the seventeenth century, it has been spelt by some and no doubt also pronounced as though akin to devious, a longer form that has been widespread now for a couple of hundred years. A 1799 report on the slave trade, presented to the House of Commons, speaks of ‘the machinations of mischievious emissaries’; and there are many nineteenth-century editions of the works of writers from Bunyan to Gibbon that contain the expanded version of the word.
What might be characterised by some as sloppiness of speech becomes, in extreme form, mumbling. And though the image of a mumbler is these days associated in particular with drunkards, anyone shy and those adolescents who seem almost to desire to be misunderstood (perhaps for the pleasure of feeling persecuted), indistinct speech has a long religious history too. In some medieval Mystery Plays, the character of Titivil, a devil with a net, was dedicated to gathering up words mismanaged or lost during church services. These he took away to Hell to preserve as evidence against the mumbling offender. The lost word overhip meant to skip or ‘over-hop’ words entirely: a book of four sermons printed by Caxton in 1483 warns its readers against ‘ouerhippyng ne momblyng’. Also dating from the fifteenth century is the compound pitter-patter, the earliest meaning of which was the too-speedy and by extension the senseless recital of prayers. In eighteenth-century editions of Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, after the verb hum is defined as meaning both ‘hesitate’ (as in hum and haw), and ‘deceive’ (as in humbug), it is explained to the reader that ‘a great number of hums’ in church has the slang meaning ‘a large congregation’, while a hum box is a pulpit.
What these old uses share is implied censure, from various angles, of those suspected of not having quite meant what they managed not quite to say—but should have said, and meant. We do, however, often communicate sense by deliberately inarticulate means. Because many great writers have tried to invoke authentic-seeming speech on the page, great literature is a wonderful source of what the gripers might call sub-literate expression. According to the OED, Shakespeare gave us hoo; Byron, bah; Thackeray, h’m, pfui, shshsh and yoop; George Eliot, tchu and pst; James Joyce, uff. And there are many other such ‘interjections’, as they are rather flatly labelled, that have become conventional. The startled ha is dated by the OED to about 1320 and the interrogative um, to 1672, while the assenting mm suddenly appears in 1911. All these and many more—oh, ah, whoops, ugh, wow, and so on—are now part of ordinary English discourse. A strikingly early attempt to pin down one or two of these suggestive sounds, found in a Latin Grammar composed by the Benedictine abbot Ælfric in about the year 1000 (unusually for the time, written in the vernacular), explains that ‘ha ha and he he getacniaþ hlehter on leden and on englisc’ (‘ha ha and he he signify laughter in Latin and in English’). We have our own, modern interjections too, naturally disliked by our reeling gripers. To invoke those important human staples indifference, contempt and dismay, numerous people have now slipped into using meh, duh and variations on euw (ew, ewww, euww)—threatening to leave earlier forms like pshaw, phooey and yikes in the shade.
In Don’t, a renowned 1883 manual by ‘Censor’ that offers advice on ‘Mistakes & Improprieties more or less prevalent in Conduct and Speech’, the author writes: ‘Don’t mangle your words, or smother them, or swallow them’, and ‘Don’t use meaningless exclamations, such as “Oh, my!” “Oh, crackey!”, etc.’ Scholars dedicated to what they call ‘discourse analysis’ try to carve up truly smothered and mangled communication into different kinds. The label ‘non-lexical back channels’ is sometimes given to those noises we make—hn?, mnmn—when, rather than give a reply, we merely want to persuade the people talking to us that we are interested in what they have to say—which perhaps we are! ‘Phatic communion’, meanwhile, covers the phenomenon of words spoken without reference to their literal meaning—as when ‘how’s things’ functions as a salute and not a question. But for our purposes, those good old catch-alls mumbling and mangling will do, providing a great realm of imprecision where dreaded non-words are occasionally born.
Shakespeare has his clowns, mechanicals and pot-house folk use ‘allicholly’ to mean melancholy, ‘argall’ to mean ergo, and ‘haber de poiz’ to mean avoirdupois (selling by weight). In Mill on the Floss, George Eliot has Maggie play ‘marls’ as a child, not marbles. There is a wilful, jokey muddle when James Joyce has a character in Ulysses say ‘weggebobble’ for vegetable, or when Kipling, in 1896, supplies this corruption of hermaphrodite: ‘’E’s a kind of a giddy harumfrodite—soldier an’ sailor too!’ Our advisers approach such mangling with anticipatory relish when it is dished up to them by a solid literary genius. Otherwise not. In a lost corner of the OED, ingram is boldly defined as ‘a perverted form’ of ignorant. The Economist Style Guide says sniffily that although use of wannabes should be limited, it ‘should not be banned’, as though it could be. The daily despairers grind their teeth over those who text imma to mean ‘I’m going to’, or who write of ‘a book I’ve read dunamany times already’,** or who, in commissioned prose, inflict apocope on the word biased: ‘A central west magistrate has rejected claims he is bias against the Aboriginal Legal Service’ (ABC News). But a word the gripers will hate even more than these from the very first moment they encounter it is infatic: ‘The 1st real test of the season saw Portsmouth respond with an infatic victory over previous level peggers Gosport’ (Portsmouth Cricket Club, match report, June 2008). If you are asking yourself whether, given the existence of ‘infatic’ victories, there are also now ordinary folk who, seeking to draw attention to this or that, infasise it—well, there are: ‘Due to some confusion last time we would like to infasise that this is a Sunday afternoon show …’.
In short, there is junking odd bits of words, and there is needlessly adding extra bits on or in—and by such moves the language has gained vocabulary that even its most conservative users consider legitimate. Yet if you venture outside the bounds of what those conservative users call Good English, expect to be condemned for your ‘utter want of education and low grade of intelligence’. If you adoptate** even one or two horrible examples—possibly words that have been in the language for centuries—you will be received as a victim of the attractive ignorance of others, feebly co-optated** into an attack on what is correct. Worse, if you infasise words that are being positively and severely mangled, you will be accused of trading in nonsense. But then, is nonsense really so dreadful? In a letter of 1898, Conrad wrote despairingly, ‘Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit’. To this one can only respond that, if so, we get by remarkably well. And anyway, even when English is cut with manifest nonsense, that nonsense can be highly communicative—as The Poor Soldier, a comic opera from the late eighteenth century, shows:
The cock courts his hens all around me,
The sparrow, the pigeon, and dove;
Oh! how all this courtship confounds me,
For want of the girl that I love!
Dootherum, doodle-adgity, nadgety, tragedy, rum,
Gooseterum, foodle-igity, fidgety, nidgety, mum.