The widely held prejudice that we have just examined against a style too tinted with Latin is echoed in a sweeping comment by Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, in an 1845 essay he wrote on William Wordsworth. Here De Quincey argued that what he called ‘lyrical emotion’—emotion concerning our most profound feelings—could be captured in none but our oldest words, because, as he put it, ‘the Saxon is the aboriginal element’.
This is a popular view even now. By being only moderately selective, one can point to a divide between the punchy ‘Saxon’ or Germanic underpinnings of today’s English, and our insipid Latin-based uses. Take a few instances of common combinations of words. Many examples in the language have exclusively Germanic roots, free love, dog days, fire storm, blood lust, death wish. Are these not more ‘significant and emphatical’, as Nathan Bailey puts it in his dictionary, than the recent Latinate confections sanitary product, stabilisation unit and structural deficit (not to mention liquidity constraints from the previous chapter)? It could even be argued that by juxtaposing a word ultimately of Latin origin, and an ‘aboriginal’ English word, we can make subtle use of the contrast between the two, as for example in mission creep, urban sprawl, counterblast and military strike, or, to reverse the order of word-origin, snap decision, fear factor and death sentence.
And yet might it not be that what makes these contrasts seem persuasive (assuming they do seem persuasive) is the fact that in the examples given above, all the ‘aboriginal’ words, and only those words, are monosyllables?
The prejudice expressed by De Quincey goes hand in hand with a rough-and-ready belief that our oldest words are our shortest, a view reinforced by little lists that get bandied about showing, for instance, how (to return to a group we have already considered) the Latin-based intestines, from the early 1500s, has three syllables; entrails, of around 1300, and coming to us via Old French, has two; while gut, from around 1000, and of Germanic origin, has one. Yet if you take field, star and nail, all of which have been in our language for well over 1,000 years, and add a Latin-origin monosyllable to each, to give, say, force field, pole star and nail bomb, do any of these come over as somehow less ‘emphatical’ than field-fresh, a putatively seductive label used to promote frozen vegetables; star dust, a sort of something supposedly emitted by celebrities; or nail care, chemically dizzying as it may be—three pairs of monosyllables fully ‘aboriginal’ in their constituent parts? Is the Latin word lax in some mysterious way outdone by its Viking equivalent, slack? In short, does it really matter whether or not ‘words monosillable’, as George Puttenham put it in The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, ‘be for the more part our naturall Saxon English’, or should we now weigh up the monosyllable as a thing ‘entire of itself’, to be judged regardless of where it comes from?
Let us say that it does not matter to us, and that we shall do exactly that.
The force of the monosyllable, and the esteem in which, on the evidence above, monosyllables appear to be held, could lead to the easy assumption that as a class they will fall within the bounds of Good English—making them, to a misuser, a lost cause. If long words are suspect, are our shortest ones not bound to be the very thing? Well, not necessarily, is the answer to that. Indeed, there are arguments strewn across the history of reflections on English that go entirely the other way. Thomas Nashe, in his 1594 riposte to his reprehenders, wrote strongly on the subject. ‘Our English tongue, of all languages, most swarmeth with the single money of monasillables, which are the onely scandal of it. Bookes written in them, and no other, seeme like shop-keepers boxes, that contain nothing else save halfe-pence, three farthings and two-pences.’ He continues: ‘Therefore, what did me I, but having a huge heape of those worthlesse shreds of small English in my pia mater’s purse, to make the royaller shew with them to mens eyes, had them to the compounders immediately’. As we saw in Chapter 8, Nashe’s half-pence attitude gave rise to his compound coinages chatmate, potluck, homespun, and so on. At least he got something out of his contempt—as did we.
John Donne, in sermons written a few decades after Nashe dashed off his piece, was, if anything, even less tolerant of these ‘worthless shreds’, discussing more than once what he presented as the disproportionate power of some of our smallest words. In a New Year’s Day sermon of 1625, for example, he declared, ‘It is an Execrable and Damnable Monosillable, Why; it exasperates God, it ruins us’. Addison put a braver face on things in a Spectator essay of 4 August 1711, when he noted that ‘by its abounding in Monosyllables’ English ‘gives us an Opportunity of delivering our Thoughts in few Sounds’. It is tempting to point out that those sounds are all the fewer for the fact that some monosyllables carry a dazzling array of meanings. Pad, for instance, simply as a noun, has since the twelfth century been used to denote a toad, a frog, a hidden danger (‘a pad in the straw’), a track or path, a starfish, a highway robber, an elephant’s saddle, the launch point for a rocket, a lily leaf, a bachelor’s flat, and more. And between them, stump and stock, to pick another two, have covered almost more meanings than one can count. But for all that, Addison was not in the end favourable. ‘I have only considered our Language as it shows the Genius and natural Temper of the English,’ he wrote, ‘which is modest, thoughtful, and sincere, and which, perhaps, may recommend the People, though it has spoiled the Tongue’. Shortly after this, Swift, also unimpressed, wrote that English is ‘overloaded with Monosyllables, which are the Disgrace of our Language’.
Perhaps the very lowest point of this ‘disgrace’ fell at the end of the 1700s, as laid out in a number of editions of Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. Here, numerous slang terms are glossed in the same way. Tuzzy-muzzy: ‘the monosyllable’; Bottomless pit: ‘the monosyllable’; Mother of all saints: ‘the monosyllable’; Eve’s custom house, Black joke, Watermill, Brown Madame, Miss Laycock: all ‘the monosyllable’. Anyone innocently mystified by Grose’s euphemistic explanation of these euphemisms, who therefore looked up his definition of the word monosyllable itself, would have found it explained as ‘a woman’s commodity’. Those, by contrast, who knew enough to check the actual monosyllable to which Grose referred, given in the second edition of his dictionary as ‘C*t’, would have found it defined for them as ‘a nasty name for a nasty thing’.**
All of that having been said, it was not the identification of the monosyllable with that much celebrated ‘nasty’ thing, the ‘C*t’, that most worried those commenting on monosyllables in years gone by. Instead, a great deal of the debate centred on their metrical quality. Dryden wrote in 1697, in his translation of works by Virgil, ‘It seldom happens but a Monosyllable Line turns Verse to Prose’. An anonymous reviewer of Cowper’s translation of Homer wrote similarly in 1793 that ‘the most vigorous attempt’ to convert a mellifluous tongue into English will frequently be baffled by ‘The hoarseness of Northern language bound in pebbly monosyllables’.** And Pope agreed. He believed that ‘Monosyllable-Lines, unless very artfully manag’d, are stiff, languishing and hard’. In a humorous shot at demonstrating what he simultaneously asserted, he wrote, ‘And ten low words oft creep in one dull line’. He does at least include the caveat ‘oft’ here. Was Shakespeare on poor form in all the sonnets that he began with ten monosyllables—including number 42, ‘That thou hast her, it is not all my grief’; 75, ‘So are you to my thoughts as food to life’; and 141, ‘In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes’? Was it ‘languishing and hard’ of Yeats to start one of his most treasured poems: ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep’?
Even a critic fully persuaded that these lines are dull and flat would be hard-pressed to deny that great writers of English glory in the capacity of its monosyllables to set off longer words, in poetry and in prose. It is difficult to say how the men who wrote the Authorized Version of the Bible could possibly have bettered the terrible question ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ And Shelley, to pluck a lyrical poet out of the air, makes no less dramatic a use of contrasting syllable-counts in the words of his famous rallying cry from The Masque of Anarchy, written in response to the Peterloo Massacre:**
Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few.
And is it by chance that there is only one word that is not a monosyllable in the following much-loved, deliberately sing-song lines from Philip Larkin’s ‘This be the Verse’?
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
The fact is that English monosyllables are not all always automatically hoarse, pebbly, low and worthless. And some are as elevated as any word can be. The author of the great fourteenth-century mystical work The Cloud of Unknowing recommends that if you wish to pierce that cloud, as it separates you from God, you must fasten a word to your heart ‘so that it never go thens’. But how? ‘Take thee bot a litil worde of o** silable; for so it is betir then of two, for ever the schorter it is, the betir it acordeth with the werk of the spirite. And soche a worde is this worde GOD or this worde LOVE.’
The debates above about the value of monosyllables may seem like very old news, but we remain contradictory about them even now. To ask a person to put something ‘in words of one syllable’ is to say, in effect, ‘be clear and get to the point’. It is this sort of thinking that leads The Economist Style Guide, under the heading ‘short words’, to write: ‘Use them’. At the same time, a person described as being ‘monosyllabic’ is implicitly uncommunicative and possibly even gruff. The hostility underlying this second take on our shortest words is reflected in the work of R. H. Fiske, his Unendurable reflections including this one: ‘If you speak in monosyllables you likely** think in monosyllables. Complex thoughts, well-reasoned arguments, a keen understanding of self and society—each and all of them lost, squandered, forfeited’.
But where does all this leave your campaign to introduce a fissure into the defences set up around Good English? If you choose to disregard Mr Fiske’s jeremiad by favouring monosyllables, do you not run the risk of producing the plain, strong style recommended by The Economist?
By a winding route, we find ourselves back at the question of register. Shorn of any context, there are monosyllables that it might be thought would fit in some way up the scale: vouch, shrift, dint, traipse, zeal, thwart. There are others that will appear plain and necessary: sing, dog, leaf, life, if, but, and so on. No normal griper would object to a word of either class in the flow of a Good English sentence. But where our advisers do identify misuse of monosyllables is in the pages of most newspapers, especially in a headline of the type ‘Drug-probe ploy backfires’. You may be thinking that this style of headline is a special case, a ‘privileged Dialect’, in the words of Elizabeth Griffith, and not a worry for anyone else. But Simon Heffer, among others, disagrees. When it comes to the common tongue, ‘No-one’, he writes, ‘can discount the effect of the tabloid press’. Though he believes that we should, in the main, ‘stick to simple words’, tabloidese is where this all goes wrong—and in going wrong, he argues, supplies a ‘fuel that feeds the vice of exaggeration’.
It is certainly true that tabloid headlines are designed to be compact come-ons, and that the words chosen for the job are often pebbly with the undifferentiated force of blast, stun, roast, pan, maul, zap or slam for counter, oppose, condemn; of bid or push for attempt, endeavour, foray; of key for important, necessary, central; of ploy for stratagem, system, device; of rap for suspicion, accusation, indictment; of foil for impede, frustrate, defeat; and of, in addition, rats, babes, tots, cheats, scams, curbs, and more. Monosyllables drawn from this list and dropped into a headline often act as cartoonish substitutes for the text they supposedly represent. In ‘Hacked nude pix: Google zaps links’ (Guardian), zaps stands for ‘has removed two’. In ‘How milk zaps tooth decay’ (Daily Mail), zaps represents ‘can neutralise’. In ‘Fpl Chief Zaps Enron Deregulation Push’ (SunSentinel), zaps turns out to refer to the efforts of a senior official who has been ‘taking a dig at’ plans for deregulation. In ‘Our boys zap Syria’ (Sun), zap means ‘have been bombing’.
This use of monosyllables as a casual shorthand clearly contributes to giving them a bad name, but some of them have a bad name anyway. Mr Heffer categorises posh, dosh and scam as ‘pure slang’, and says that they ‘have no place in respectable writing’. He would surely have added zap to this list if it had occurred to him—not to mention biff, bop, bonce, dweeb, bint, nix and faff. In short, individual monosyllables, as much as any words, can end up being identified with particular registers, so that in an otherwise unexceptionable piece of Good English, some of our shortest words would supply a wild blip of tone.
If, however, monosyllables, just as other words, can carry this sort of load, it follows that how each one rates is potentially open to change. In 1954, countering the usual trend in these matters, V. H. Collins was able to describe the two-syllable, Latin-origin noun present as a ‘more natural and simple word’ than the Germanic monosyllable gift. He added, ‘Those, however, who draft advertisements prefer gift, and so do the genteel, especially perhaps women’. Would those who still favour present over gift agree with the last of Collins’s fine discriminations? And would they also agree in decrying (as he did) the use of stress to mean ‘emphasis’, or dire to mean ‘dreadful’? The sensitivities that led him to dismiss stress and dire as ‘vogue-words’ have long since withered away, suggesting that others of our low monosyllables might one day be brought within the sweep of common-or-garden Good English too.
However forcefully the gripers attempt to contain the language of everyone else, their lexicon does, over time, change. A word they at first find blunt may come to acquire nuance, and one they once thought low may make its way up in the world. If you should happen to wish to fill your bonce with ‘complex thoughts, well-reasoned arguments, a keen understanding of self and society’, go ahead. In doing so, it is true, you will zap the proprieties of the gripers—but who can say how this will end? Hold your nerve, friend. Give it a whirl. Seize the day.