Before the 1800s, trips to distant lands were slow, uncomfortable, and often dangerous. The wealthy might travel for amusement, taking heaps of luggage and an army of servants. Some adventurers headed off alone, daring the risks and hardships and hoping for the best. But most people only left home if they had to; otherwise, they lived out their lives in the neighborhoods where they had been born.
In any case, Europe was a dangerous place for a holiday. After the French Revolution in 1789, and the beheading of the king and queen, Napoleon had taken control of France, and had crowned himself emperor. His armies were on the march as he extended his empire west into Spain, south into Italy, and east across Europe and into Russia.
But Napoleon was defeated in 1815, and much of his empire collapsed, while the British empire was flourishing. The British flag flew over territories not just in the Americas and Australia, but also in the Mediterranean, the East Indies, the Far East, Africa, and countless islands scattered around the globe. The British boasted that the sun never set on their empire; “Our tongue is known in every clime, our flag on every sea.”
By this time, travel was not only safer; it was easier than ever before. Thanks to the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, railways whisked passengers over iron bridges spanning deep valleys, and through tunnels blasted under mountains. Ships chugged along on steam power, no longer waiting for wind to fill their sails. By the 1850s you could even buy a package tour, with the tedious details of tickets and hotels and meals arranged in advance.
Tourists were drawn to Italy by ancient Roman ruins and by spectacular buildings like St. Mark’s Basilica, in Venice — so grand, so elaborate, so excitingly foreign. (photo credits 16.1)
Tourism – especially the “grand tour” of major cities and antiquities – became the rage. Travelers returned home entranced by foreign styles of art, architecture, landscaping, cooking, clothing, music, and dance. Wherever the English went, their language went too – and brought home new words in its baggage.
In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, linking the Mediterranean and the Red Sea so that ships could head east without making the long, dangerous trip around the bottom of Africa. The voyage to India, once an ordeal of many months, could be done through the canal in just seventeen days. This was vital for the British, because by now much of India was part of their empire.
India was a thrilling destination, with its elephants and tigers, its snake charmers, its elaborate temples and romantic palaces. In the evening, travelers could return to a British-style hotel, order roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and settle down to read a London newspaper, though it might be a few weeks old. (photo credits 16.2)
Back in 1600, in the days of Elizabeth I, a group of merchants had formed the East India Company, to send out great sailing ships (called East Indiamen) that would bring back exotic goods like pepper and other spices, and gems, and indigo (blue) dye. By 1700 the East India Company owned territories around India, and was shipping tea and coffee and printed fabrics. By 1800 the company had its own army and navy. British soldiers, government officials, teachers, missionaries, and merchants lived there, many with their families. Indian servants cleaned their houses, cooked their dinners, and cared for their children. Inevitably, words from Hindi and other Indian languages crept into English.
Our word guru (teacher, expert) is a Hindi word, and pundit (also meaning expert) comes from pandit, Hindi for scholar; Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s prime ministers, was known as Pandit Nehru. Bungalow began as bangla, “Bengal-style” – light one-story houses must have been common in the steamy Bengal region of India. Chintz (flowered cotton fabric) was called chints in Hindi. The small rowboat we call a dinghy started out as a dingi, jungle comes from jangal, thug from thag. Veranda began as varanda, bangle as bangri, loot as lut, and shampoo as chhampo. The British in India developed a taste for hot curry (kari in Tamil) and chutney (chatni). Even the British nickname for their homeland – Old Blighty – came from Hindi; bilayati meant “foreign.”
Have you ever heard of a juggernaut? It’s something immense and almost unstoppable — like an eighteen-wheeler barreling down the highway. In the Hindu religion, Jagannath is an avatar (form) of the great god Vishnu. (His name comes from Sanskrit jagat nathas, “world protector.”) Jagannath’s statue is paraded through the streets of India in a heavy cart. It’s said that some fervent worshippers used to hurl themselves under the cart’s giant wheels. (photo credits 16.3)
By the early 1800s, English tourists were flocking to the cities and health spas of Europe’s German-speaking states – Prussia, Bavaria, Austria, and many others. After all, the English and the Germans were almost cousins. Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837 till 1901, was partly German; her husband was German; their oldest daughter married the crown prince of Germany. German literature was greatly admired, while German music – Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner – was unparalleled. How could one be cultured without speaking at least a smattering of German?
Since the English weren’t the only ones bringing home new vocabulary, some words ended up with a tangled history. For example, workers in Iraq, in a part of Baghdad called attabiy, used to make glossy striped silk. Italians called the cloth tabi. The English turned tabi into tabby – and pretty soon, glossy striped cats were called tabbies.
German looks daunting at first, partly because the words can be stuck together like beads on a string. This creates phrase-words that are useful for combining ideas that really don’t fit in one word – like Kindergarten, “child-garden.” (Unlike English nouns, German nouns still begin with capital letters.) Here are some other German constructions that have slipped into English:
Bildungsroman (education-novel): a novel about someone growing up. The Harry Potter books add up to a bildungsroman.
Schadenfreude (harm-joy): pleasure from someone else’s misfortune; “After Terry stole my toffee, I felt a thrill of schadenfreude when he pulled out one of his fillings.”
Doppelganger (double-goer): a stranger who looks exactly like someone else. When a doppelganger appears in a story, it usually means something spooky is going to happen!
With many words run together like this, German offers less choice about the order that words are put in. Often an important word like the main verb comes right at the end of the sentence:
Der Unfall war in zwei Sekunden geschehen.
The accident had in two seconds happened.
In English we have a lot of freedom about how we arrange our words. We can choose a certain order because it makes the sense clearer, or it sounds better, or it’s less boring. But it’s generally wise to keep modifiers close to whatever they describe. Look what can happen when you don’t:
I’m going to say I’m leaving tomorrow. (Are you leaving tomorrow? Or are you saying tomorrow that you’ll leave some other time?) The adverb, tomorrow, should be close to the verb it modifies – but is that leaving? Or going to say?
I took my puppy to the vet, who has droopy ears and a waggly tail. Oops! The modifying clause, “who has droopy ears and a waggly tail,” should be close to puppy.
What’s a dangling participle? Remember that a participle is a form of verb that, like an adjective, modifies a noun – “the escaped rhinoceros,” “the fleeing crowd.” If the participle is too far from what it modifies, we say it’s dangling; it’s not attached to the correct word, so it gloms onto whatever is nearby:
After chomping on the dragonfly, we saw the frog swallow. (Yuck! The participle, chomping, should be close to frog.)
Dressed in her tutu, the cat and the ballerina looked lovely. (Miaow!)
Sometimes, whatever the participle was supposed to describe isn’t even in the sentence:
Getting up next morning, the house was cold.
Driving into the forest, the mountain disappeared.
(How far up did the house get? Does that mountain have a driver’s license?)
While some English words come from the depths of history and some are from foreign languages, others were deliberately invented. Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-Glass, invented many words, including slithy and mimsy. Meaning what? “Well,” Humpty Dumpty explains to Alice, “‘slithy’ means ‘lithe and slimy’… You see it’s like a portmanteau – there are two meanings packed up into one word.” (Portmanteau is an old name for a suitcase, from the French for “carry-coat.”) “Well then,” he goes on, “‘mimsy’ is ‘flimsy and miserable’ (there’s another portmanteau for you.)”
Galumph blends gallop and triumphant (“My dog finally found her ball, and came galumphing back to me.” A guesstimate is an estimate based on guesswork, and smash is part smack and part mash.
Do you know these portmanteau words? If not, can you figure them out?
1) What’s the name of the tunnel under the English Channel?
2) What’s a bit like breakfast and a bit like lunch?
3) What’s halfway between a snort and a chuckle?
4) What kind of dog is part Labrador and part poodle?
5) What’s a cross between broccoli and cauliflower?
6) What’s partly a skirt and partly shorts?
7) How do we describe a day that’s gray and drizzly?
8) What are we breathing when fog mixes with smoky pollution?
answer
Sometimes we create a language so that people won’t understand us. Kids try to fool their parents by speaking pig Latin – not Latin at all, but English mangled so that “hide the book” becomes “ide-hay e-thay ook-bay” (though their parents probably spoke pig Latin when they were young). Each generation invents its own slang, its own private vocabulary, especially for common meanings like excellent or disgusting or boring. Can you think of special words that you and your friends use? Words you don’t expect to hear from your parents or grandparents? They probably had their own slang words, when they were your age.
Can you guess the meanings of these slang expressions from not so very long ago?
1) groanbox
2) have a cow
3) pucker paint
4) make like a boid (bird)
5) the bee’s knees
6) the cat’s pajamas
ANSWERS
Although most biscuits are baked only once, biscuit is derived from Latin biscoctu, “twice-cooked.” Those long, thin Italian cookies called biscotti are baked twice – first in a loaf, and then again in slices. So is zwieback, a crisp bread baked till it’s brittle all the way through – the name comes from German zwei backen, “twice baked.”
French street slang reverses a word’s syllables, or at least its sounds. Café becomes féca, bonjour becomes jour-bon, fou (“crazy”) becomes ouf. L’envers, meaning “reverse,” becomes vers-l’en (the s is silent), or verlan, the name of this slang.
We know now that the tropical disease called malaria is spread by mosquitoes. In the past, though, people thought you caught malaria by breathing infected air – “bad air” – in Italian, mal’aria.
Trickiest of all is the rhyming slang of the Cockneys (people from a region of London). It works like this: take the word you mean (such as phone) and replace it with an expression that rhymes (dog and bone) – “Quiet, I’m on the dog and bone.” And if you want to be really mystifying, drop the part that rhymes. Then phone becomes dog – “Quiet, I’m on the dog” – but unless you already know that, good luck figuring it out!
For Britons making the grand tour, Italy was also a must-see destination. Besides, the language was far easier to learn than German. Because Italian is closely related to Latin, many words resemble their English relatives.
The years of easy travel were not to last. The German states, already joined in a confederation to protect their mutual interests, were drawing closer together. By 1871, after a war with Prussia and a war with France, Germany declared itself an empire. The daughter of Queen Victoria was now, awkwardly, the Empress of Germany. Europe was seething with rivalry and resentment.
In 1914, the age of world wars began.
