War has been a frequent visitor in our history, and it too has added to the English language. The Romans had hundreds of military words – for ranks, weapons, armor, strategies – and some of them remained in Britain after Rome’s armies went home. A cohors was a unit of several hundred soldiers, a legio was ten cohortes, militia was military service. To us, cohorts are people working together; legion means “many;” a militia is a group of civilians who are trained to fight in time of war.
The ancient Greeks and Romans invented countless ways of hurling things at their enemies, including the ballista (from Greek ballein, “to throw”) – a heavy wooden contraption, similar to a crossbow, that fired a rock or spear. Since a missile (from Latin missum, “sent”) is anything thrown or shot, many early “ballistic missiles” were just big rocks. (photo credits 17.1)
When William the Conqueror ferried his Norman horsemen (chevaliers, from French cheval, “horse”) across the English Channel, he brought along the language of cavalry. A cavalcade used to be a horse parade, but now it’s a special series like “a cavalcade of films.” A cavalier was once a gallant gentleman like a knight, but today being cavalier means being rather arrogant and inconsiderate: “I said Max could taste my birthday cake, but he’s pretty cavalier to take three slices.”
Bomb and bombard are “imitative” words; they sound like what they mean. Many imitative words begin with a sibilant sound like s: screech, spit, splash, squawk, squeal. (Sibilus is Latin for “hissing.”) There are heavy words (bump, clump, thump), swingy words (swirl, sway, sweep), glowing words (gleam, glare, glitter). We can whoop or whistle; we can whack, wham, or whomp. Other words imitate natural reactions: eek, ugh, blah, pooey, yum, OW!
Ancient sea battles depended on primitive tactics like ramming or hurling stones, trying to punch holes in the enemy’s boats. But sometime in the 1300s, Europeans learned about the explosive force of gunpowder (probably from the Arabs, though it was first invented in China). When the fleet of the Spanish Armada set sail in 1588, it was bristling with cannons (from Latin canna, “tube”), and the goal was to blast England’s ships to smithereens. With gunpowder came words like detonate, “explode loudly” (related to Latin tonare, “thunder”), and bomb and bombard (from Greek bombos, “booming”). Originally, a bombard was a kind of cannon. Today it’s a persistent attack, but not necessarily with guns – “That new kid bombarded me with questions.”
By the time of the twentieth century and the two world wars, combat had spread up into the skies, and down into the ocean. Once again, new words were needed. Some came from German: snorkel from Schnorchel, the tube that lets a submarine breathe without surfacing; blitz from Blitzkrieg, “lightning war.” Today a blitz can be as trivial as an advertising campaign or a football play; in World War II it meant a campaign of sudden, deadly attacks.
Other military words came from Greek: helicopter from helikos pteron, “whirling wing,” and periscope – a tube that lets a submarine crew see without surfacing – from peri skopein, “around-look.”
Some complex inventions just couldn’t be defined in one word. Instead of sticking words together, as the Germans did, anglophones turned to acronyms, made from the beginnings of words. Radar detects objects like planes or ships, and determines their distance (range), by bouncing radio waves off them; the name comes from “radio detecting and ranging.” Sonar locates underwater objects by using sound waves: “sound navigation and ranging.” We say flak meaning angry complaints (“Tanesha got a lot of flak for bringing her pet porcupine to school.”) but it began as a wartime acronym from the German for “anti-aircraft gun,” Fliegerabwehrkanone (flight-defence-cannon).
Acronyms are pronounced as words (NATO, UNICEF), unlike initialisms, which are spelled out (FBI, DVD). (“Acronym” comes from Greek akros onoma, “at the top [of the] name.”) Acronyms and initialisms are both handy shortcuts, but it’s easy to forget what they stand for. Do you know the words behind these?
1) OPEC
2) AWOL
3) navy SEAL
4) op-ed page
5) scuba
6) RSVP
7) a.m.
8) RIP
ANSWERS
In the 1900s, anti-Semitism drove many Jewish people out of Europe, to England and other anglophone lands. Most spoke Yiddish as their everyday language, and Yiddish words spread into English. Yiddish – the name comes from German judisch, “Jewish” – is similar to German but it’s written in Hebrew characters. (Hebrew, Israel’s official language, is used for religion and scholarship.)
Many people think SOS – the Morse code message sent by telegraph when a ship is in desperate trouble – means “save our souls.” In fact, it was chosen because in Morse code, S-O-S – di-di-dit, dah-dah-dah, di-di-dit – is easy to remember and recognize. When ships communicate in English, the emergency message is mayday, mayday, from French m’aidez, m’aidez, meaning “help me, help me.”
By the 1950s and the Cold War – the armed standoff between the Communist dictatorships of the east and the democracies of the west – the race for power reached out into space, as both sides built rockets and satellites. Along with the space race came computer technology, with words for things that are unimaginably tiny and fast. Science in general was booming, coming up with new products, new processes, new ideas – and words and more words. Back in the early 1900s, about a thousand new words entered English every year. By the end of that century, the number added each year was close to twenty thousand.
A nanosecond – a billionth of a second – takes its name from Greek nanos, “dwarf.” A googol is the number you get when you put a hundred zeroes after “1,” and it was apparently named by the nine-year-old nephew of a mathematician. He defined an even bigger number, a googolplex, as “one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired” – so many zeroes that if you turned the whole universe into paper and ink, you still couldn’t write them all down.
Because scientists cooperate internationally, it makes sense to derive new words from Greek and Latin, so they’re familiar in many languages. Besides, classical words often sound so grand: stratosphere and troposphere, intermolecular and intergalactic, supersonic and supernova. Need a name for a scientist who studies fossils of prehistoric spiders? Reach for the Greek: palaios (“ancient”), arakhne (“spider”), and logos (“word, talk, discussion”) add up to paleoarachnologist.
Still, many of our technical terms are old-fashioned English words with new meanings. Look at computer vocabulary: we boot up, use a mouse and a menu, put up a firewall so nobody can hack into the system, track down a bug, surf the net, set a bookmark, and delete any cookies. We call one of the great mysteries of space a black hole, and dream of finding a shortcut across the universe through a wormhole – using words that date back to King Alfred and beyond: wyrm, blaec, hol.
Big words, small words, new words, old words, Anglo-Saxon words, imported words – the richness of the English language gives us so many ways to say pretty much the same thing. How do you go about speaking and writing well? Here’s a good place to start: Think about exactly what you mean, and then say it, simply and clearly.
As the King of Hearts explains to the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland:
Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end; then stop.
The Greek word for “far away” is tele. What invention lets you
1) have a closer look at the moon
2) watch a baseball game in another city
3) talk to a friend in another country
4) use a distant computer
5) photograph a woodpecker on a faraway tree
6) beam yourself up to the spaceship (at least in movies!)
ANSWERS
