By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal

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СКАЧАТЬ word for a dull, conventional person.) Free copies were given out to those present, printed – as was the association’s custom – in a special jacket.

      Burgess was there, and he didn’t like the jacket. He felt it was much too conventional. A much better idea, he thought, was the practice of contemporary lurid novels, which always had a delicious damsel posing on the front cover. So he decided to draw one. He sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets, and labelled her ‘Miss Belinda Blurb’.

      The name caught on. Any excessive testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a blurb. In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:

      1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.

      2 Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.

      Blurbs have been with us ever since.

      Actually, blurb was quite fortunate. Most of the words we make up on the spur of the moment never catch on. It doesn’t matter even if you’re gifted and famous. Shakespeare is the first recorded user of about two thousand words, but nearly half of them fell out of use sooner or later. From his list, we continue to use abhorred, abstemious, accessible, and accommodation; but nobody uses adoptious, aidance, allayment, or annexment any more.

      Why did abstemious stay and adoptious go? One of the great mysteries of language change is why people decide to use one word and not another.

      Sometimes you can sense the nature of the choices available. For instance, frequency is recorded in English from 1553. A century later, frequentness appeared. This is something which happens quite a lot. A word with a good Anglo-Saxon ending (such as –ness) is put into competition with an already existing word with a foreign ending (the Latin/French –ency, in this case). Which won? Today the dictionaries all include frequency and only occasionally even bother to mention frequentness.

      Perhaps it was the shorter length of frequency which made it appeal. Or the desire to sound educated. Or the fact that it was recognized in the leading dictionaries. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much that people preferred frequency as that they disliked frequentness. Maybe it was the slightly awkward pronunciation, as they tried to get their tongues around the –ntn – sequence in the middle. Maybe they didn’t like the sound of the two n’s.

      But frequentness didn’t totally disappear. If you listen out in everyday conversation, you will quite often find the Anglo-Saxon constructions being used in place of the expected forms. I have heard immenseness, immediateness, and delicateness as well as frequentness. None of them is a recommended dictionary form. The dates of their earliest and latest recorded uses, according to the OED, are:

      immenseness: 1610–1798

      frequentness: 1664–1862

      delicateness: 1530–1873

      immediateness: 1633–1882

      They should be dead; but they live on.

      It’s an interesting exercise to explore the use of suffixes, trying them out to see the different meanings and effects they convey. I tried it once with a school group. The idea was to see how many suffixes could attach to a noun like bee. Modern dictionaries usually don’t give any. I found bee-like in one, and that was all.

      Within minutes they had concocted a story about an imaginary beedom (from kingdom), in which a queen bee (your beeness) had offered beehood (from knighthood) to a brave worker who had saved the hive from attack. They went on to form a beeocracy. Outsiders who criticized their way of life were displaying beeism and considered beeist. The heroic worker was eventually beeified. And so it went on. It was like the unwritten script for an animal cartoon – the stuff of Antz.

      The students weren’t the first to think up beedom. The OED editors had already found an instance of it in 1868. They also found one use of beeishness in 1674. Beedom turns up several times in the writing of the missionary poet John Bradburne. It is the sort of word that gets repeatedly invented.

      I wonder if von Frisch was ever stung? An occupational hazard of an entomologist, I imagine. And if I ever had the chance to do some detailed work on the languages and dialects of animals, I think I’d prefer sheep to bees, having been stung more than once.

      Of course, all this talk of language and dialects is metaphorical when applied to animals. Von Frisch knew this very well. We can hardly compare the infinite possibilities of expression and comprehension mediated through human language to the limited set of instinctive reactions that we find in a bee, whose brain, he pointed out, is the size of a grass seed. And we would find huge limitations of communication, similarly, if we were to investigate the communicative patterns of larger-brained animals, such as we find in gull cries, thrush songs, ape calls – or sheep bleats.

      We do keep underestimating the ability of animals to learn facets of language, though. For a long time, it was thought there were certain properties of language that animals could never learn, and this may still be true. Maybe the defining characteristic of humanity is indeed being ‘Homo loquens’, the speaking animal. But animal researchers have been steadily chipping away at the idea that there is a major evolutionary gap between humans and other species.

      Some animals may not be able to speak, write, or sign in the way humans can; but they can do more than we might expect. Chimps can be taught manual signs. Parrots imitate a remarkable range of vocal sounds. Dogs recognize subtle tones of voice. There was even news, in 2006, of a species of African monkey that varied the sequence of calls in order to express different meanings – much as we vary word order in English. And in the same year a research team in California reported that they had taught some starlings to tell the difference between the song equivalent of simple sentences and those containing a song into which another bit of song had been inserted – in effect, a subordinate clause.

      Actually, 2006 was quite a year, because in August there was a report suggesting that cows have regional accents too. Apparently some Somerset dairy farmers had noticed that cows have different moos, depending on which herd they come from. Mooolects. Maybe bleatlects aren’t such a fantastic idea after all.

      A huge flock of starlings flew towards me and then turned back at the last minute, as if they were wanting to keep out of Gwynedd. Maybe starlingese syntax is different there. Or maybe they understand more about human dialects than we give them credit for. If so, any especially sensitive starlings would steer well clear of the town I was about to pass through, Caernarfon.

      There is an English four-letter taboo word beginning with the letter c which is so sensitive still, in the minds of many, that if I were to print it in full in this book I would cause unknown quantities of upset and complaint. So, not being in the business of upsetting readers, I will rely on folk memory to supply the missing word. And in case there are any who do not know what I am talking about, I will provide a clue in a couple of paragraphs’ time.

      In Caernarfon, this same word is used among some sections of the population as an amiable form of address. Much as you might hear ‘Hello, mate’ as a friendly greeting, so in the streets of Caernarfon you can hear an affable ‘Hello, c—.’ Anywhere else in the UK, such a greeting would earn you a black eye at least. But not here.

      Book publishers are able to eliminate such words at an early stage, if they want to. But what do you do with the Internet? The search engines had a real problem when they СКАЧАТЬ