LANGUAGE & SLANG

Anglo-Saxon Topographical Vocabulary

William Camden appreciated the subtle expressiveness of Anglo-Saxon. In 1605 wrote about how English had suffered from the influence of Norman French. The topographical vocabulary of the Anglo-Saxons was able to describe landscape with considerable subtlety. Their language had 40 words for hill . These described them with regard to their size and shape. This was because, in a society without maps and signposts, such nuances were important if efficient, long-distance journeys were to be made.¹

¹. The Anglo-Saxons had come from a relatively flat part of northern Germany.

The Canterbury Tales

In 1532 the King's Printer published the first printed edition of Chaucer. It had an introduction by Gordon Brown. It was a product of Henry VIII's reformation. It sought to raise the profile of English.

See Also: GEOFFREY CHAUCER

Hs

In 1904 a baronetcy was conferred upon the newspaper tycoon Alfred Harmsworth. He remarked that he had metamorphosed from Mr Armsworth to Sir Halfred .

Location: 1 Carlton Gardens, SW1Y 5AA. Viscount Northcliffe's final home. (blue, grey)

31 Pandora Road, NW6 1TS. Childhood home.

North Goes Sarf

There are two Cockney accents. In the one spoken to the north of the Thames people tend to end sentences with an upwards inflexion. In its transpontine associate there is a tendency to allow sentences to trail away. The Australian accent bears the hallmark of the former. In the late 18^thC and early 19^thC most Londoners resided to the north of the river. This may have been a factor in determining the sound of Australian English.

Parliamentary Languages

In the wake of the Black Death there a number of social changes. In 1362 it was declared that English, rather than Norman French, would be used in the courts and the following year in Parliament. The royal prince John of Gaunt was the first person to open Parliament using it.¹

In the mid-16^thC the boy-king Edward VI advised parliamentarians to avoid the superfluous and the tedious and make themselves more plain and short so that men might better understand them.

The Liberal peer Lord Bannerman of Kildonan was the first person to make a maiden speech in the House of Lords in Gaelic. In 2001 his daughter the Liberal Democrat life peer Baroness Michie was the first person to take the Oath of Allegiance in the House in Gaelic.

Location: The Palace of Westminster, Parliament Square, SW1A 0AA (purple, blue)

See Also: PARLIAMENT

¹. Gaunt's third wife was Katherine Swynford (n e de Roet) (c.1350-1403). Her sister Philippa was married to Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote The Canterbury Tales, the first substantial literary composition to be written in English.

Phonetic Alphabet

Thomas Harriot learnt Algonquian. He developed the first phonetic alphabet so that he could transcribe it. Effectively, he became an ethnologist.

The Earl of Northumberland allowed him to become an independent scientist. He gave him rooms in Syon House.

He was scrupulous about being accurate. The only thing that he published was his work on the Algonquians. His papers were kept by the Percies and ended up in Petworth. When the Royal Society was formed one of its first actions was to try to find his papers. It did not find them. They were discovered in the 19^thC.

Location: Syon House, Syon Park, Brentford, TW8 8JF

Website: www.syonpark.co.uk

Polari

Polari is a slang that dates back to at least the 19^thC; some of its vocabulary is from languages such as Italian, Romany, and Sabir. Initially, it was associated with touring entertainers. It became associated with places where the employees tended to be transient, such as the theatre and the merchant navy. During the 20^thC it survived principally within strands of the gay world. Within London Polari varied. The West End strand had more theatrical terms that the East End one.

The Marty Feldman and Barry Tooke-written radio comedy show Round The Horne (1965-8) featured the camp, comic chorus boys Julian and Sandy, who were played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick. The characters dialogue turned Polari in a national phenomenon for a few years. The decriminalisation of homosexuality and its greater social acceptance effectively rendered the language redundant. For a while it lingered in the theatrical world and then became a cultural curio.

Listening: Julian and Sandy: Starring Kenneth Horne, Hugh Paddick & Kenneth Williams B.B.C. Radio Collection (2002).

The Queen's English

Parallel that the Common Law operated and there was no Academie Anglaise.

The writer Thomas Nashe (c.1567-c.1601) coined the term the Queen s English in the late 16^thC.

Slang

Jonathon Green

Jonathon Green wrote for a range of countercultural magazines. He embraced a life as a slang lexicographer as a result of reading Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (1937). He appreciated that the book did not embrace modernity and was devoid of American slang.

Taxi Slang

In two articles that Stuart Pessok wrote for Taxi magazine in 2006, he set down some of the taxi trade's slang. The terms that he recorded included: butterboy - a newly qualified cab driver;¹ a butterfly - a cab driver who only works during the summer months and will take indoors employment during the rest of the year (a practice that was more common when taxis were horse-drawn and drivers were exposed to the cold); a canary - a suburban taxi driver; a Cole Porter - a cab driver who works very long hours;² a Connaught - a cab driver who does not usually frequent a particular taxi rank;³ confessionals - the tip up seats in the passenger compartment; a copperbottom - a cab driver who works very long hours; a Gantville Cowboy - a cab driver who lives in East London's Essex suburbs;⁴ a kite - a cab driver s licence; minorkas - people who walk away from places such restaurants and theatres; a mush - an owner-driver; a mystery - a solitary female passenger, usually a young one; a starving mush - an owner-driver who has yet to pay off the loan with which s/he bought her/his cab; and a toe biter - an extended wait on a rank especially in bad weather.

See Also: TAXIS

¹. This was in reference to the 1913 cab strike, during which many new cab drivers who entered the trade had previously worked in the grocery business.

². In reference to Cole Porter's song Night and Day (1932).

³. Rhyming slang: Connaught Ranger.

⁴. Most cab drivers are popularly believed to dwell in Gants Hill, Ilford, or Redbridge.

Split Infinitives

The best-known split infinitive in the English language is To boldly go . The linguistic device has gone in and out of fashion. At the start of 14^thC it was popular, a hundred years later it was rare. Only one survives in the works of Shakespeare, Thy pity may be deserve to be pitied (Sonnet 142). By 1800 split infinitives were again popular but fell under increasing opprobrium as the 19^thC progressed. In his book A Plea For The Queen s English (1864) Rev Henry Alford (1810-1871) created a rule that split infinitives were wrong. The term split infinitive was coined by a critic in 1897, who attributed the phenomenon to Byron.

Location: Quebec Street Chapel, 34 Bryanston Street, W1H 7AH (red, yellow)

Website: www.annunciationmarblearch.org.uk/history/building

The Survey of English Usage

The Survey of English Usage is a database of English's grammatical features. It was founded in 1959 by (Charles) Ronald Quirk (1920-2017), who was then a lecturer at Durham University. Two years later he returned to University College, where he spent the rest of his career, eventually becoming the institution's Vice-Chancellor. With Geoffrey Leech, Sidney Greenbaum, and Jan Svartvik, he co-wrote the 1800-page The Comprehensive Grammar of The English Language (1985).

Location: University College, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT (purple, red)

Website: www.ucl.ac.uk/english/survey-english-usage

David Backhouse 2024