MORE THAN WORDS
A look at terms that entered the dictionary 100 years ago reveals the legacy of war, the evolution of cinema, new technology and ways in which sex was finally exiting the bedroom
Where do words come from? Here’s a clue. ‘Clue’ comes from the medieval word ‘clew’, or ball of thread. In Greek myth, it was this kind of thread that helped the warrior Theseus mark his way into the labyrinth to battle the Minotaur. Minotaurs – part-bull, part-man – were jumbo-sized. ‘Jumbo’ comes from the name of an African elephant who was born in the 1860s and wowed crowds in England, France and North America. His name was possibly a corruption of the West African word for elephant: nazamba.
Some words have twisty, intriguing histories. When millennials talk about freelancing, few know that the word is medieval term of war — ‘freelance’ referred to a mercenary warrior whose lance was not sworn to any kingdom, but ‘free’ for hire.
Words change too. ‘Stew’, now a longboiled dish of meat or vegetables, also meant a whorehouse in the 14th century.
Lexicographers updating the dictionary even 100 years ago had their hands full. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added 333 new words in 1918. In America, Merriam-Webster added 191.
Many overlapped and many were formally defined for the first time. Not only was the world inching painfully and hungrily towards the end of a war, the English language itself was furiously keeping up with advancements in film, aviation, medicine and society. See some of what’s stuck on or changed a century later:
FIRST WORLD WAR:
You might think the term developed around the time of World War 2, but it was first recorded in the closing months of this one, in a diary entry from September 10, 1918. It was popularly referred to as the Great War or the War To End Wars at this time, but someone clearly knew there was more to come. DEFEATIST: By 1918, the war had dragged on for four years, exhausting everyone. This word was used to describe pacifists and those ready to lose if it meant an end to the fighting. These days, it refers to a different kind of battle: it’s now a terrible attitude to have in the boardroom.
DEVALUE: Where there’s war, there are expenses, financial losses and debt. Devalue was first formally used for currency in 1918. Last year’s most devalued currencies came from Venezuela, Egypt and Argentina. But British pound’s fall after the Brexit vote remains the steepest recent devaluing of a major currency. DELOUSE: Cooties or body lice entered the lexicon the previous year, originating in trenches where soldiers had few opportunities to bathe. A problem with solution: ‘delouse’ was coined in 1918. DOG-TAG:Soldiers have been carrying identification since the Spartans wrote their names on sticks tied to their wrists. Metal IDs were introduced by the British Army in 1907. But it’s the US Army’s twin aluminium tags, stamped with wearer’s name and serial number, adopted in 1918, that became the standard. STORMTROOPER: A member of the Kaiser’s elite, specially trained German infantry. Its meaning changed in 1977, when a film called Star Wars introduced an army of white-armoured footsoldiers with lousy aim.
WHIZZ-BANG: Deadly weapons don’t always have deadly words to describe them. One small shell from a German gun travelled faster than sound – you could hear it ‘whizz’ past before it did its damage.
HEAD-HUNTER: In the 1800s, this was a savage who collected human heads for rituals. A century later, it started to mean one who identifies and recruits workers for jobs, especially for special wartime tasks. INTERVIEW: A face-to-face meeting so military recruiters could identify potential among enlisted Britons. A few years after the war, it came to mean a personal meeting to discuss any hiring. WELFARE: In 1904, the word covered the well-being of children and the unemployed. By 1918, with the war squeezing pockets dry, it got a new meaning — ‘an organised effort to provide for maintenance of members of a group’. ARMISTICE: From the Latin for stoppage of arms; when an agreement was signed at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, it was called the Armistice. It marked the cessation of battle. Algeria’s armistice with France in 1962 is the most recent instance.
MASS GRAVE: The high death toll from the war birthed the unfortunate term. It would have a very different meaning by the end of WWII.
FRIENDLY FIRE: This term was first used in a report in the New York Times on October 18, 1918, for when soldiers come under fire from members of the same army. Other wartime terms that made it to the dictionary include ‘line of duty’, ‘biological weapon’ and ‘triage’. BREAKTHROUGH: We’ve been ‘breaking through’ barriers since the 1400s, but breakthrough as a military term was formalised at the end of the war. By the 1930s it was a way to describe a burst of progress. SEX DRIVE: The rise of psychoanalysis during the period shows we had sex on our minds. ‘Sexual cravings’ came into use in Lexicographers at the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Dictionary look for new as-yetundefined words in books, periodicals and popular use. They determine if a word is widespread, means the same thing in every use, and has staying power. Then they craft a definition.
These days, popular films, songs and slang are all up for consideration too. Special attention is paid to existing words with new meanings – like ‘hashtag’. Many words just walk over from other languages: ‘emoji’ (Japanese), ‘gung-ho’ (Mandarin). Some just get cobbled together: ‘cronut’, ‘bromance’. So dictionaries don’t invent words or influence popularity. They simply describe what’s already in use 1900, ‘sex object’ the following year and ‘sex appeal’ by 1904. Sex drive is from 1918. By 1942, it was common to ‘sex up’ products to make them appealing.
SHIMMY: In 1917, Spencer Williams released a dance number titled ‘Shim-MeSha-Wabble’. By the following year, Shaking the Shimmy, a dance combining the foxtrot with a shaking of the shoulders, was all the rage. The word quickly became a term for any suggestive dance.
BOB: That short haircut for women emerged in 1918, when it was seen as radical. Indian hairdressers gave women bob-cuts until well into the 1980s. CLIMAX: Coined in the sexual sense by birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes in her book Married Love, which challenged the idea that it was improper for a woman to enjoy sex. The book that became so popular it went through six reprints in its first year. Stopes used ‘climax’ because many of her readers would have not been familiar with ‘orgasm’. MICROCLIMATE: By the 19th century, data and research made it possible to compare the climates of small areas and study how and why they differed from others in the same region. Microclimate, coined in 1918, is used to study how climate change affects land and life.
MULTISTORY: Strangely, ‘skyscraper’ is older, from 1888, three years after the world’s first one was completed in Chicago. It was only 10 floors high. The 1918 term multistory, however, refers to any structure with more than two levels. FADE-OUT: Filmmaking was still new in the early years of the previous century. Early filmmakers initially placed an aperture in front of their lens to let the scene emerge from a hole in the screen. This ‘iris effect’ soon gave way to fades — scenes would dissolve into darkness, like the lights slowly going out on a theatre stage.
RETAKE: With cinema, actors weren’t performing live. There was room for re-dos. Hence the ‘retake’. LIFESPAN: Growing interests in species longevity and life expectancy prompted the coinage of this word. India based on ragas, where there’s continuity in the music. The piano, on the other hand, is an instrument on which the sound breaks. To add to this, the old masters of Indian music set their songs to full orchestra, while Silas is almost a one-man show, trying to play the role of violin and flute too, through keys and chords.
But to hear Silas play, you’d never know of these complexities because the music flows so easily. “Since childhood, we heard all these songs chalte phirte on the radio… they are all inside the system, embedded,” he jokes. During concerts, the audience starts clapping along or humming the words. Sometimes Silas finds himself humming under his breath too.
While he is a mine of talent, it is his wife Ravinder Kaur, who has moulded him as a public artist, pushing him to perform on stage. “He is not ambitious at all, but if even one person is listening, he will play happily,” Kaur says.
Aptly, Kaur first heard Silas and then met him. “He was playing these old songs at a restaurant, and I suddenly realised he didn’t fare too well at the time — our average expectancy was among the world’s lowest, at under 30 years. Australians at the time lived to 61. The Indian lifespan stands at 68.3 today; the people of Canada, Australia, Japan and western Europe live to an average of 85.
ALTIMETER: The Wright Brothers’ first successful flight was in 1903. The next few decades took aeronautics to, well, new heights. A name for a device for measuring altitudes entered the OED in 1918. TURBULENCE: Air travel meant we started to feel the atmospheric eddies in the sky and needed a name for them – the 15thcentury word for ‘trouble’ seemed apt. QUEUEING: Queue entered the dictionary in 1893. The verb form came out of the war, as millions lined up for rations. A book published in that year notes that queuing afforded women “an occasion and an opportunity for gossip”. RURBAN: The industrial revolution rapidly urbanised some areas, creating zones for business and manufacturing. But by 1918, towns and villages were no longer watertight. Cars had made movement easier; cities were expanding beyond their borders, necessitating the coinage to better manage the in-between zones. TROUBLESHOOT: HR didn’t come up with this bit of corporate-speak. A ‘troubleshooter’ originally meant someone who worked on telegraph or telephone lines. The verb form, born in 1918, eventually became shorthand for problem-solving. BLAH: In 1918 it stood for “idle, meaningless talk” as in ‘blah blah blah’. The following year it also indicated that something was dull – as in, ‘so blah’.
SNOOTY: The adjective derived from ‘snoot’ meaning “proud or arrogant”, which itself came from ‘snout’.
ROOMIE: American English-speakers had been familiar with the concept of a roommate since the late 1700s. The short form dates from 1918.
CHEERIO: The goodbye greeting was originally ‘cheero’ a variation of ‘cheer’ or ‘cheers’. Enough people preferred ‘cheerio’ for it to enter the OED in 1918. SOPPY: It usually meant wet, but the first reference of it being used to mean “sentimental” dates from 1918.
ZING: Bullets were already ‘zinging’ past in 1911, years before war broke out. By 1918, term for high-pitched sound evolved as slang for ‘energy’ or ‘zest’.
FOR 20 YEARS, BRIAN SILAS’S PIANO HAS GIVEN BOLLYWOOD HITS A NEW SOUND
was playing them on the piano! We moved our seats closer to the stage to hear him properly,” she recalls.
She learnt how to play the piano from Silas too, but found it tough going since he doesn’t dictate musical notations. “His talent comes instinctively, but I’m a learner, I need to practice,” she says. So she devised a technique where she heard the music, simplified the notes and wrote them down. Years later, when the couple opened their own school where Silas gave piano lessons, many students relied on her technique.
Kaur stopped playing the piano after the two got married. “When someone plays that well, it is more of a pleasure to sit and listen,” she says. But she remains Silas’s closest collaborator, organising his concerts and pushing him to perform.
The other collaborator is Silas’s beautiful piano, a custom-made C Bechstein he got for his 50th birthday in 2007, his name engraved on it in gold lettering.
“I am open to the idea of playing newer Bollywood songs as well, but older songs won’t fade away,” he says. For more dictionary entries from 1918 and more stories of how these words came to be, go to hindustantimes. com/lifestyle