The words lolcat and wiki are among the newest in the English language, so new that lolcat doesn't appear in "The Secret Life of Words" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 440 pages, $27), Henry Hitchings's account of the growth of English vocabulary over the centuries, though wiki does. According to Mr. Hitchings, there were 50,000 words in the English language a millennium ago, and there are at least 700,000 today. Half of English words are borrowed, some from the jargon of subcultures such as the Internet, but more often from other languages.
"Borrowings have a 'psychological climate,'" Mr. Hitchings writes, himself borrowing a phrase from a scholar of loanwords. Therefore, Hitchings continues, "we can use details of language to open up a historical vista." For example, in the 1842 coining of dinosaur, which was composed by joining the ancient Greek words for "scary" and "lizard," one can see the pride in the ability to read Homer in the original that was typical of 19th-century intellectuals, even those who dug up bones for a living. And in the emergence of the word teenager in the 1940s and 1950s, one can sense the optimism, informal style, and sociological self-regard of America just after World War II.
Read it all
No comments:
Post a Comment