New Words Are New Worlds

Every day on the way home from work I see a large sign:

Learn to Bartend

with a phone number. And every day I grumble to myself, “It should say, ‘Learn to Tend Bar,” but, of course, the sign isn’t going to change. [Nor on this point will I.] It rankles me. Not as much though as when colleagues suggest we should problemsolve….

Some months a go I was [half] awake way too early on a Sunday morning and ran across a British series from a few years ago called The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language hosted by Melvyn Bragg. I liked the style of the show — not a deep, scholarly approach but lots of fun facts. I liked what I saw enough that I bought the book based on the series.

Bragg writes:

As far as England is concerned, the language that became English arrived in the fifth century with Germanic warrior tribes from across the sea. They were first invited over as mercenaries to shore up the ruins of the departed Roman Empire, stayed to share the spoils and then dug in.

And then:

The “-ing” ending in modern place names means “the people of” and “-ing” is all about us — Ealing, Dorking, Worthing, Reading, Hastings; “-ton” means enclosure or village, as in my own hometown of Wigton, and as in Wilton, Taunton, Bridlington, Ashton, Burton, Crediton, Luditon; “-ham” means farm — Birmingham, Chippenham, Grantham, Fulham, Tottenham, Nottingham. There are hundreds of examples. These were straightforward territorial claims. The language said: We are here to stay, we name and we own this.

English was nearly extinguished by French, battled Latin in the churches [or was that battled the churches in Latin?], spread through commerce and conquest, and thrived in part by evolving and integrating words from other languages along the way. English is a bastard. And, I’ve been told by several people who have learned it as a second [or third, fourth, fifth...] language, English is a bitch.

We invent new words and redefine old words all the time. This malleability is a wonderful attribute [even when I hate some of the more vulgar new words]. English has at every turn refused to be limited to its “correct” form. I will probably always hate bartend and problemsolve. I hope they fall out of favor. [Note that I did not say, "Hopefully they will fall out of favor," even though I think the battle over hopefully has already been lost.]

English is fun. English is a toy. English is a game. Where we bump up against other languages we get pidgins and creoles and dialects. And the more I learn about these varieties, the more I appreciate their beauty.