What-ho! Is that Norse you're speaking, Bertie Old Bean?

THE STORY OF ENGLISH IN 100 WORDS BY DAVID CRYSTAL (Profile Books £12.99)

By Roger Lewis for MailOnline
Updated: 13:06 EDT, 10 November 2011

What ho!: The expression is derived from 'hwaet', the first word in Beowulf

How many of us bother to give any thought to the words we speak? We babble away, generally in ignorance of linguistic intricacies.

Though I myself, in my far-off younger years, taught English at Oxford University, it has come as news to me that when Macbeth tells us his ‘bloody cousins’ have fled, ‘he isn’t swearing but accusing them of a murderous stabbing’. I simply thought the Thane was being unnecessary. Victorian euphemisms for bloody, incidentally, include blooming, ruddy, devilish, jolly, awfully and terribly.

Gossiping: But do we understand the intricacies of the words we use?

David Crystal’s jaunty The Story Of English In 100 Words is crammed with such nuggets. He points out that newspapers never use abolish, forbid, reduce, swindle and resign if they can deploy the blunter and more emotive axe, ban, cut, con and quit. Furthermore, where posh people use the lavatory, common folk go to the toilet. George V was outraged when his son and heir, the Prince of Wales, said radio instead of wireless – radio being brash American jargon. And as regards America, we are indeed divided by a common tongue: wing-mirror / side-view mirror, number plate / license plate, petrol / gas, aerial / antenna, windscreen, wind shield, bonnet / hood, boot / trunk.

English as we (more or less) know it began forming in the Fifth Century, when Saxons, Angles and Jutes arrived from Germany and mingled their vocabulary with remnants of the Latin left over from the Roman occupation. Another important influence was Old Norse, the legacy of Viking invasions. From Old Norse (still proudly spoken I believe in parts of Grimsby) we have skirt, yard and kirk. Latin roots survive in the words to do with plants and animals, food, drink and domestic objects: chattels, candle, kettle, cup, butter, cheese.

The formation of written English - and hence of a standardised English - was the job of the learned medieval monks. I must admit, I wish they’d thrown the Old English poem Beowulf on the pyre, when they found the manuscript in a cupboard up in Mercia. It was such a punishment having to translate the grisly nonsense - a task inflicted on First Year English undergraduates until very recently, at Oxford and St Andrews.

Old English: An early manuscript of Beowulf

The first word in it is ‘Hwaet!’ and Crystal says this became ‘What!’ as in P.G. Wodehouse’s ‘What ho!’ That is to say, it is a sign of greeting. From Beowulf to Bertie Wooster is some distance, but the history of English is the history of an evolutionary process, with words and phrases coming and going down the centuries, altering their meaning, with endless refinements and permutations.

Who’d have guessed, for example, that the word wicked would become ‘a term of strong praise’. Similarly, owing to technological developments in the communications sector, twitter and tweet, text and texting, have taken on fresh connotations in just the past few years.

As Crystal says, verbs (e.g. laugh, look, push, lift) can become nouns; adjectives become verbs (to calm, to empty); and nouns change into verbs (to host, to contact). People, too, become things: cardigan, leotard, mackintosh, sandwich and wellingtons were all men originally. It is an accolade when a doctor becomes a disease: Parkinson’s, Alzheimers, Tourette’s.

‘Speakers love to use their imaginations in creating new vocabulary,’ claims Crystal. Which leads us adroitly to my favourite chapter, the one on swearing. I was particularly keen to see that the a-word only became rude in the Eighteenth Century. Prior to then, a ‘heavy arse’ was a ‘lazy fellow’, an epithet used by clergymen in the pulpit. ‘Haemorrhoids are fine veins that stretch out at the arse,’ wrote a medieval doctor - some things don’t change. Arseward splendidly meant perverse, ‘with no hint of vulgarity’. Then bum and buttocks came in and folk got prudish. Similarly, the c-word, which has now ‘achieved really strong taboo force’, though not with everyone, was used in Renaissance textbooks ‘as a routine part of a description of female anatomy’.

William Tyndale: His 1525 translation of the Bible was a great influence on the English language

The last time we were officially invaded it was by the Normans in 1066, who brought over such French words as question and flame, to add to the Anglo-Saxon ask and fire. From French we also have dame, ‘used for ladies of high rank,’ though the word in America ‘went downmarket’, to almost mean strumpet or harridan.

William Tyndale’s translation of the Bible into English in 1525 provided many rich new coinages: busy-body, castaway, stumbling-block and long-suffering. Tyndale also gave us matrix, meaning ‘the structure or material in which something is embedded,’ for example the Virgin Mary’s womb. Shakespeare was another great inventor of words and images, though it was his little-known contemporary Thomas Nashe who gave us conundrum, grandiloquent, multifarious and balderdash.

As our Empire rose and fell, and people migrated and returned, words were appropriated from other languages, other countries. From Italy we have cameo, concerto, soprano and volcano; and from the Spanish, bravado, mosquito, tobacco and potato. After colonising India, we were to gain atoll, cheroot, pariah, curry and gymkhana. Even the Scots have provided bonnie, wee and mickle.

I may be mistaken (and I say this as a Welshman - and David Crystal is himself a professor of linguistics in Bangor), but I can’t find any words that derive from Welsh - even daffodil was originally the Latin affodilus, leek was leac in Anglo-Saxon, and dragon derived from the Greek drakon.