The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins

277 Pages·2012·2.28 MB·English

by  Anne Curzan

Topic
Literature Subtopic
& Language Writing
The Secret Life of Words:
English Words
and Their Origins
Course Guidebook
Professor Anne Curzan
University of Michigan
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The Teaching Company.
Anne Curzan, Ph.D.
Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of English
University of Michigan
Professor Anne Curzan is Arthur F. Thurnau
Professor of English at the University of
Michigan. She also has faculty appointments
in the Department of Linguistics and the School of
Education. She received her B.A. in Linguistics with
honors from Yale University and both her M.A. and
Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan.
In 2007, Professor Curzan received the University of Michigan’s Henry
Russel Award, one of the highest honors for midcareer faculty; she also has
been honored at Michigan with a Faculty Recognition Award and the John
Dewey Award.
Professor Curzan has published on a wide range of topics, including the history
of English, language and gender, corpus linguistics, historical sociolinguistics,
pedagogy, and lexicography. She is the author of Gender Shifts in the History
of English and coauthor, with Michael Adams, of the textbook How English
Works: A Linguistic Introduction, now in its third edition. She also coauthored,
with Lisa Damour, First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student’s Guide to
Teaching, also now in its third edition. Professor Curzan’s other Great Course
is How Conversation Works: 6 Lessons for Better Communication.
Professor Curzan served as coeditor of the Journal of English Linguistics
for eight years and is now a senior consulting editor for the journal. She has
been a member of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary of
the English Language since 2006 and is currently a member of the American
Dialect Society Executive Committee. Professor Curzan shares her insights
on language in short videos on the website of Michigan University’s College
of Literature, Science, and the Arts and on Michigan Radio’s weekly
segment “That’s What They Say.” In her spare time, she is an avid runner
and triathlete. ■
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION
Professor Biography ............................................................................i
Typographical Conventions ...............................................................vi
Course Scope .....................................................................................1
LECTURE GUIDES
LECTURE 1
Winning Words, Banished Words ....................................................................3
LECTURE 2
The Life of a Word, from Birth to Death ...........................................11
LECTURE 3
The Human Hands behind Dictionaries ...........................................18
LECTURE 4
Treasure Houses, Theft, and Traps .................................................24
LECTURE 5
Yarn and Clues—New Word Meanings ...........................................30
LECTURE 6
Smog, Mob, Bling—New Words ......................................................38
LECTURE 7
“Often” versus “Offen”—Pronunciation ............................................44
LECTURE 8
Fighting over Zippers ........................................................................50
LECTURE 9
Opening the Early English Word-Hoard ..........................................56
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 10
Safe and Sound—The French Invasion ..........................................62
LECTURE 11
Magnifical Dexterity—Latin and Learning ........................................68
LECTURE 12
Chutzpah to Pajamas—World Borrowings ......................................74
LECTURE 13
The Pop/Soda/Coke Divide .............................................................82
LECTURE 14
Maths, Wombats, and Les Bluejeans ..............................................90
LECTURE 15
Foot and Pedestrian—Word Cousins ..............................................98
LECTURE 16
Desultory Somersaults—Latin Roots .............................................106
LECTURE 17
Analogous Prologues—Greek Roots .............................................113
LECTURE 18
The Tough Stuff of English Spelling ..............................................121
LECTURE 19
The b in Debt—Meddling in Spelling .............................................126
LECTURE 20
Of Mice, Men, and Y’All .................................................................133
LECTURE 21
I’m Good … Or Am I Well? ............................................................141
LECTURE 22
How Snuck Sneaked In .................................................................149
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 23
Um, Well, Like, You Know .............................................................156
LECTURE 24
Wicked Cool—The Irreverence of Slang .......................................163
LECTURE 25
Boy Toys and Bad Eggs—Slangy Wordplay ..................................171
LECTURE 26
Spinster, Bachelor, Guy, Dude .......................................................179
LECTURE 27
Firefighters and Freshpersons .......................................................187
LECTURE 28
A Slam Dunk—The Language of Sports .................................................194
LECTURE 29
Fooling Around—The Language of Love .......................................201
LECTURE 30
Gung Ho—The Language of War ..................................................208
LECTURE 31
Filibustering—The Language of Politics ........................................215
LECTURE 32
LOL—The Language of the Internet ..............................................223
LECTURE 33
#$@%!—Forbidden Words .............................................................230
LECTURE 34
Couldn’t (or Could) Care Less .......................................................237
LECTURE 35
Musquirt and Other Lexical Gaps ..................................................244
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Table of Contents
LECTURE 36
Playing Fast and Loose with Words ..............................................251

SUPPLEmENTAL mATERIAL
Bibliography ....................................................................................258
v
Typographical Conventions
This guidebook uses the following typographical conventions:
• Italics are used for words cited as words (rather than used
functionally; e.g., The word ginormous is a combination of gigantic
and enormous) and foreign-language words.
• Single quotation marks are used for meanings of words (e.g., Wife
meant ‘woman’ in Old English).
• Double quotation marks are used for pronunciations of words (e.g.,
“often” versus “offen”) and words used in a special sense (e.g., The
“secret lives” of words are fascinating).
• Slashes are used to indicate sounds (e.g., /b/).
• An asterisk is used to designate proto-language forms (e.g., The
Indo-European root *mn-ti, ‘to think,’ gives us the Latin borrowing
mental).
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The Secret Life of Words:
English Words and Their Origins
Scope:
Words have fascinating stories to tell—about the history and
culture of their speakers, about the human mind and human
creativity, and about the power of language. This course
explores the history of English words, tracing back a number of common
and uncommon words and phrases through history to get to their origins.
The course moves from learned, classical words on standardized tests,
such as erinaceous, to the sports metaphors that permeate everyday talk,
such as you’re off base. It explores words that have been the source of
public concern, from Internet acronyms, such as LOL, to the curse words
we write with symbols: #$@%!.
The word omnivorous is a Latin borrowing whose parts mean ‘all devouring,’
and it is a word often used to describe the capacious English vocabulary.
This course takes us around the world to explore the words that English has
acquired from Arabic to Yiddish, from pajamas to pickle. In these words,
we’ll see the history of imperialism and colonization, as well as immigration
and assimilation. We’ll also journey around the United States to learn why
some folks in the South say “might could,” who calls a poached egg a
“dropped egg,” and what you do when you make a “Michigan left.” The
course considers whether such forces as television or the Internet threaten
this rich lexical diversity in English.
We’ll travel back in time to the invasions by the Vikings and the Normans
to explore words from sky to story, which are so familiar they hardly seem
borrowed at all. Then, we’ll immerse ourselves in the classical revival
of the Renaissance, which gave English related sets of Latinate words,
including omnivorous, carnivorous, piscivorous, and voracious. Up to this
day, the language of science and medicine is permeated with Latin and
Greek; exploring classical roots opens up this technical vocabulary for
the nonspecialist.
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From the learned language of Latin, we will then dive into the playfulness
of slang. This ephemeral language phenomenon, so hard to pin down yet so
delightful to study, stretches the lexical boundaries, turning such words as
wicked on their heads to make them good, making rhyme rebellious with
chill pill, and making bad eggs through metaphor. Words help establish who
we are, as slang makes eminently clear.
As we’ll see, the English lexicon is oddly uneven in spots. The positions
of governor and governess are no longer parallel, nor are a bachelor and a
spinster equally eligible. The proliferation of words meaning ‘drunk’ stands
in contrast to the language’s odd lexical gaps, such as the fact that we have
only one word for ‘spicy hot.’ Why do we have so many words for some
things and no words for others?
We will also explore the language of love and war, of politics and political
correctness. Does it matter that we talk about dating as a game and about
treating disease as a war? Does it change the world to talk about firefighters
instead of firemen? We’ll learn how English speakers continue to create new
words to handle the globalizing, technologically complex world in which
we live.
Have you ever wondered why colonel is spelled with an l but pronounced
with an r; about the fact that foot and pedestrian are historically related
words, even though they now have different consonants; or whether it
matters if you say “I am good” or “I am well”? Answers to all these questions
and more await. If you’ve ever pondered where such a word as erinaceous
comes from (and what it means), or if you just want to enjoy language more,
this course will provide hours of enlightening pleasure. ■
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