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| Edited By: Pratik Ghosh |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 01:57 PM IST
Decades before the word f**k was emasculated, thanks to excessive use in everyday conversations, it had kicked up a nationwide storm in Britain in 1965. One of the guests at an evening live television show had deliberately uttered the four-letter word, observes Philip Gooden in his delightful book May We Borrow Your Language. On September 14, the following day, there was a blizzard of criticisms — from newspaper headlines to angry editorials — and subsequently a demand in parliament for censure of television. But even before f**k's TV debut, it had riled up puritans when Penguin Books was prosecuted for its publication of DH Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960.
F**k and its progeny f**king probably owe their origins to the Germans, writes Gooden, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, which also quotes similar terms from early Dutch and many Scandinavian languages.
Gooden, who has straddled the diverse worlds of crime novels and books on language, peppers this one with etymological nuggets to show how the English language has "stolen, snaffled, purloined, pilfered, appropriated and looted words from all over the world". He steers clear of the trappings of academia that makes the study of the history of English language a yawn-inducing exercise. Fun-filled, insightful and rigorously researched, Gooden devotes one chapter for a word to trace its origin and evolution. In total there are 108 entries, chronologically arranged, that have enriched the lingua franca of the world — a language that is spoken by one billion people across geographies. It features commonplace terms like pork, arrive, jargon and disaster along with not-so-common words such as shibboleth, gauche, panopticon, kamikaze and strafe.
May We... is a story of origins — the earliest terms dating back to the seventh and eight centuries — that is also alive to contemporary footprints of a globalised world. The initial waves of foreign influences came through Roman, Anglo Saxon, Viking and Norman conquests of Britain. As the country grew into an imperial power at the time of Elizabeth I, a tremendous influx of terms from around the globe, including India and the Far East, the Americas and Australasia, swelled its vocabulary. And, all the while, it has been a two-way traffic. Cultures that came in touch with the English too soaked up the influences of their language.
The best thing about the English language is its dynamic nature, which allows one linguistic stratum to blend with another. The worthy contributions of Latin and Greek in the course of the journey are no less remarkable, especially since the former "was the language of government and authority during the period of Roman occupation and settlement".
Gooden's book reiterates a vital point: No language or culture can survive in isolation. For it to grow, it can't be impervious to foreign influences. And, nothing illustrates this intermingling better than the word "juggernaut". The anglicised term for the Hindu deity Jagannath first cropped up in the travel journals of Odoric of Porpendone, a Christian missionary, who came to India in the early 14th century. Odoric was spellbound by the spectacle of rathayatra in what is now known as Odisha. In vivid details, the mendicant monk describes how pilgrims flung themselves on the chariot's way "so that its wheels may go over them". It was their desire to die for their god.
However, juggernaut had to wait 300 years to enter the English language in the form of Iagarnat in 1638. The modern version of the word stands for both the deity and an unstoppable force.
