A History of English Words (review)

There is a tremendous popular interest in vocabulary and dictionaries. Columns dealing with words and language are a staple of many newspapers. The American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year typically results in holiday season news features. And books such as Simon Winchester’s The madman and the professor (NY: Harper Collins, 1998) make the best-seller list. In A history of English words, Hughes connects with this interest to create a readable but erudite history of English focusing on shifts in the vocabulary over the last 2000 years.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Ch. 1 (1–64) introduces the key idea that vocabulary provides a historical record and that register distinctions reflect class distinctions. H takes as his point of departure Sir James Murray’s image of the vocabulary as a central core of common words with literary and colloquial levels surrounded by peripheries of dialectal, technical, scientific, literary, foreign, and slang terms, and he goes on to explore the relationship among the various levels. Ch. 2 (65–108) deals with the core of the English vocabulary, from Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Roman, and Celtic sources. Ch. 3 (109–45) treats the influence of Norman French. Ch. 4 (146–222) covers the Renaissance experimental use of language and reactions to it. Ch. 5 (223–76) takes up the formation of dictionaries and the tension between the license of the Restoration and the restraint of the Victorian era. Ch. 6 (277–314) discusses imperialism and the growth of varieties of English. Ch. 7 (315–57) covers varieties of modern and contemporary English, taking up such topics as standardization, censorship, and the role of ideology. And Ch. 8 (358–402) treats changes in the structure of the vocabulary and the shift from mediated English to low-register colloquial. Here H distinguishes four attitudes toward language—normative, aware, militant, and activist. The book concludes with a brief appendix on the quantitative study of the vocabulary (403–5) and a bibliography (407–17).

H mostly does an excellent job of placing the vocabulary in context and is able to convincingly include literary and historical material, citations from contemporary language, and quantitative information. Many interesting lexical facts are presented —we learn, for example, that mongoose is from Marathi mangus and that Nottingham derives from ‘the homes of the sons of Snot’. And a number of interesting lexical analyses are presented as well—including treatments of medical terminology in the Renaissance, the sociology of food during Norman times, the vocabulary of war, and lexical items such as pregnant. H provides a fine treatment of literary register, including discussions of modernism and an extended discussion of the language of Shakespeare. He also focuses on the low registers and the issue of decorum and discusses both censorship and George Orwell’s newspeak. There are a few weaknesses as well. The section on political correctness seemed cursory to me. And H gives just a page to Black English (with no discussion of the U.S. Ebonics controversy) as compared to several pages each for Australian and South African English.

Overall H’s book would be an interesting text for a history of English course. Like The story of English (Robert MacNeil; Robert McCrum; and William Cran, NY: Viking Penguin, 1986), it places many vocabulary issues in a broader historical and social context, and it is accessible to students with no previous knowledge of linguistics. It also has the advantage of providing a different perspective on the history of the language than other texts do because it focuses on the vocabulary and is written from a non-U.S. perspective. Nevertheless, some topics would require supplementing.