Edward Skidelsky
“Denial” is an ordinary English word meaning to assert the untruth of something. Recently, however, it has acquired a further polemical sense. To “deny” in this new sense is to repudiate some commonly professed doctrine. Denial is the secular form of blasphemy; deniers are scorned, ridiculed and sometimes prosecuted.
Where does this new usage come from? There is an old sense of “deny,” akin to “disown,” which no doubt lies in the background. (A traitor denies his country; Peter denied Christ.) But the more immediate source is Freud. Denial in the Freudian sense is the refusal to accept a painful or humiliating truth. Sufferers are said to be in a “state of denial” or simply “in denial.” This last phrase entered general use in the early 1990s and launched “denial” on its modern career. “Holocaust denial” was the first political application, followed closely by “Aids denial,” “global warming denial” and a host of others. An abstract noun, “denialism,” has recently been coined. It is perhaps no accident that denial’s counterpart, affirmation, has meanwhile acquired laudatory overtones. We “affirm” relationships, achievements, values. Ours is a relentlessly positive culture.
An accusation of “denial” is serious, suggesting either deliberate dishonesty or self-deception. The thing being denied is, by implication, so obviously true that the denier must be driven by perversity, malice or wilful blindness. Few issues warrant such confidence. The Holocaust is perhaps one, though even here there is room for debate over the manner of its execution and the number of its victims. A charge of denial short-circuits this debate by stigmatising as dishonest any deviation from a preordained conclusion. It is a form of the argument ad hominem: the aim is not so much to refute your opponent as to discredit his motives. The extension of the “denier” tag to group after group is a development that should alarm all liberal-minded people. One of the great achievements of the Enlightenment—the liberation of historical and scientific enquiry from dogma—is quietly being reversed.
Prospect
In China, women can only marry at age 20 and men at age 22.
The Times, 28th August 2009
“Definitely” is the most commonly misspelt word in the English language, with Britons regularly writing it as “definately.”
Daily Mail, 15th June 2009
Sales of extra-large condoms in Tesco are higher in Glasgow than anywhere else in Britain.
Daily Express, 2nd September 2009
Britain produced 91,723 scientific papers in 2009—just under 8 per cent of the world’s total, and third only to the US and China.
BBC News website, 2nd October 2009
While a cub reporter in Essex, Ruth Rendell wrote up a tennis club dinner without attending it. As this meant she missed the after-dinner speaker dying mid-speech, she resigned before she could be fired.
The Guardian, 7th September 2009
Greenland has the world’s highest suicide rate—each year 100 people per 100,000 take their own lives.
Slate, 9th October 2009
According to in-house estimates at the Times, Jeremy Clarkson is responsible for 25 per cent of timesonline.co.uk traffic.
Vanity Fair, November 2009
The annual retail spend of Oxford Street, Regent Street and Bond Street is £5.5bn—more than Manchester and Birmingham combined.
The Times, 3rd November 2009
22 per cent of men “regularly include a kiss on texts to their male mates.”
The Register, 4th November 2009
Jim Giles
Is the word “awesomepants” part of the English language? Don’t worry if you haven’t heard of it; almost no one has. It probably came into existence because “awesome,” meaning really good, has become so over used. In the past few years, enthusiastic types have begun adding “pants”—as in the American word for trousers—as an intensifying suffix. It crops up on Twitter a few times a day.
Does this level of usage make it a real word? Not by any traditional yardstick. It’s not one of the 650,000 or so words in the OED. Yet some time in the past year, one of the isolated uses of “awesomepants” was netted in a lexicographical trawl of the web. The software that spotted the word is busy populating a new kind of online dictionary. It’s called Wordnik and it is the work of Erin McKean, an editor who used to compile American dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Other finds include “smizing”—smiling with your eyes—and “spoofy,” as in spoof-like. Wordnik went online early this year and does not yet work as well as McKean would like. But if her ambitions are realised, it could be the most comprehensive dictionary ever created.
Wordnik has no print edition, so there are no constraints on the number of words it can contain. At the time of writing, “awesomepants” was one of around 4m entries. Some were imported from traditional sources, such as the ten-volume Century Dictionary of 1914. Others come from archives of blog posts and newspaper copy.
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Tom Chatfield
The humble "at": the spider monkey in German or snail in Italian
One of the joys of the digital era is the way it creates innovations in multiple languages. The “at” sign used in email addresses—@—has, for instance, earned a delightful variety of descriptions, from being called an elephant’s trunk (snabel-a) in Danish to a spider monkey (Klammeraffe) in German or a snail (chiocciola) in Italian. The internet also abounds, however, with all manner of symbols that haven’t as yet earned popular linguistic recognition: from the “vertical pipe with a hole in it” to the “checked ballot box,” and so on. For these, a word first coined in the early 19th century has come to the rescue: “dingbats.”
Since its first appearance in America in 1838, a “dingbat” has referred, among other things, to money, a professional tramp, a muffin, male genitalia, an Italian, a woman who is neither your sister nor your mother, a foolish person in authority and—most crucially for our purposes—a typographical ornamentation. If only English had showed a similar level of ingenuity when it came to naming the @.
Tom Chatfield
One of the joys of the digital era is the way it creates innovations in multiple languages. The “at” sign used in email addresses—@—has, for instance, earned a delightful variety of descriptions, from being called an elephant’s trunk (snabel-a) in Danish to a spider monkey (Klammeraffe) in German or a snail (chiocciola) in Italian. The internet also abounds, however, with all manner of symbols that haven’t as yet earned popular linguistic recognition: from the “vertical pipe with a hole in it” to the “checked ballot box,” and so on. For these, a word first coined in the early 19th century has come to the rescue: “dingbats.”
Since its first appearance in America in 1838, a “dingbat” has referred, among other things, to money, a professional tramp, a muffin, male genitalia, an Italian, a woman who is neither your sister nor your mother, a foolish person in authority and—most crucially for our purposes—a typographical ornamentation. If only English had showed a similar level of ingenuity when it came to naming the @.
Tom Chatfield
“Much madness is divinest sense,” wrote the 19th-century poet Emily Dickinson—”Assent, and you are sane; / Demur—you’re straightway dangerous, / And handled with a chain.” The chains may have gone, but the language of sanity remains a divisive field; one in which, at least linguistically, the majority’s assent can still tend towards brutality.
The word “insane” was first used in 1560 and derives from the Latin insanus. Its etymology—in means “not” and sanus means “sound or healthy”—is a simple clue to the difficulties of discussing mental health. Since ancient times, madness has been defined as a deviation from a norm (the word “madness” itself derives from the Greek mania, “excessive rage”). Unlike physical illness, however, achieving any precision of diagnosis, let alone cure, has proved hugely problematic. Diseases of the mind are a nebulous, atavistically fearful business—one that has repeatedly defied both public comprehension and compassion.
Around 1300, the word idiot was introduced to describe those “natural fools” born incapable of reason. Slightly above this state was imbecility, a term used from the 1620s to indicate “weakness of mind.” The 18th century gave us cretin, a term taken from an Alpine dialect, meaning one suffering from a deficiency of thyroid hormones; in America, in 1910, the term moron was coined to describe “an adult with a mental age between eight and 12.” Yet all of these terms drifted away from their origins to become increasingly perjorative. And so too have most of the more recent words designed to replace them: retarded, disabled, special. It suggests a troublingly intractable limit to our tolerance. We’re demolishing the last asylums, but the prison of public words will take a lot longer to dismantle.
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Adam Rosenthal
“The genius of democracies,” wrote de Tocqueville, “is seen not only in the great number of new words introduced but even more in the new ideas they express.” And when it comes to new political words, what better place to look than in the names of politicians? From Aristophanes on, onomastic word-play has been a way of sorting the genius of democracy from the dunce. Helpfully, New Labour has served up a succession of politicians whose names chime perfectly with the bland, milky corporatism of their politics: Blair, Blears, Byers, Blunkett, Beckett, two Browns, one Balls, Milburn, Banks and a Millbank full of Milibands. The results, though, have been disappointing. The ubiquitous Tony Bliar is hardly inspired. Vince Cable’s Gordon Bean is hopeless. Fans of satirical invention can only glance enviously across the pond at the neologisms of 2008 and wonder what American English would have done with such material.
Obama may have stormed the ballot, but the biggest winner of the election campaign was the portmanteau, the linguistic shotgun wedding that gives us such strange bedfellows as Bennifer, Brangelina and Billary. So McCain was labeled McBush and his supporters McCainiacs, while Obama’s adherents were caricatured as brainwashed Obamatons. His speeches, meanwhile, were obambastic, his tactics barackavellian, his elderly supporters baractegenarians, and his putative administration Obamalot. Alright, so most of these may be utter obamanations. But they’re better than the mere witless barracking we’re used to.
Outside of candidates’ names, the language of the election was notable for the freedom of suffix-formation it afforded: –holic (e.g. infoholic), -nomics (carbonomics) and -licious (er, Obamalicious) all had good campaigns. And of course, no American political cycle would be complete without a –gate, which has of course migrated from its original context in Watergate to taint any word it touches with scandal. Ayersgate, Wrightgate, Lipstickgate and Troopergate all made it into the lexicon, even if the actual ’scandals’ never made it past the starting gate. The ever-available adjectival suffix ‘-y’, meanwhile, was given a boost by two comediennes, Tina Fey offering us the unorthodox mavericky and Sarah Silverman the unforgivable civil-rightsy.
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Tom Chatfield
The word “slang,” first recorded in the mid-18th century, is of uncertain origin: suggestions include the old name for a convict’s fetters, the Old Norse verb “to sling,” slyngva, and the name of an 18th-century Dutchman, the Lord of Slangenburg. It’s an appropriate muddle. Slang initially meant the opaque private diction of criminals, only later expanding to its present sense of any very informal, non-standard language, and it remains a field in which meanings are hard to trace or pin down.
That’s not for want of trying, however. Around 1536, some 70 years before the first recognised English dictionary (Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall), a former apprentice of Caxton’s, Robert Copland, published a poem entitled The hye way to the spyttell hous. It consists of a dialogue between the author and a porter at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, and deploys with relish the “thieves’ cant” of its day: a private vocabulary which included such delights as “pek my jere” (eat excrement), “docked the dell” (deflowered the girl) and “maimed nace” (helplessly drunk). Copland’s glossary of “canting words” was Britain’s first glimpse of what an English dictionary might look like.
After Copland, it seems, the public could not get enough of cant. Guides to “low” speech proliferated throughout the 16th and 17th centuries—monuments to our delight in coining new words for those eternal human preoccupations: bodily functions, reproduction and intoxication. And those thinking that the increasingly comprehensive “proper” dictionaries of the last few centuries have defeated the demand for such things should think again. Look at the urban dictionary online if you don’t believe me. In a digital world, it’s the authorities who are on the back foot. We’re heading back to Copland.
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Lesley Chamberlain
Peter Mark Roget, the future Linnaus of the English word, began compiling word-lists at the age of eight. Why was he not playing with other children, honing his social skills? The problem was his mother, a widow at 28, who drained her son of sympathy. Catherine Romilly gave birth to a wonderful, handsome, talented boy , but couldn’t let him be himself. Independence, he would write in his Thesaurus under list 744, equals freedom of action, unilaterality; freedom of choice, initiative. But for freedom see also non-liability, disobedience, seclusion and liberation: the way one insists on freedom in the face of opposition.
Catherine Roget née Romilly came from a well-regarded and successful London Huguenot family blighted by mental illness. After the early death of her Swiss-born husband, Catherine never recovered her capacity for normal life. Her own mother had been mentally incapable and Catherine slipped inexorably into a lesser version of her mother’s state. Shlepping with his sister backwards and forwards between London and the country on the wheels of maternal restlessness, Peter never felt he had a home, except in his wordlists. He worked on them in solitude, while qualifying as a doctor.
Fully fledged at 20, five years too young to practise, he was exceptionally able and also peculiar and solitary. He hated disorder and dirt. When he took a job accompanying two rich teenagers on their European Grand Tour, their notebooks revealed his crabbed and pernickety mind. He taught them to count the windows in cathedrals, and visitor numbers, and tally how many paintings were in a collection. He taught them to structure the world prosaically and reliably; at all costs to avoid emotional surrender. His response to both human and natural life was to classify it, the foundation of his great work to come.
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Tom Chatfield
According to OUP’s Words of the Year, 2008 will be remembered above all for “crunch” and “credit,” although not necessarily in that order. The phrase was coined by the New York Times back in 1967, but only came into its own in these last headily disastrous few months: the BBC website deployed it almost 25,000 times in September. “Credit crunch” is a snappy alliteration, but it’s also perfectly suited to the tenor of these times, in which financial reportage tends to be viscerally, bone-crunchingly concrete. Witness the free mixing of medical and mechanical metaphors that has seen equity “pumped” and “injected” into companies, interest rates “slashed,” “fatal” blows delivered to banks, and economies left “reeling” from “toxic” shocks. The terms have been in use for a while—but rarely has a bloodless crisis been rendered so resoundingly physical.
All this, it’s worth noting, is something of a historical anomaly. The great crash of 1929 was a fertile time linguistically, but also a more delicate one—at least in print. An Economist article that November coined the notion of a financial “recession,” but intended it as a euphemism, reassuring gentle readers that “a revival in industrial activity” would not be long delayed. Similarly, the word “redundant” was first used in 1929 as a way of describing job losses without upsetting the public too much. Perhaps the most enduring fiscal euphemism of all, however, arrived in 1793: the use of “depression” in economics, which likened financial collapse to someone feeling a little glum. This was also the year in which George Washington noted in his state of the union address that “no pecuniary consideration is more urgent than the regular redemption and discharge of the public debt.” If only someone had been listening.
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