Wednesday

15 November 2017

— Burnished beech leaves still gliding by

Good Morning All,

Probably because the school has been so much on my mind, I find myself this morning in the mood to amble into a classroom and say, “All right, you ladles and jellyspoons, before we get back on the raft with Huck and Jim, I am offering a free quiz grade of 100% to anyone who can say five times in ten seconds, without goofing up: "The whiskey mixer mixes whiskey.”

Four or five hands would shoot up. I’d admonish the class to listen carefully and groan when the slip up came. Then I’d set my yellow stopwatch, choose the first contestant, and off we would go. For that particular tongue twister, more difficult than most, we’d be lucky to get two winners from the ten or dozen who tried. But we had great fun doing it, including the kids making me take a shot, and it certainly lifted them out of any afternoon doldrums.

Anyway, being in a teaching mood, I shamelessly offer you this entry from Week Twenty-Seven of the 1001 English Delights. The chances are you probably know most—or all—of it, already, but there might be an engaging detail or two.

B. Style Tips

Germanic and Latinate Words: Early English came to us largely through German and Danish, after England was conquered by the Anglos and the Saxons from Germany, and the Vikings, the Jutes, from Jutland. Indeed, the name England is a derivation of Angloland.

We owe much to German and Danish. Most of our everyday words come from them: wind, earth, fire, house, talk, take, green, blue, etc. And, like the Germans and Danes, we often make new words by putting words together. Green + house gives us a greenhouse, which isn't green at all, but made of glass. (To + get + her, by the way, is not such a compound word, but bulldoze, honeymoon,  and bookworm are.)

After the Romans and later on the French conquered England, many Latin and French words found their way into English. Such words as definite and spectator. We also picked up Greek words that had worked their way into Latin, e.g., democracy and omniscient. Early Christian missionaries in England added more Latin and Greek words to English.

The Romans, as you probably know, made new words differently from the Germans. Instead of putting whole words together, they added word parts, prefixes and suffixes to word roots. Thus they added the prefix ab, which means “away from” to the verb sum, which means “I am”, to get the word absum, “I am away from.” As you may have guessed, that eventually became our English word absent. The Latin word root ject means “throw", giving us such words as abject, deject, inject, interject, object, project, reject, subject.

After the Norman (French) conquest in 1066, French became the language of choice. If you were anybody, you spoke French. Thus the common Old English word notgothroughsome, for example, was replaced by the Latinate word impenetrable.

The old Germanic words are fine, of course, but when we need to find-tune our meaning the words derived from Latin, Greek and French come in handy. For instance, sad is the simple, general Germanic word that means anything from a mild, momentary unhappiness to intense grief. Good writers look for more precision. Sorrowful, for example, implies a sadness caused by some specific loss, disappointment, accident, or mistake (her death left him sorrowful.) Melancholy suggests a chronic mournfulness or gloominess (melancholy thoughts about his lost youth.) Dejected, “thrown down”, implies a discouragement or a sinking of spirits because of frustration or disappointment (after his team lost, he felt dejected.) Depressed, “pushed down”, suggests a mood of brooding despondency because of fatigue or a sense of futility (the novel left him feeling depressed for the future of humanity.) Doleful implies a mournful, often lugubrious, sadness (the doleful look on the boy’s face after his ice cream fell to the sidewalk.) Morose defines a gloomy, glum, ill-humored sadness (after she lost the debate she stared morosely at her shoes.). 

So, what luck the Celts living in England got beat up by some many other people, so that we could get such an expressive and finely-tuned language!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Two Holly snaps: