EXCERPT: The Rude Story of English - Tom Howell

7/27/2019 EXCERPT: The Rude Story of English - Tom Howell

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T H E R U D E S T O R Y O F E N G L I S H

T O M H O W E L L W I T H I L L U S T R A T I O N S B Y G A B E F O R E M A N

McCLELLAND & STEWART


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| 1

part one

The Hero

1. the not-rude not-story of english

The story o the English language is actually quite cool. It

contains some sad parts, but these are well dispersed among

moments o beauty, hilarity, pauses or thought, lessons or

us all, and ambiguous moral themes. It is, as the saying

goes, all over the place. I picked up the tale piecemeal,

reading parts in books and hearing other parts virally, by

word o mouth, word o radio, word o PowerPoint, word o

museum, and sometimes by word o silly song. In my expe-

rience, when somebody attempts to ft the whole storyline

together into a single orm, two big problems stick out.

One, no hero. Two, not rude enough. The rough, barba-

rous, ragrant olks o olden times who began unravelling

the yarn we now call English liked their stories to be ull

o rudeness and heroism. They wanted battles with mon-

sters, meetings with mentors, wild sea voyages, magic, and

a lonely characters tumbledown luck. I think they were onto something.


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2 | t h e r u d e s t o r y o f e n g l i s h

Theres a good reason why stories about English tend to

be unheroic. Its the numbers. Five billion humans today

speak this language, plus all the dead ones who used to, and,on top o that, parrots. Each speaker has (or had) a dierent

story about how English ound them, depending on what

boat they/their ancestors climbed into (or perched on), or

which gang o thugs showed up in boats to pester which

grandparents/put them in a cage, etc., and a single hero can

glue together only so many plot lines.A central myth began to take shape two hundred years

ago in the hands o scholars who called themselves philolo-

gists. Their name looks as i it could mean either lovers o

study or students o love, depending on which end is the

head and which the tail, but no, wrong, philologists were

instead phillers o the log, lovers o the word. Their job

involved reading the handwriting that has survived rom

days o yore, translating all the ancient words, and tracing

what amounted to career paths that connected old speech to

modern, or old to even older. The scholars would observe

how a single word had switched jobs over time, either taking

on a new meaning or losing an old one, and how its outward

appearance changed, usually in tandem with travels through

space or time. Such threads o tale could be entwined to link

our present moment with our past, and so it is due to the

philologists eorts that English has any story at all.

Sadly, rather than fnishing their work by sewing the di-

erent word-careers into a neat, metred, rhyming epic tale,

the philologists ell victim to a plague o science envy.Roughly eight decades ago, most rebranded themselves as


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t h e h e r o | 3

linguists, a name that is all tongue and no love, and they

began wearing the used lab coats theyd ound outside the

chemistry department. The linguists set to dissecting vari-ous puzzles o speech into tinier and tinier pieces until no

determined amateur could tell the bits apart, let alone put

them all back together again. As a result, a properly inormed

account o Englishs lie is now too difcult to tell around

the campfre or at bedtime or while smoking pot at a house-

warming, or wherever our crucial myths are supposed tolive these days.

I never bash experts. I wouldnt know what to bash them

with. Id probably pick the wrong thing, like a chair, only to

fnd out thats exactly what experts are trained to fght with,

and Id be wriggling on my back beore I saw them move.

However, the story o English needs all the help it can get

any idiot can see this and several have volunteered already.

Im only piping up because I made two astounding discover-

ies, in the Christopher Columbus sense o fnding things

other people already knew about, and I believe my discover-

ies can cure our languages anguish in the story department.

One century ago, in that golden age when philologists

roamed the earth, the cream o their species ound jobs with

major dictionary projects such as the amous Oxford English

Dictionary. In halls and ofces flled with paper, pens, dust,

and oak lecterns, the scholars conerred and created proes-

sional norms, such as a practice o telling the truth most o the

time. They couldnt alwaysstick to acts, because they lived in

a dirty, messed-up world riddled with gaps. Ninety-fve percent o the universe is made o types o gap dark matter,


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anti-matter and so on and the same physics govern the

realm o words, so upon fnding a gap in the knowable uni-

verse, a philologist would attempt to fll it using a piece owisdom handed down to him or her by elders in the orm

o a law. Grimms Law was one. Verners Law was

another. As with physical laws, these rules extrapolated rom

past experiences and observations, helping a scholar predict

the existence o objects, sounds, activity, and other orces

that lie beyond the ken o a naked human eye. The wordingo the laws doesnt matter right this minute because what

counts is the result o philological practice, the slow spin-

ning out o a semi-fctional parallel universe, which has been

nicknamed the asterisk reality. This is their proessions

second-most inspiring and poetic artwork, ater the Oxford

English Dictionaryitsel.

I grew up knowing about theAstrixreality, the world o

the books populated by cartoon Gauls and Romans engaged

in unevenly plausible scenarios drawn rom acts and other

speculations. The asterisk reality is exactly the same thing. In

a philologists handwriting, an asterisk mark signals where

material has been concocted to plug a hole in real-world

evidence. For example, when someone at Oxords dictionary

department wanted to show that our modern word arse

once had a job as an ancient Greek word, orsoz, the scholar

needed to imagine a scene in which a German princess two

thousand years ago was sitting on something locally known

as her ars-oz. No documents exist to prove this occurred so

the philologist added an asterisk in ront o the word *ars-oz and stuck it in the dictionary under the arse entry in a


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t h e h e r o | 5

paragraph recounting the words lie story. Generally, depend-

ing on the number o nearby acts available, and on how

clever/lazy the philologist was, an asterisk might stand oranything rom as good as true to probably-maybe to

whatever, time or lunch.

The * is the sign o the reconstructed orm, explained

Tom Shippey, who gave the asterisk reality its nickname. It

was proposed by August Schleicher in the 1860s and used

widely ever since. In this entire process the thing which wasperhaps eroded most o all was the philologists sense o a

line between imagination and reality. In a sense, the non-

existence o the most desired objects o study created a

romance o its own.

Romance is typically a divisive word. Its a red stoplight

to the hard-headed, but to a certain strain o artist or poet or

sophomore or lover, its the other variety o red light, the

type that means, Come closer, or perhaps, Desired object

o study right this way.

Soon ater I discovered philologys looking-glass world, I

also learned that it contains an asterisk hero who is perect

or the story o English, a demigod-like fgure with one oot

in the real universe and the other oot lost in dark matter.

The heros existence, stretching that word or the moment,

owes much to one o the alt-realitys minor contributors,

J.R.R. Tolkien, the same person who helped write TheLord

of the Rings movies. He worked at Oxords dictionary

department or two years, 1919 and 1920, until he grew tired

o trying to remain plausible and wandered o to writeabout hobbits instead. While in the ofce, J.R.R. mostly


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investigated English words that began with the letter w,

such as wol and warg and wallop, rom which he

invented the ancient French verb *waloper(to wallop some-one, obviously). He also doodled ake Saxon riddles in the

margins. Even ater quitting the dictionary, J.R.R. carried

on philologizing and asterisking, going past mere words to

imagine the people who spoke them and rom these specu-

lations emerged his stories o quests, elves, warriors, rings,

and scary people on horses. Tolkien had read the old epicsand knew that all good adventures need a single, socially

isolated hero, so he collected several o these characters and

kept them in reserve or later use in his fction. Among the

candidates was a man named Hengest.

Tolkien didnt magic this man out o nothing. I remember

Hengest rom my high-school history classes in England.

The ancient warrior had somehow gained a reputation or

discovering Britain on behal o the Angles, a tribe in north-

ern Germany, thereby inventing the English language. (The

word English may reer to the speech o Angles who

crossed the water, but nobody uses it to name the German

dialect spoken by those let behind on the mainland.) This

historic coup makes Hengest highly desirable as an object o

study, but hes a horrendously tough fsh to hook back up

into the world o acts. J.R.R. certainly tried his darndest.

The proessor based all o his asterisk-acts regarding

Hengest on two poems, named Beowulfand The Fight at

Finnesburg, ancient works rom an oral tradition, set down

on parchment a thousand years ago. The poems put Hengestin the company o Jutes, whose tribe supposedly lived next


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t h e h e r o | 7

door to the Angles on whats now labelled the Jutish penin-

sula o modern Denmark. But theres a wrinkle. The Jutes

name was once pronounced yooten, which also happenedto be a Germanic word or magical giants. Strangely, the

particular gang o Jutes that joined Hengest on his trip to

Britain let no trash or modern archaeologists to dig up,

raising the question o whether they were indeed magical

giants or just very large humans with supernaturally tidy

habits. Having visited the Danish province o Jutland mysel,where I cultivated a rapport with the locals, I fnd the sec-

ond interpretation easy enough to believe. However, i thats

wrong and Hengests original lie story did eature giants,

any sober-minded adult might suspect the whole crowd o

characters belongs to a airytale. Its hard to tell rom scraps

o parchment. They almost never declare themselves as fc-

tion or non-fction.

J.R.R. chose to believe that Hengest lived in real history

and that the yooten were real Jutes rom Jutland. Working

rom the claims o anonymous poets, the author-philologist

sketched out a fgure who was a masterless man, seeking

warlike employment and any opportunity that luck might

present to him.* Hengest (or *Hengest, really) seemed to be

an expert swordsman, and, even more excitingly, the true

prince o the Angle tribe, although he suered a alling-out

with his own people and became a loner. In this regard he

resembled Aragorn, the wandering king o The Lord of the

Rings, who travels ar rom home under a ake name.

* Finn and Hengest, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The book was compiled rom theproessors notes by a younger colleague, Alan Bliss.


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Ostracized, Hengest sailed to Britain in 449ad primarily as

a mercenary but soon changed his purpose, as Tolkien put

it. The warrior decided to settle down on the island, makebabies, and invite his ellow thugs to do the same. Events were

conspiring to give our language a great oundational hero.

Sadly, beore Hengest could assume his ull asterisk-sel,

urgent duties distracted J.R.R. Tolkien. The amous schol-

ars beautiul plans or Hengest gradually sank under piles

o other asterisks, along with student papers, grocery lists,orcs, etc. I consider this to be a grim moment in the story

o English because it seems to me that Tolkien, too, was on

to something.


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copyright 2013 by tom howell

illustrations copyright 2013 by gabe foreman

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced,

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,

recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior

written consent of the publisher or, in case of photocopying or other

reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing

Agency is an infringement of the copyright law.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Howell, Tom

The rude story of English / Tom Howell ; Gabe Foreman, illustrator.

Issued also in electronic format.

isbn 978-0-7710-3983-6 (pbk.)

1. English language Obscene words History.

2. Swearing History. 3. English language Slang History.

4. English language History. 5. English language Etymology.

I. Title.

pe3724.o3h69 2013 427 c2011-904429-3

Typeset in Caslon by M&S, Toronto

Printed and bound in the United States of America

McClelland & Stewart,

a division of Random House of Canada Limited

One Toronto Street

Toronto, Ontario

m5c 2v6

www.randomhouse.ca

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The Rude Story of English by Tom Howell

There are only two problems with the story of the English language: one, no

hero. Two, not rude enough. In The Rude Story of English, recovering

lexicographer Tom Howell swiftly remedies these and gives us a rousing

account of our language without all the boring bits and with all the

interesting parts kept in and reveals Englishs boisterous, at times

obnoxious, character.

From a haphazard beginning in 449 AD, when a legendary, fearsome

Germanic warrior named Hengest tripped and fell onto British shores, the

real story of English has been rife with accident, physical comedy, phallic monuments, rude behaviour,

dubious facts, and an alarming quantity of poetry written by lawyers.

Across vast distances of space and time, from the languages origins to its fast-approaching retirement, a

moody and miraculously long-lived Hengest voyages to the pubs of Chaucers London, aboard pirate

ships in the north Atlantic, to plantations in Barbados, bookstores in Jamaica, the chilly inlet of Quidi

Vidi, Newfoundland, a private mens club in Australia, and beyond.

Part Monty Python sketch, part Oxford English Dictionary, The Rude Story of English displays an

exuberant love of language and a sharp, anti-authoritarian sense of humour. Entertaining and

informative, it looks at English through its most uncomfortable, colourful, and off-putting parts,

chronicling the story of the language as it has never been told before.

Hardcover

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EXCERPT: The Rude Story of English - Tom Howell

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