A History of English Language

A history of the english language 282
frequency modulation) and AM (for amplitude modulation) serve regularly in radio
broadcasting for the identification of stations, while terms associated with television
include cable TV, teleprompter, videotape, VCR, and DVD. The related development of
increasingly refined equipment for the recording of sound since Thomas Edison’s
invention of the phonograph in 1877 has made the general consumer aware of stereo and
stereophonic, quad and quadraphonic, tweeter, woofer, tape deck, reel-to-reel, and
compact disc or CD.
The first electronic digital computers date from Word War II, and a few terms have
been in general use since then. New meanings of program, language, memory, and
hardware are familiar to people who have never used a computer. With the widespread
manufacturing and marketing of personal computers during the 1980s, a much larger
number of English speakers found the need for computer terms in their daily work: PC
itself, RAM (random-access memory), ROM (read-only memory), DOS (disk operating
system), microprocessor, byte, cursor, modem, software, hacker, hard-wired, download,
and new meanings of read, write, mouse, terminal, chip, network, workstation, windows,
and virus. The use of bug for a problem in running a computer program is sometimes
traced in computer lore to an actual moth residing in the Mark II at Harvard in 1945. It
was discovered by Grace Hopper and is taped in the logbook for September 9, 1945. As it
turns out, however, the 1972 Supplement to the OED records bug for a problem in
technology as early as 1889, by Thomas Edison working on his phonograph. Admiral
Hopper may have a stronger claim to the first use of debug.
214. The World Wars.
As another example of how great developments or events leave their mark upon language
we may observe some of the words that came into English between 1914 and 1918 as a
direct consequence of World War I. Some of these were military terms representing new
methods of warfare, such as air raid, antiaircraft gun, tank, and blimp. Gas mask and
liaison officer were new combinations with a military significance. Camouflage was
borrowed from French, where it had formerly been a term of the scene-painter’s craft, but
it caught the popular fancy and was soon used half facetiously for various forms of
disguise or misrepresentation. Old words were in some cases adapted to new uses. Sector
was used in the sense of a specific portion of the fighting line; barrage, originally an
artificial barrier like a dam in a river, designated a protective screen of heavy artillery or
machine-gun fire; dud, a general word for any counterfeit thing, was specifically applied
to a shell that did not explode; and ace acquired the meaning of a crack airman,
especially one who had brought down five of the enemy’s planes. In a number of cases a
word that had had only limited circulation in the language now came into general use.
Thus hand grenade goes back to 1661 but attained new currency during the war. Other
expressions already in the language but popularized by the war were dugout, machine
gun, periscope, no man’s land, and even the popular designation of an American soldier,
doughboy, which was in colloquial use in the United States as early as 1867. Blighty was
a popular bit of British army slang, derived from India and signifying Britain or home,
and was often applied to a wound that sent a man back to Britain. Other expressions such
as slacker, trench foot, cootie, and war bride were either struck off in the heat of the