A History of English Language

A history of the english language 284
abolitionist have for every American specific meanings connected with the efforts to
abolish slavery, efforts that culminated in the Civil War. In the last quarter of the
nineteenth century an interesting story of progress is told by new words or new meanings
such as typewriter, telephone, apartment house, twist drill, drop-forging, blueprint,
oilfield, motorcycle, feminist, fundamentalist, marathon (introduced in 1896 as a result of
the revival of the Olympic games at Athens in that year), battery and bunt, the last two
indicating the growing popularity of professional baseball in America.
The twentieth century permits us to see the process of vocabulary growth going on
under our eyes, sometimes, it would seem, at an accelerated rate. At the turn of the
century we get the word questionnaire, and in 1906 suffragette. Dictaphone, raincoat,
and Thermos became a part of the recorded vocabulary in 1907 and free verse in 1908.
This is the period when many of the terms of aviation came in, some still current, some
reflecting the aeronautics of the time—airplane, aircraft, airman, monoplane, biplane,
hydroplane, dirigible. Nose-dive belongs to the period of the war. About 1910 we began
talking about the futurist and the postimpressionist in art, and the Freudian in
psychology. Intelligentsia as a designation for the class to which superior culture is
attributed, and bolshevik for a holder of revolutionary political views were originally
applied at the time of World War I to groups in Russia. At this time profiteer gained a
specialized meaning. Meanwhile foot fault, fairway, fox trot, and contract bridge were
indicative of popular interest in certain games and pastimes. The 1933 supplement to the
OED records Cellophane (1921) and rayon (1924), but not nylon, deep-freeze, airconditioned,
or transistor; and it is not until the first volume of the new supplement in
1972 that the OED includes credit card, ecosystem, existentialism (1941, though in
German a century earlier), freeze-dried, convenience foods, bionics, electronic computer,
automation, cybernetics, bikini, discotheque. Only yesterday witnessed the birth of
biofeedback, power lunch, fractal, chaos theory, and cyberspace. Tomorrow will witness
others as the exigencies of the hour call them into being.
216. Sources of the New Words: Borrowings.
Most of the new words coming into the language since 1800 have been derived from the
same sources or created by the same methods as those that have long been familiar, but it
will be convenient to examine them here as an illustration of the processes by which a
language extends its vocabulary. It should be remembered that the principles are not new,
that what has been going on in the last century and a half could be paralleled from almost
any period of the language.
As is to be expected in the light of the English disposition to borrow words from other
languages in the past, many of the new words have been taken over ready-made from the
people from whom the idea or the thing designated has been obtained. Thus from the
French come apéritif, chauffeur, chiffon, consommé, garage; from Italian come ciao,
confetti, and vendetta, and from Spanish, bonanza, canyon, patio, rodeo, barrio,
machismo, and cantina. In the Southwestern United States and increasingly throughout
the country, the dinner table is enriched and spiced by borrowings from Mexican
Spanish. Although chili has been in the language since the seventeenth century, most of
the culinary terms date from the modern period: enchilada, fajita, jalapeño, nachos, taco,