Photo (cropped) by Jason Hafso on Unsplash
Confession time: I’m a devoted fan of the way Americans fuck around with the language. This is a heresy in my part of the world, where so-called Americanisms are considered a form of cultural imperialism visited upon us by a barbarous horde. But there it is.
My fandom is based largely on the fact that America has a long history of making English more interesting. Many of its efforts remain stuck at home, sometimes not even venturing beyond the valley, county or state in which they arise. But now and again a new word sets sail across the ocean, slips past customs, and insinuates its way into what the rest of the world regards as the King’s English.
And before you know it, we’re all using that word, happily assuming it originated from good old Blighty.
And right there is another reason for my fandom. Who doesn’t love a bit of cloak and dagger?
Take rile. It’s a word that anyone who spends any time on social media will be familiar with, having been riled up by the sewage that’s so often served up as commentary, or having observed others getting all riled up by the same thing.
It’s a great word, isn’t it? Short, as all good, angry Anglo-Saxon words should be, but just stretchable enough through that long i that you can perform all sorts of pissed off acrobatics with it too. I suspect Jim Carrey in his heyday could have made a 30-second performance out of it without breaking into a sweat.
But here’s the thing. Rile isn’t even close to being Anglo-Saxon. It’s an American bastardisation of the Early Modern English roil, which may have come from French, although no one’s too sure. Its primary meaning is “to churn up a liquid and make it turbid”, and it can also mean “annoy”. But you and I are much more likely to reach for rile for that second meaning.
That makes us hostages of a pronunciation that our ancestors - including many Americans - would have considered the mark of an uneducated hillbilly. It’s first recorded in the early 1800s, when spoil was often pronounced spile by the same people who said rile. Their great grandchildren later turned hoist into histe, a 20th century invention which, for reasons unknown to me, is spelt heist.
Why some parts of America began turning oi into i in some words, I don’t know, although I suspect it has a lot to do with immigration. From 1815 to 1865 a flood of people entered the country from across Europe, bringing with them a rainbow of accents. You’d be mad to think they wouldn’t mangle the English language as they fought to get their tongues around it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was that mangling that gave us rile. Or hoss for horse. Or vays for vase.
Did say “mangle”? I mean “bend to their will and, in the process, add richness and variety”. And, when you get down to it, some of those pronunciations are more careful than the ones the rest of us use. You say vee-i-kill, you lazy dog, while those in the American south voice the h and say veer-hah-kill. It is they who deserve plaudits, not us.
Bending and twisting the language isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon. It happens everywhere, including in Britain, where, according to Wikipedia, accents can be roughly divided into Southern England, Northern England, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man, Ulster, Connacht/Leinster/Munster, and Irish Travellers. Within each of these categories, further sub-categories exist - many of them a source of fierce pride to those who reside within them.
A map of English dialects (not accents, but related). By Maunus at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47854636
What may make America unique, though, is that it lacks any strong version of Britain’s “received pronunciation”, the standard that was for many years the only acceptable way of speaking for anyone wishing to become a BBC announcer (or a monarch, for that matter).
That’s created a culture that relishes word play. It’s hard to imagine any other country inventing winningest to describe the most successful sports team in a competition, or my bad as an admission of fault. By not being all up tight about “proper” English, American English has gained the freedom to invent words and phrases the way a Catherine wheel throws off sparks. If many of them turn out to be lemons (another Americanism), so what? Anyone who creates things knows that much of what you come up with is bad - but that coming up with lots of ideas is also the best way to produce gems.
That’s one reason I can’t bring myself to criticise newcomers to English who struggle to master every one of its rules and conventions. Yes, doing so would make me more of an asshole than I already am. But equally, if a language is to stay vibrant and alive, what could be better for it than loads of people learning it as adults, mashing up bits of it along the way, and adding new words and phrases that native speakers would never have come up with by themselves?
Bits and specious
Speaking of Hordes, they were a tribe of nomads from what is now Western Turkey. English took on the word in the 1550s as a proper noun before finding it a useful way to describe any group of people it suspected of being unable to form an orderly queue.
At least seven movies have been named The Heist. They are:
The Heist (1970), a French-Italian crime drama
The Heist, aka Dollar$, a 1971 comedy
The Heist (1976, Mexico)
The Heist, aka The Squeeze, 1977
The Heist (1989 )
The Heist (2001)
The Heist (2008)
Then there’s Heist (2001), directed by David Mamet; Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, a 2011 documentary; Heist, a 2015 film directed by Scott Mann; and The Maiden Heist, a 2009 film starring Morgan Freeman (released as The Heist in the UK).
Now for some news from the world of evolutionary biology. Flatfish such as flounder swim on their sides, with both eyes on one side of their head. But they don’t start off that way - when young they swim vertically with their eyes in the standard locations. As they get older, one eye journeys across their head to join its partner and they assume their adult swimming position. In some species it’s the left eye that migrates, in others it’s the right, and in others it’s anyone’s guess which eye will pack its bags.
Quote of the week
That's American English for you: more roots than a mangrove swamp.
Roy Blount, Jr.