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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Language in Society
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
A new approach to sociolinguistics, introducing the study of the social meaning of English words over time, and offering an engaging and entertaining demonstration of lexical sociolinguistic analysis The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach explores the rise and fall of the social properties of words, charting ways in which they take on new social connotations. Written in an engaging narrative style, this entertaining text matches up sociolinguistic theory with social history and biography to discover which kind of people used what kind of word, where and when. Social factors such as class, age, race, region, gender, occupation, religion and criminality are discussed in British and American English. From familiar words such as popcorn, porridge, café, to less common words like burgoo, califont, etna, and phrases like kiss me quick, monkey parade, slap-bang shop, The Social Life of Words demonstrates some of the many ways a new word or phrase can develop social affiliations. Detailed yet accessible chapters cover key areas of historical sociolinguistics, including concepts such as social networks, communities of practice, indexicality and enregisterment, prototypes and stereotypes, polysemy, onomasiology, language regard, lexical appropriation, and more. The first book to take a focused look at lexis as a topic for sociolinguistic analysis, The Social Life of Words: * Introduces sociolinguistic theories and shows how they can be applied to the lexicon * Demonstrates how readers can apply sociolinguistic theory to their own analyses of words in English and other languages * Provides an engaging and amusing new look at many familiar words, inviting students to explore the sociolinguistic properties of words over time for themselves Part of Wiley Blackwell's acclaimed Language in Society series, The Social Life of Words is essential reading for upper-level undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and linguists working in sociolinguistics, lexical semantics, English lexicology, and the history and development of modern English.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgements
Permission Credits
Introduction: Geyser, Califont, Ascot
I.1. On Concepts, Approaches, Methods, and Theories
I.2. On Sources
I.3. Editorial Principles
References
1
Lexical Sociolinguistics and Social Networks
1.1. Introduction to Social Network Theory
1.2. Previous Scholarship
1.3. Swiss waiter
1.4. Sosison Vo Land
1.5. Summary
References
2
Lexical Sociolinguistics and Communities of Practice
2.1. Introduction to Communities of Practice
2.2. Previous Scholarship
2.3. Etna
2.4. Laugh!
2.5. Summary
References
3
The Sociolinguistics of Polysemy
3.1. Introduction to the Sociolinguistics of Polysemy
3.2. Previous Scholarship
3.3. Maroon
3.4. Popcorn
3.5. Summary
References
4
The Sociolinguistics of Onomasiology
4.1. Introduction to the Sociolinguistics of Onomasiology
4.2. Previous Scholarship
4.3. direction, address
4.4. Kiss Me Quick
4.5. Summary
References
5
The Sociolinguistics of Stereotypes
5.1. Introduction to the Sociolinguistics of Stereotypes
5.2. Previous Scholarship
5.3. GOSS
5.4. Goodwill
5.5. Porridge
5.6. Fido, Rover
5.7. Summary
References
6
Language Regard and Lexical Influencers
6.1. Introduction to Language Regard
6.2. Previous Scholarship
6.3. Café, Restaurant
6.4. Summary
References
7
Lexical Sociolinguistics, Indexicality and Enregisterment
7.1. Introduction to Indexicality and Enregisterment
7.2. Previous Scholarship
7.3. D
rage
7.4. Tinned Salmon
7.5. Rather!
7.6. Summary
References
8
Lexical Sociolinguistics and Spatial Spread
8.1. Introduction to Spatial Spread
8.2. Previous Scholarship
8.3. Monkey Parade, Shopping Parade
8.4. S
unnyside
8.5. Summary
References
9
Lexical Appropriation
9.1. Introduction to Lexical Appropriation
9.2. I
nto
9.3. B
aggonet
9.4. B
urgoo
9.5. Summary
Appendix 9.A
Appendix 9.B
References
10
Future Directions
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 1.1 London pyrotechnists’ seasonal partnerships as advertised in news...
Chapter 3
Table 3.1 Dating of first attestations in various senses.
Table 3.2 Some historic English words for
maize
with dates of first attesta...
Chapter 4
Table 4.1 Pejorative/affectionate members of the onomasiological set for th...
Table 4.2 Ratios of members of the onomasiological set for the concept ‘add...
Table 4.3 Members of an onomasiological set belonging to the concept ‘perfu...
Chapter 5
Table 5.1 Prototypical and stereotypical properties of some members of an o...
Table 5.2 Some historical members of the onomasiological set of the concept...
Table 5.3 Names given by English‐speaking owners to dogs, retrieved from lo...
Table 5.4 Names given by English‐speaking owners to enslaved people.
Chapter 6
Table 6.1 Members of the onomasiological set for the concept ‘place at whic...
Table 6.2 Number of court‐cases in
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online
databa...
Table 6.3 Number of court‐cases in
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online
databa...
Table 6.4 Words for ‘commercial eating place’.
Chapter 9
Table 9.1 Lexis appearing in advertisements for public burgoos held in Illi...
Table 9.2
BURGOO
variables in the onomasiological set for the concept ‘meat...
Table 9.3
BURGOO
noun and noun‐phrase variables in the onomasiological set ...
Table 9.4 Other variables in the onomasiological set for the concept ‘festi...
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Welles Patent Peripurist.
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Polysemous meanings of
awesome
, adj. according to age of speaker....
Figure 3.2 Polysemous meanings of
green
, adj. in present‐day English.
Figure 3.3 Polysemous meanings of
fast
, adj. in present‐day English.
Figure 3.4 Temporal sequence of polysemous developments of meanings of
slow
...
Figure 3.5 Polysemous meanings of
MAROON
in earlier twentieth‐century Americ...
Figure 3.6 Polysemous meanings of the colour‐term
MAROON
, adj. in American E...
Figure 3.7 Polysemous meanings of
corn
in British and American English.
Figure 3.8 Polysemous meanings of
POPCORN
in nineteenth‐century American Eng...
Plate 3.1 London Maizypop vendor.
Figure 3.9 Polysemous meanings of
POPCORN
‘snack’ sociolinguistically marked...
Chapter 5
Plate 5.1 Detail from Rocque (1746) of cribby islands east of Chancery Lane ...
Plate 5.2 Detail from Rocque (1746) of Moorfields and adjacent cribby island...
Plate 5.3 Detail from Rocque (1746) of the Bermudas, within the triangle for...
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Frequency percentages for ‘commercial eating place’ synonyms, 182...
Figure 6.2 Frequency percentages for variants meaning ‘commercial eating pla...
Figure 6.3 Number of court‐cases in
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online
databa...
Figure 6.4 Number of court‐cases in
The Old Bailey Proceedings Online
databa...
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Polysemous meanings of
BURGOO
.
Map 9.1 A plot of 62 tokens of the word
BURGOO
in senses ‘meat and vegetable...
Map 9.2 Detail of Map 9.1, showing the relationship of the Cumberland Gap (b...
Map 9.3 A plot of 62 tokens of the word
BURGOO
1843–1951 in
America’s Histor
...
Map 9.4 Detail of Map 9.3 showing the Ohio–Kentucky–Indiana–Illinois–Missour...
Map 9.5 Plot of locations of 30 community‐festival, church, and school burgo...
Guide
Introduction: geyser, califont, ascot
Cover Page
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Series Editor's Preface
Acknowledgements
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Index
WILEY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
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Language in Society
GENERAL EDITOR
David Hornsby, University of Kent
First launched in 1980, the Language in Society series is now established as one of the premiere series in the broad field of sociolinguistics, dialectology, and variation studies. The series includes both textbooks and monographs with past titles by such scholars as Ralph Fasold, Suzanne Romaine, Peter Trudgill, Lesley Milroy, Michael Stubbs, and others. Originally edited by Peter Trudgill, the series is now overseen by David Hornsby.
Language and Social Psychology
, edited by Howard Giles and Robert N. St Clair
Language and Social Networks (second edition)
, Lesley Milroy
The Ethnography of Communication (third edition)
, Muriel Saville-Troike
Discourse Analysis
, Michael Stubbs
The Sociolinguistics of Society: Introduction to Sociolinguistics
, Volume I, Ralph Fasold
The Sociolinguistics of Language: Introduction to Sociolinguistics
, Volume II, Ralph Fasold
The Language of Children and Adolescents: The Acquisition of Communicative Competence
, Suzanne Romaine
Language
, the Sexes and Society, Philip M. Smith
The Language of Advertising
, Torben Vestergaard and Kim Schroder
Dialects in Contact
, Peter Trudgill
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, Peter Muhlhausler
Observing and Analysing Natural Language: A Critical Account of Sociolinguistic Method
, Lesley Milroy
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, Suzanne Romaine
Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition
, Dennis R. Preston
Pronouns and People: The Linguistic Construction of Social and Personal Identity
, Peter Muhlhausler and Rom Harre
Politically Speaking
, John Wilson
The Language of the News Media
, Allan Bell
Language
, Society and the Elderly: Discourse, Identity and Ageing, Nikolas Coupland, Justine Coupland, and Howard Giles
Linguistic Variation and Change
, James Milroy
Principles of Linguistic Change
, Volume I: Internal Factors, William Labov
Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach (third edition)
, Ron Scollon, Suzanne Wong Scollon, and Rodney H. Jones
Sociolinguistic Theory: Language Variation and Its Social Significance (second edition)
, J. K. Chambers
Text and Corpus Analysis: Computer-Assisted Studies of Language and Culture
, Michael Stubbs
Anthropological Linguistics
, William Foley
American English: Dialects and Variation (third edition)
, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling
African American Vernacular English: Features
, Evolution, Educational Implications, John R. Rickford
Linguistic Variation as Social Practice: The Linguistic Construction of Identity in Belten High
, Penelope Eckert
The English History of African American English
, edited by Shana Poplack
Principles of Linguistic Change
, Volume II: Social Factors, William Labov
African American English in the Diaspora
, Shana Poplack and Sali Tagliamonte
The Development of African American English
, Walt Wolfram and Erik R. Thomas
Forensic Linguistics: An Introduction to Language in the Justice System
, John Gibbons
An Introduction to Contact Linguistics
, Donald Winford
Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation
, Lesley Milroy and Matthew Gordon
Text
, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis, H. G. Widdowson
Clinical Sociolinguistics
, Martin J. Ball
Conversation Analysis: An Introduction
, Jack Sidnell
Talk in Action: Interactions
, Identities, and Institutions, John Heritage and Steven Clayman
Principles of Linguistic Change
, Volume III: Cognitive and Cultural Factors, William Labov
Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change
, Observation, Interpretation, Sali A. Tagliamonte
Quotatives: New Trends and Sociolinguistic Implications
, Isabelle Buchstaller
Sociolinguistic Styles
, Juan M. Hernández-Campoy
The Social Life of Words
, Laura Wright
The Social Life of Words
A Historical Approach
Laura Wright
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Series Editor's Preface
It is a great pleasure to welcome The Social Life of Words: A Historical Approach, the forty‐third volume in Wiley Blackwell's Language in Society series.
In her earlier work as a historical scholar of English, Laura Wright has boldly unravelled the complexities of medieval texts which appear baffling to the outsider, and shed exciting new light on apparently intractable problems. In this volume, she shows similar boldness in tackling variation and change in the lexicon, an area from which sociolinguists have too often recoiled in the past, focusing instead on phonological or grammatical variables which lend themselves more readily to quantitative analysis. By painstakingly tracing the history of words through their associations with different social networks, classes, or occupational groups, she demonstrates how existing sociolinguistic models can fruitfully be applied from a diachronic perspective to this most problematic of linguistic domains, and marks out for future scholars an entirely new approach to language change.
When Language in Society was founded by Peter Trudgill over forty years ago, sociolinguistics was still in its infancy. Under his inspirational editorship, the series has helped establish the discipline and raised its profile, and its strength very much reflects Peter's own unique gifts as a scholar and communicator. While standing the test of time as ground‐breaking research monographs, the Language in Society volumes have retained a clarity and accessibility of style which makes them eminently usable in the seminar room. In taking over the role of editor, I am mindful of the need to preserve that legacy, and warmly commend this original, thought‐provoking and entertaining book as a very worthy addition to this excellent series.
David Hornsby
Acknowledgements
My special thanks to series editor David Hornsby for his incisive editing and generous encouragement, and to anonymous peer‐reviewers for their wise advice. I am grateful to Kathryn Allan, Nuria Calvo Cortes, Mina Gorji, Merja Kyto, Christopher Langmuir, Paula Schintu, and Louise Sylvester for sharing their expertise. My gratitude to the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, for contributing to publishing costs. At Blackwell/Wiley, I thank Rachel Greenberg, Liz Wingett, Anya Fielding, Sukhwinder Singh, and Yoganandh Rajadurai. This book could not have been written without the labors of the many people who since 1857 have been creating the Oxford English Dictionary, including the thousands of readers who continue to send in citations. I am indebted to everyone.
Permission Credits
The extract from Peter Nichols’s Born in the Gardens is with permission of Alan Brodie Representation Ltd. Quotations from the 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers © Gale, a part of Cengage, Inc., are reproduced by permission. Quotations from Tim Hitchcock, Robert Shoemaker, Clive Emsley, Sharon Howard, and Jamie McLaughlin, et al., The Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 1674–1913 (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 24 March 2012), accessed October 2021, are reproduced by permission. Quotations from The Times are credited to The Times/News Licensing. The quotation from the Auburn, New York, Police Department Mugshot Cabinet Cards, Cayuga County NYGenWeb Project, is reproduced by permission of cabinet card owner Kathy DeJoy‐Genkos and County Coordinator Bernard Corcoran. The extract from Wyndham Lewis’s Doom of Youth is by permission of The Wyndham Lewis Memorial Trust (a registered charity). Extracts from George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying and The Road to Wigan Pier are credited to Mariner https://www.hmhbooks.com/. A Song of Temperance Reform and the quotation from The Innocence of Father Brown are reproduced by permission of United Agents LLP on behalf of The Royal Literary Fund (G K Chesterton). The extract from Howard’s End is with permission of The Provost and Scholars of King’s College, Cambridge and the Society of Authors as the EM Forster Estate.
Introduction: Geyser, Califont, Ascot
This book starts with a bang. Here are some lines from a twentieth‐century play set in Bristol:
HEDLEY.
I’d enjoy nothing better than discussing ad infinitum the relative merits of British and American television but I’m dealing at the moment –
A loud explosion offstage.
What the hell –?
Makes for the door. QUEENIEhas jumped up.
MAURICE.
HEDLEY.
MAURICE.
HEDLEY.
I put you in a new immersion heater. Why are you letting her risk her life with that old geyser?
He goes off, calling:
Mum, are you all right?
(Nichols 1979 [2014]: 238/with permission of Bloomsbury)
Some quickfire play with the word geyser three times in five lines to convey the character of someone who is old and dotty – which only works if the audience knows about words for water‐heaters in late twentieth‐century British houses and what sort of person was likely to use which type. At this date there was a social gap between having a faulty old‐technology gas geyser and a brand‐new electric immersion heater. Neither term is commonly used in British English now, and although the Oxford English Dictionary explains what they were (OED geyser, n. 2. ‘The name given to an apparatus for rapidly heating water attached to a bath. Also for the heating of water for use in wash‐basins, sinks, etc.’, first attested 1878; OED immersion, n. C2 ‘a heater (usually electric) whose element may be immersed in the liquid to be heated; esp. one having a thermostatic control and designed to be fixed inside a domestic hot‐water cylinder’, first attested 1914), dictionaries do not explain the social dimension – what kind of person used these words, when and where. This kind of cultural knowledge is the domain of sociolinguistics: what sort of person says what to who, and also pragmatics: in what sort of social or cultural circumstance.
How this bifurcation in the social status of water‐heaters came about is as follows. Inventor, Patentee, and Manufacturer Benjamin Waddy Maughan (or Maugham) of 214 Goswell Road, London, advertised the ‘so‐called geyser, or patent invention for heating water speedily’ (The Times, 23 August 1870), although not all readers would have recognised that geysir was Icelandic for ‘gusher’, from Old Norse gøysa ‘to gush’, which became the name of a hot spring periodically hurling forth boiling water, nor would they have known how to say it aloud. Pronounced something like [ˈkeːis&ip.iscp;r&c.ringbl;] ‘kacer’ in Icelandic, the main eighteenth‐century British pronunciation of the fountain’s name had been [ˈgeizə(r)] ‘gazer’, followed by [ˈgaizə(r)] ‘guyzer’, and then later on, [ˈgi:zə(r)] ‘geezer’ (I have put the /r/ in brackets as it was still variable word‐finally in London English in 1870). Natural geysers are found in the English‐speaking world in America and New Zealand where the ‘guyser’ pronunciation still predominates.
Competition came from George Ewart & Son of the Euston Road (est. 1834) who lifted the word geyser from Maughan. Ewart & Son advertised their Royal geyser in 1895, and went on to market their Lightning geyser, their Elite geyser, their Brilliant geyser, and their Success and Victor geysers, covering the market‐appeal bases of heaven‐sent electricity, social aspiration, and warfare. Ewart & Son also sold their B pattern Califont, with cali‐ from the Latin adjective calidum ‘hot’ and ‐font alluding like geyser to gushing water. In the twentieth century, a third common term for a geyser was an Ascot. The Ascot Gas Water Heater Company was created by Dr Bernhards Fridmanis of Latvia in 1932 at 255, North Circular Road, Neasden, as an agency for the German Junkers brand. But in 1933, Hitler came to power and Bernhards Fridmanis changed the name of both himself, to Bernard Friedman, and that of his company. The placename Ascot had been associated with horseracing royalty since 1711 and Dr Friedman was neither the first nor the last to harness the considerable marketing force of a royal personage together with a fast‐running horse.
Here is George Ewart when his business was still in its infancy. He was working in the block of the Euston Road known at the time as Quickset Row, in workspaces created from the built‐over front‐gardens of the houses that faced the New Road (as the bypass was still known). It was crowded, witness the five firms registered at no. 5, with Benson, Logan & Co. making cement in the gap between two houses:
Quickset row, New rd. Fitzroy sq.
2 Adron Wm. & Charles, statuaries
5 Clothier Saml. statuary & mason
5 Libbis George, auctioneer
5 Milligan Wm. scagliola works
5 Morton James, brushmaker
5A Benson, Logan & Co. cement works
6 Dawkins Mrs. Hannah, dairy
8 Reeve Joseph, iron works
9 & 11, Gray John, organ builder
10 Pistell, William, statuary
14 Harris Edward, chair maker
15 Stamper Wm, zinc manufacturer
16 Drake Joseph, lath render
17 West Mrs. H. iron and wirework manufr
19 Ewart George, zinc worker
23 Marsh Thomas, statuary
21 Herring William, menagerie
(Post Office Directory1841: 211)
Scagliola was imitation marble. At no. 6, Mrs Hawkins ran a dairy, and at no. 21, William Herring’s trade card advertised ‘Dealer in all sorts of pheasants, fancy poultry, swans, water fowl, gold and silver fish, sporting and fancy dogs: menagerie, New Road, Near Regents Park, London, Late Brookes’, in reference to Joshua Brookes (1761–1833), zoologist, anatomist, and forerunner of seeing bad sanitation as the cause of cholera, whose menagerie was operative by 1776. Although George Ewart was initially crammed together with the iron and cement works, the statuary masons and all the animals, with traffic thundering up and down just a few feet distant, by 1884, he could afford a sustained advertising campaign. Over the autumn of that year, George Ewart & Son inserted near‐daily advertisements in the Standard and Morning Post, not laid out with the other ads but as a line inserted in the personal columns with no explanatory context whatsoever. By insinuating his word into this daily reality‐show, Ewart ensured that his disguised advertisements got read, rather than skipped over as advertisements usually are. For example:
A. P. to J. S. – Received. Don’t call or send without my special request; write only under cover: suspect unfriendly eyes. N. got copies alone. If to blame for misdirection your friend across the sea is dead. Greatly distressed about person in grey who is dying; never fully recovered. Send address. If meeting necessary will give country one.
FETCH SILVER RING. P. heard outside; poorly surrounded afraid; Come Boldly; Lodgee, Alone; Send Help sealed; mistefied South Road Daily; fine 11, 30, 8, often. – STILLIE NIGHT.
J. E. H., Derby, write home.
TO J *** P***** – Pray come home, or communicate with Mr. Mills or your solicitor.
I. H. E. – Have you seen the CALIFONT?
([1884]. Multiple Classified Ads. The Standard [16 October]: 1)
BOX. – Letter received a few weeks since. I forgive you, though you did not keep your promise. I am sure you do not know how badly I have been treated, nay, robbed, by M., whom I shall never forgive.
DAISY. – Write K***, 2, V. S. Any day, Two o’clock, Charing‐cross Station Waiting‐room; preferable to Park‐lane.
D. H. – The meeting is reported to have lasted only a few minutes. F. J. hopes that all is right, however, and longs to hear.
R. A. – A long communication from the London Committee shows that grounds for the anxiety felt have not existed, and it is desired that great satisfaction at this should be expressed. No despatch has arrived since the one written on Friday, the 11th. It is hoped that a brighter and happier view of the cause can now be taken? If you can send what can be considered ‘satisfactory instructions’, another Committee will be summoned after the 25th inst., and then dissolved for the winter months. A return of the summer days is anxiously longed for.
I. H. E. – Have you seen the CALIFONT?
([1884]. Multiple Classified Ads. The Standard [20 October]: 1)
Only in the New Year was it finally revealed that the califont was a gas water‐heater. These three brand names were dreamt up by working men in the ordinary environs of the Goswell, Euston, and North Circular roads but their wider lexical associations with a dramatic Icelandic thermal fountain, fascinating fraught love‐affairs and the glamour of racetrack‐going royalty resulted in a shift from brand‐name to common noun (proclaimed with a curse every time the pilot light went out – you had to summon up your courage when putting match to gas‐jet due to the frightful bang and burnt fingers that followed). Here is George Ewart’s word 140‐odd years after he invented it, half the world away in a report on the transmission of the coronavirus Covid‐19 in Cochabamba, Bolivia:
el varón temía haberse contagiado cuando fue arreglar un calefón a la casa de una mujer que llegó de Italia, epicentro de la enfermedad en Europa.
(2020). Sedes: pruebas. Los Tiempos (29 April)
‘the male feared he had been infected when he was fixing a water‐heater at the house of a woman who arrived from Italy, epicentre of the disease in Europe’.
CALIFONT became a generic noun for a gas water‐heater in New Zealand English, and in the Spanish of Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay. However, in British English, use of CALIFONT dwindled after the Second World War as the word became mainly restricted to advertisements for second‐hand goods, and by the later twentieth century all three words had become second‐order indexical, a concept discussed in Chapter 7, meaning that they had gained a widely recognised social property – and it was not a good one. Mere mention invoked shabbiness, useful for literary authors:
I took the transistor into the bathroom and gave the Ascot geyser a bang to get hot water running into the crummy bath with the brown stains.
(Yuill 1976: 96)
She thought she felt his eyes on her, but when she looked up he had gone and the bathroom door was closed. There was the boomy explosion of the califont and the usual drift of gas.
(Duggan 1967: 248)
Over the decades, GEYSER, CALIFONT, and ASCOT had become socially downgraded. By the end of the twentieth century, these kinds of water‐heaters had been superseded and the British Science Museum now contains specimens of all three (objects nos. 1958‐44, 1965‐140, Y1991.122.38). The words GEYSER, CALIFONT, and ASCOT in the sense ‘type of gas water‐heater’ in British English are largely now historic. However, the story does not end there, because in New Zealand, CALIFONT has had a recent upgrade due to the growing propensity for urban New Zealanders to build baches and cribs – weekend cabins – in remote beauty spots. CALIFONT has become aligned there with the type of water‐heater suitable for very small buildings.
I.1. On Concepts, Approaches, Methods, and Theories
This is lexical sociolinguistics: the circumstances in which a word came into being, how and where it spread, who used it, and when and how those circumstances changed. Until recently such questions could not be answered. Tracing the social trajectories over time of GEYSER, CALIFONT, ASCOT would not have been possible without access to databases of newspaper archives, literature, business companies, Post Office directories, and other electronically searchable historic sources, so that sociolinguistics as an academic discipline in the pre‐internet age accordingly focussed on phonological, morphological, and syntactic variables at the expense of the wordstock. Seminal studies such as Labov (1966) on the social distribution of post‐vocalic /r/ in New York, or Trudgill (1974) on the social distribution of word‐final /ŋ/ in Norwich, depended on sociolinguists’ capacity to locate and record samples of the target community’s speech, whereas the amount of text necessary to track the development of a word over time is of a different order of magnitude. Historical sociolinguistics as a discipline really only consolidated in 1991 with the release of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, the first multi‐genre diachronic corpus, consisting of samples from Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, but single corpora are usually insufficient for lexical sociolinguistics. The more historic text uploaded to the internet, the more viable the hunt becomes, which explains why this book is the first systematic attempt at applying sociolinguistic approaches developed over the last half‐century to the lexicon.
Historical sociolinguists cannot avail themselves of methods used by linguists investigating present‐day vocabulary such as selecting informants, recording their conversation, asking them questions about their social background, observing the situations in which they use their wordstock, eliciting speakers’ opinions about words, and searching electronic corpora of recently gathered spoken English annotated with metadata about speakers’ social affiliations, such as gender, region, age, and social class. Historical sociolinguists wanting to establish sociolinguistic qualities of specific words at specific times and places do not have the luxury of informants to quiz, and the word they wish to investigate might not occur frequently enough to be included in electronic corpora. They have to make the best of whatever text is available, and in this book, I draw on methods established by historians and geographers as well as linguists. To answer who/when/where questions, all kinds of texts merit scrutiny, whether of the sort usually studied by linguists such as newspapers, literature, private letters, diaries, and courtroom testimonies, or the sort less studied: names on perfume bottles, technical manuals, music‐hall lyrics, names of dogs and ponies. The social contexts of writers are recreated by drawing up biographies and researching their locations: an overlap of lexicography, sociolinguistics, prosopography, and historical geography. Prosopography is a term used by historians for collecting together all the information available about a group of people under study when biographical data on individuals is scant. Many of the biographies collected here are derived from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, a source sufficiently detailed as to enable assessment of a speaker’s social class. This is similar to the prosopographical approach taken by Bergs and Hernández Campoy with regard to recreating the social network of the fifteenth‐century Paston family and their associates in Norfolk (Bergs 2000; Hernández Campoy 2020); the fifteenth‐century Stonor family and their associates in Oxfordshire (Conde Silvestre 2020), and the network of Mercer’s Livery Company masters and apprentices in fifteenth‐century London (Alcolado Carnicero 2013), but chasing their words rather than their phonemes, morphemes, syntax, or spellings, and paying special attention to types of social space, their social aspirations, and their authority constraints (for authority constraint, see Section 8.1). Hernández Campoy and Conde Silvestre (2005: 102–103) make the point that linguistic change occurs via individuals communicating over a course of time, under the conditions allowed by the social structures of the individuals’ societies, in a set of geographic spaces. They survey various models of diffusion through space and consider the implications for linguistic innovation, drawing the conclusion that ‘innovations normally arise in large, heavily populated areas that have historically been powerful socioeconomic and cultural centres, and spread out from there’ (Hernández Campoy and Conde Silvestre 2005: 108). For the lexical sociolinguist, an important part of that sentence is the word ‘economic’. It is not possible to survey the history of the wordstock of English over the last three centuries without considering words generated by industry and commerce. Brand names and proper names are not the usual focus of lexicographers but speakers use them like they do any other word, and they too can acquire and lose sociolinguistic properties over time.
Historical lexical sociolinguistic analysis necessitates borrowing concepts and approaches from the linguistic subfields of semantics, cognitive semantics, pragmatics, lexicography, dialectology, and stylistics, and viewing them from a social angle. On the one hand, lexical sociolinguistic investigation is like any other type of sociolinguistic enquiry: the practice of analysing variables in a data set in order to discover their affiliations of usage according to social parameters. On the other, words are unlike other linguistic features in several ways. They are not necessarily spread by face‐to‐face encounters as they can be transmitted over very great spatial or time‐distances via writing: older media such as stone, parchment, birch‐bark, reed, wax‐tablets, wax‐cylinders, and celluloid; or newer media such as films, television, games, and the internet. Words can emanate from genres such as song‐lyrics, playscripts, and advertisements as well as from spontaneous conversation. On occasion, originators and influencers can be identified. As we have seen with CALIFONT, words can be abandoned by one social group and picked up by another, in a new social context with new social connotations. Lexical sociolinguistics undoes the concept of languages, as words travel from language to language or out from small groups into large ones, or conversely as they retreat and become dialectally or sociolinguistically restricted over time and space. Commerce, which is almost a human universal, trades words as well as goods around the globe: for example, the German word Adidas can be seen in non‐German‐speaking localities far distant from Germany, although its social connotations will vary from group to group.
The focus on structure in linguistics has led to modularity, and to a series of dichotomies that have long allowed linguists to make language sit sufficiently still so as to allow them to study its structure: synchrony vs. diachrony, langue vs. parole, cognitive vs. social, denotative vs. connotative. But language does not sit still. Social indexicality permeates the linguistic system because language exists to articulate social practice, and social practice is change.
(Eckert 2019: 769)
Flux is a linguistic universal. As words come and go, certain speakers acquire them before others do, or abandon them earliest. As a word, or a new meaning of a word, or a new soundshape of a word enters a language, it always does so in the language of a speaker anchored in space, time, and in a social situation, talking to another person similarly sited. For a new word or pronunciation to spread, the innovation has to move from the initial group of similarly sited speakers to speakers in other places and other social situations. The premise of this book is that all word‐change has the potential to become sociolinguistically marked – that is, to gain the quality of being associated with the kind of person who first or typically used it, or went on to use it, or continued to use it after everyone else had dropped it – and that these sociolinguistic qualities can on occasion be identified.
The work of certain linguists repeats across these chapters: David Trotter (2003) on international words, Peter Trudgill (2010) on how adults and children have affected language development in different ways, and Penelope Eckert (2000, 2008, 2012, 2019) on how group‐membership equates with group‐talk. Eckert has shown that acts of belonging are continually negotiated and renegotiated through speech. Social groups, such as for example friends and relations who talk while they knit, or friendship‐groups of teenage teddy‐boys in the 1950s, not only share (or shared) a common lexicon but that use of it is (or was) obligatory. You cannot be an English‐speaking knitter of any competency without understanding ‘knit one, purl one’ – the words ‘knit one, purl one’ conveying digital expertise built up and passed from generation to generation over unknowable millenia. You would have been a marginal mid‐fifties ted had you been unable to correctly interpret and produce lexemes Brylcreem, duck’s arse, or Woodbines. Woodbines were one of the rougher, cheaper brands of cigarettes, becoming thereby associated with the rougher type of society. This is cultural knowledge of a stereotypical sort, examined in Chapter 5 (stereotypical knowledge is what the adult speaker knows about a word over and above its semantic content). Children learned that Woodbines were a type of cigarette but older speakers also knew that they were predominantly smoked by working‐class men. This is the sort of knowledge that accrues with age. What adults also know is that stereotypes are a generalisation which may not hold in any given circumstance: Princess Alice of Battenberg (the mother of Prince Philip, who was married to Queen Elizabeth II) is reputed to have smoked Woodbines. She was also a nun.
Sociolinguistics is concerned with social groupings that are salient in a given culture at a given point in time and the value in which that society holds them; pragmatics concerns the wider context of the culture that they operate in. Here is a definition of culture, not from a linguist but a forensic scientist:
Culture in this context is the personality of an organisation, institution or occupation. And like real personalities, it varies enormously; some cultures are relaxed, some cooperative, some like to dominate. Imagine the differences between a theatre group and a law firm, or a primary school and a factory. Culture is largely intangible; you sense it more than you see it, but it can be observed in the structure of an organisation, how power is wielded, and in rituals, procedures, symbols and language.
(Fraser 2020: 303)
Not only is culture evasive and constantly shifting; words typical of or conveying a culture can also elude simple definition. Su (2008) investigated the meaning and usage of the word qizhi ‘refined disposition’ in present‐day Taiwanese and Mandarin. Although a native speaker, a teenaged Su queried the meaning of qizhi in her diary, and later on in her research established that informants usually applied qizhi to females rather than males, and to Mandarin (the higher social variety in Taiwan) rather than Taiwanese‐accented Mandarin or Taiwanese (the lower social varieties – although when commenting on Taiwanese’s lack of qizhi, several informants took pains to point out its morphological richness, so the evaluation was not uncomplicated). At an annual social event, members were asked to nominate candidates for titles such as Mr/Ms Hardworking, Mr/Ms Qizhi, Mr/Ms Humorous, and whilst genders were equally distributed for most prizes, the contenders for the prize of Mr/Ms Qizhi were overwhelmingly women. Su found that informants used the word qizhi in the context of concepts of refinement, elegance, femininity, politeness, high socioeconomic status, education, and also in introspections about Taiwaneseness versus Chineseness. In a more local context, positive qizhi correlated with social poise, appreciation of cultural activities and cosmopolitan experiences, along with avoidance of profanity, avoidance of a Taiwanese accent when speaking Mandarin, and the correct spelling of English on restaurant menus. The word qizhi embodies the history and values of its culture, but these are not fixed entities. Su concludes that possession of qizhi is a form of cultural capital, but one that is particularly difficult for women to negotiate in the twenty‐first century as societal values veer from traditional, conservative, and Taiwanese to modern and international. In Chapter 4, the changing fortunes of genteel and DIRECTION ‘address’ are tracked from positive, to negative, to abandonment altogether (consider whether you self‐identify as genteel) as social contexts shifted from the aristocracy to their servants.
The slipperiness of words is not limited to shift of meaning according to user; physical location and whether spoken over land or water can also make a difference. David Trotter, the Chief Editor of the Anglo‐Norman Dictionary, made the point that in the case of international lexemes:
it is often impossible to attribute the lexis of maritime affairs with certainty to any of the irresponsibly promiscuous and apparently interchangeable languages used in Mediterranean ports from east to west […] It is impossible to study this material without reaching the inescapable confusion that the modern urge to impose order and clarity on this mêlée of forms and languages is about as likely to succeed (and about as safe) as an attempt to determine the precise racial origins of the denizens of Genoa’s waterfront on a rowdy Saturday night.
(Trotter 2003: 22)
Trotter was referring here to medieval words related to ships and shipping but the same is true of all periods, and his joyful verdict of irresponsible promiscuity also applies to the words for the goods ships bring. Durkin (2020) questions:
how far less common content vocabulary may have been demarcated into different ‘languages’ at all; if the word for ‘cinnamon’ in Anglo‐Norman is cinamome (or cinamone, etc.), in Middle English is cinamome (with similar spelling variants), and in Latin is cinnamōmum, the question of ‘translation’ from one language to another is reduced to knowledge of the usual grammatical behaviour of the identical word stem in each language.
(Durkin 2020: 352, see also Tiddeman 2020)
A point to bear in mind when investigating the social history of words is the unknowable multilingual environments of historical sea voyages, as before the invention of modern technology and means of transport, words travelled by sea. Section 8.2 summarises Calvo Cortés’s (2014) analysis of words aboard, ahead, and aloof which originated as maritime spatial perceptions, only subsequently moving from ship to shore. Specific vocabulary has long been used on board ship, and Section 9.4 considers the journey of the word BURGOO from the languages of the Middle East to Britain to North America across the Mediterranean, English Channel, and North Atlantic, with consequent shift in meaning on crossing the gangplank. BURGOO had one meaning before leaving the dockside, another meaning onboard ship, and a third meaning in the New World, as speakers underwent different sorts of experiences along the way. In the parts of North America in which it survives, BURGOO has now taken on a new sociolinguistic role and its Middle Eastern and maritime senses are forgotten: the kinds of physical space in which words are used affects their meanings, both sociolinguistic and semantic.
As well as questioning the validity of the concept of separate languages, investigating the sociolinguistic properties of word‐histories necessitates consideration of what constitutes a sociolinguistic category, and what is more a matter of style or register. Sociolinguists usually work with the concepts of region, social class, gender, age, and race as variables. However, these are not hard and fast boundaries, as for example Speaker A might grow up in a family of felons with social links to other criminal families collectively forming a close‐knit criminal social milieu, so that ‘criminality’ would be a valid social variable for Speaker A, whereas non‐criminal Speaker B might have decided to repeat a word enregistered as typical of criminals, such as rhino or prigg (Section 7.2) as a matter of style. Speaker C may have spent her whole life as a devout member of a sect, so that ‘religion’ would be a social variable for Speaker C. This was true of members of the mid‐nineteenth‐century Sandemanian/Swedenborgian network I investigated in Wright (2020) who named their houses SUNNYSIDE, a name which had the social property of signalling to other Nonconformist insiders that a Nonconformist lived there, as however socially important a Sandemanian or Swedenborgian became – and some were extremely rich, influential industrialists, factory owners, and businessmen – the church and its ritual requirements took precedence in their lives. Yet on getting up to preach in front of the Lord’s Table (not the altar, because that synonym belonged to another, rival, community of practice, the Church of England), switching into preaching rhetoric would have been a matter of style. I have treated late Victorian/Edwardian flirting teens as a social group in Section 8.3 because collectively their antisocial behaviour generated the term MONKEY PARADE, but flirtatious talk itself is a type of register. Lexicographers and other linguists usually treat names as a separate part of speech, but I have treated perfume brand‐names as hyponyms of various themes in Section 4.4 as it is hard to imagine how non‐chemists could talk about perfume without explicitly mentioning their names – ‘I wear/buy/love/can’t stand Chanel No. 5’ cannot be expressed generically. In the 1920s, the social significance of the lexeme Chanel No. 5 was ‘wealth’ as the ingredients of the original formula were expensive. Victorian perfume‐producers targeted specific social groups and they did this through language, not smell.
Another peculiarity of the lexicon involves the difference between language learnt in childhood and language learnt in adulthood. Peter Trudgill has shown that long‐term co‐territorial contact involving child‐language bilingualism leads to increased linguistic complexity, but language contact in adulthood leads to simplification (Trudgill 2011: 318). Applying this age‐division to words learnt in infancy versus words learnt in adulthood, children acquire all the words they hear spoken around them, but adults can, to some extent at least, pick and choose whether or not to borrow words from another group. In Chapter 9, the term lexical appropriation is applied to conscious borrowing in adulthood for reasons of participating in the desirable social trait possessed by the donor group, demonstrated by preposition INTO as used by twentieth‐century American West Coast rock musicians. Another kind of adoption in adulthood of words typical of a social group leads to language regard, the topic of Chapter 6, where the newly borrowed term ousts the older ones for the same concept. New borrowings CAFÉ and RESTAURANT are shown to have had the effect of elbowing out older synonyms ORDINARY, SLAP-BANG SHOP, and ALAMODE BEEFHOUSE.
I.2. On Sources
Synchronic sociolinguistic enquiry ranges in scope from investigating the speechways of numerous informants such as the populace of a group of cities, to the speechways of a few, such as the members of a single family. In both cases, representativeness is of concern, and historical data is no different. In these pages, searches range from very large data sets like Google Books (more than forty million titles scanned by 2019), large general corpora of text‐types such as the British Library newspaper archive or The Old Bailey Proceedings Online and book‐collections such as Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, large crowdsourced repositories such as the Oxford English Dictionary, to smaller corpora and databases built by linguists and others for specific purposes such as the Works of Dickens database or The Trans‐Atlantic Slave Trade Database, to the small database of around three hundred medieval building names I assembled in order to investigate the distribution and sociolinguistic implications at various points in time of the North British farm‐name SUNNYSIDE (Section 8.4). At the smaller end of the scale, no lexeme is too rare to merit sociolinguistic enquiry. In Sections 2.4 and 7.5, neither LAUGH! nor RATHER! are amenable to corpus‐searching due to their low frequency in comparison to other polysemous uses (they are written here with an exclamation mark in order to distinguish them from other senses, but they are not usually distinguished typographically in print). Data may be scarce but historic and present‐day usage can be aligned, revealing sociolinguistic allegiances and shifts, as it is a feature of the human brain that very low‐frequency words transmit from generation to generation, even though speakers rarely hear or produce them over their lifespan.
Many editorial decisions go into corpus‐building, such as whether to normalise spelling in older texts, or include draft variants in more modern ones. If a text is published, its content may have been adapted to the publishers’ house‐style, smoothing out underlying authorial variation, or altered silently in numerous ways by editors. If a corpus has been annotated, certain types of search will be possible, others not. Some search‐functions return much rogue data which then needs to be gleaned and cleaned. Even dedicated corpora can contain data of diverse sorts: Fitzmaurice (2002), a study of seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century correspondence from a historical pragmatic angle, warns that the epistolary genre is internally far more complex than the label would suggest. The Corpus of Early English Correspondence led by Terttu Nevalainen and her team is a family of corpora created between 1993 and 2006 covering letters written between 1402 and 1800 by royalty, nobility, gentry, clergy, professionals, merchants, and others, which has generated much sociolinguistic inquiry. For example, Palmer (2013) found that within the fifteenth‐ and sixteenth‐century portions, men led women in the use of suffixes ‐cion and ‐ment, whereas women led men in the use of ‐ity. This kind of finding is a spur to further research, representative of the texts selected for the corpus but potentially open to challenge: ‘It is entirely possible that overall trends in the use of certain derivatives might differ markedly in a different corpus – certainly if different registers are investigated’ (Palmer 2013: 19). As a generalisation, corpus‐searches reveal trends and shifts rather than facts per se, as no corpus can capture all the words of a language, and many corpora are augmented from time to time, potentially changing the picture. All this means that the shifts and trends identified in these pages remain at the level of hypothesis. More historic data may change the view.
By and large, present‐day sociolinguistic enquiry into phonological, morphological, and syntactical variables is quantitative, and historical sociolinguistic surveys usually attempt to replicate this, with caveats pertaining to the limitations of data, and snapshots taken at specific points in time to illustrate change in progress. Words are less amenable to this kind of quantification so that alternative kinds of verification have to be substituted, as words can occur in very low frequencies. A tool here is collocation, both linguistic and exophoric (meaning outside the text). If a historic word only collocates between certain dates with regional rural dialect terms in literature (BAGGONET), or with expensive West End gift‐shops and high‐society wedding‐presents in real life (ETNA), or predominantly with the eye‐colour of people of sub‐Saharan heritage as opposed to other brown‐eyed peoples at the same place and time (MAROON), then concomitant deductions can be drawn about correlations with region, class, and race in those societies. Absence of collocation may be salient: eighteenth‐century slaves and dogs were named FIDO and ROVER but freeborn children were not. In each case, sociolinguistic meaning is specific in time and place to the relevant social group and not applicable to others, just as the word Adidas connoted either ‘type of highly desirable shoe I’m proud to wear’ or ‘despicable type of shoe I would not be seen dead in’ to two different groups of mid‐twentieth‐century speakers in the small town of Herzogenaurach, Germany. Adolf Dassler’s brother was Rudolph Dassler, Adolf’s arch‐rival and originator of the Pumabrand. Both firms are still headquartered in Herzogenaurach and many of the townspeople worked in the factories, so that allegiance to Adidas or Puma were social variables in Herzogenaurach along with class, age, and gender. Metonyms (the part standing for the whole) can represent entire social groups, with TINNED SALMON and GOSS used dismissively by non‐lower‐class speakers to invoke people lower down the social scale, and MONKEY PARADE coined to deride the mating ritual of lower‐middle/lower‐class teenagers. Another tool for determining sociolinguistic affiliation is text‐type and genre. Click, LAUGH! and KISS ME QUICK all featured in music‐hall songs aimed at entertaining the lower classes; SWISS WAITER featured in lighthearted periodical and newspaper squibs. A comparison with the words of real‐life Swiss waiters as they came up before the court at the Old Bailey provides the key to the caricature. Context is crucial for interpreting words, synchronically and diachronically, semantically and socially. How much context is necessary will vary depending on the comparanda available, but the principle remains the same whether querying an inscription on a stone tablet from the fifth century or the name of a late nineteenth‐century device for making tea: holding the parameters of time and place steady: with which other words did this word collocate, in which text‐types?
I.3. Editorial Principles
The book is arranged into 10 chapters, 9 dealing with a different theoretical, conceptual, or methodological approach: social network theory, communities of practice, polysemy, onomasiology, prototypes and stereotypes, language regard, indexicality and enregisterment, various types of social space, and lexical appropriation; and the 10th considering future directions for lexical sociolinguistics. Words treated as headwords appear in small capitals, other words discussed appear in italics. Underlinings in quotations draw attention to the word under discussion. Small capitals are also used when discussing metaphors, as per convention, and they are retained in extracts from newspapers. Chapters follow the blueprint:
definition and description of theory, concept, method, or approach
relevant previous work in the field: scholars who introduced the theory or concept, or used it with regard to either sociolinguistics or lexis
application to the historical sociolinguistic development of specific words
summary
Sociolinguistic marking or weighting – a word’s accrual of the social properties pertaining to the set of people who used it at a given time and place – signals many kinds of societal perceptions and preoccupations, but the main variables treated here are class, age, race, region, gender, and religion in British and American English. Upper/upper‐middle class affiliation is examined in the use of ETNA, RATHER!,cracked ice; central class affiliation is examined in the use of DRAGE, GOSS,click, shopping parade; and lower‐class affiliation in the use of LAUGH!, DIRECTION,coffee‐house, slap‐bang, ordinary, alamode beefhouse, and TINNED SALMON. Age was a salient variable in the sociolinguistic interpretation of GEYSER and would have been a salient variable at some point in the historic pub name Black Boy (Chapter 10). Race and slavery is examined in the use of the word MAROON and names FIDO and ROVER; rurality in polysemous meanings of the word POPCORN, and Nonconformist Christianity in neat‐bound, PORRIDGE, SUNNYSIDE, and vegetarian. Gendered behaviour and flirting were relevant to the sociolinguistic properties of KISS ME QUICK and MONKEY PARADE, humour to SWISS WAITER and BAGGONET, criminality to GOODWILL,cribby isles, and PORRIDGE. Glamour was bestowed by the French language on international words CAFÉ and RESTAURANT, and also to SOSISON VO LAND (a type of eighteenth‐century London firework, never translated as ‘flying sausage’ because said glamour would have fizzled out), and by Californian hipsters on the preposition INTO. Nine research questions are posed and addressed:
in a historical social network, can multiplex strong‐ties be identified, causing language maintenance?
can it be established that a given word was used by a historic community of practice, and if so, were any social properties typical of it, so that these social properties became transferred from the community of practice to the word?
did the various meanings of a polysemous word mean different things to different people and if so, what social characteristics did those people have in common?
were lexical members of an onomasiological set used differently by different social groups?
can a socially stereotypical meaning be identified over and above a word’s historical prototypical meanings?
where an onomasiological set underwent reduction, can an influencer be identified?
if a historical word became stereotypically salient, can the stages of indexicality and enregisterment be identified in order to show how that saliency came about?
how have the realities and perceptions of various types of space impacted on vocabulary in the past?
can lexical appropriation be identified in historical texts and if so, what was its purpose?
This book started with a word originating in the 1880s in a repurposed front garden in the Euston Road in London, England, recently recorded in a house in present‐day Cochabamba, Bolivia, having passed innumerable times via chains of innumerable conversations across seas and across languages. Every one of those conversations occurred between two people negotiating a social relationship, so it is no surprise that social relationships should end up encoded in words. The advent of large amounts of searchable historic text means that sociolinguists can now investigate the lexicon. Seeking words’ social history results in unexpected directions, shifts and detours in physical, social, and perceived space, uncovering the social constraints and assumptions that different societies lived under. Words in use today are contingent on how speakers used them in the past, with their activities, inventions, attitudes, and experiences influencing their meanings. Studying the social histories of words shows how we, as speakers of English, got here, from the names we choose for our houses and dogs to the foodstuffs we consume and the establishments that sell them to the colour‐terms we use to describe the world around us. Words about the activities of going shopping, eating, laughing, stealing, dressing up, flirting, singing, and insulting recur in these pages because that is what people in the past talked about. We talk about them still.
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