From ‘gazump’ to ‘gobsmack’, ‘squiffy’ to ‘snog’, British English is full of words that sound like barmy balderdash. Christine Ro explains why.
That sentence may not sound serious. But the situation it describes is. Translated into standard English, it would be something like “That idiot dared to offer more money for the house after my offer already had been accepted; I'm shocked by this tricky situation full of nonsense that's gone awry!”
Shakespeare, this isn’t. The first sentence sounds so peculiar to certain ears not just because of the mangling of parts of speech. It’s also full of words, with origins ranging from the 1700s to the 1980s, that have two qualities in common: they’re all rather silly-sounding, and they’re all British English.
British English is full of whimsical terms like these. They reflect the UK’s cultural appreciation of wit, a long tradition of literary inventiveness – and Britain’s fluctuating global influence over the centuries.
These types of coinages aren’t unique to English, let alone British English. But the relative simplicity of English words may lend itself to this kind of play, says Anatoly Liberman, professor of languages at the University of Minnesota and an etymology blogger for Oxford University Press. “English is largely a monosyllabic language (‘come’, ‘go’, ‘take’, ‘big’, ‘laugh’, and so forth),” he says. “This makes such games easy.
Especially characteristic of these formations in British English is the way they reflect a certain kind of humour. Pop anthropologist Kate Fox has written about the English “ban on earnestness” (an aversion to taking things too seriously) and the pervasiveness of humour in social interaction. This humour is of a particular kind: self-deprecating and given to understatement and irony.
It’s unsurprising that this national trait has made its way into the language. Romantic activities (like ‘snog’ and ‘shag’) are spoken of in childish terms. Classic dishes are made to sound deliberately unappetising (‘dead man’s arm’ and ‘Eton mess’ – respectively, a rolled cake filled with jam and a dessert combining meringue, strawberries and cream. And there’s a healthy appetite for nonsensical ambiguity. To take just one example, ‘ladybird’ is a bugbear of perplexed Americans who wonder – although their version of the word is only slightly more sensible – “Why ladybird? Why not ladybug?”
This hints at a gleeful willingness in British English to dispense with literal meaning. Food, for instance, is a rich vein of words like this. ‘Fairy cake’, ‘toad in the hole’, and ‘jacket potato’ have nothing to do with fairies, toads and jackets.
Child’s play
There’s a long tradition in British English of inventing words just for the fun of it. Eminent linguist David Crystal writes in The Story of English in 100 Words that ‘a gaggle of geese’, ‘an unkindness’ of ravens’, and other collective nouns of this ilk were created in the 15th Century. He speculates that this was done deliberately for comic effect, giving rise to ‘a superfluity of nuns’ (pun intended).
It’s unsurprising that this national trait has made its way into the language. Romantic activities (like ‘snog’ and ‘shag’) are spoken of in childish terms. Classic dishes are made to sound deliberately unappetising (‘dead man’s arm’ and ‘Eton mess’ – respectively, a rolled cake filled with jam and a dessert combining meringue, strawberries and cream. And there’s a healthy appetite for nonsensical ambiguity. To take just one example, ‘ladybird’ is a bugbear of perplexed Americans who wonder – although their version of the word is only slightly more sensible – “Why ladybird? Why not ladybug?”
This hints at a gleeful willingness in British English to dispense with literal meaning. Food, for instance, is a rich vein of words like this. ‘Fairy cake’, ‘toad in the hole’, and ‘jacket potato’ have nothing to do with fairies, toads and jackets.
Read more at:
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170619-why-british-english-is-full-of-silly-sounding-words