500 YEARS of NEW WORDS to My Two Wonderful Children, Jeffrey and Juliana 500 YEARS of NEW WORDS by BILL SHERK

500 YEARS OF NEW WORDS To my two wonderful children, Jeffrey and Juliana 500 YEARS OF NEW WORDS BY BILL SHERK The Dundurn Group Toronto Copyright © Bill Sherk 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or trans- mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from Access Copyright. Publisher: Anthony Hawke Copy-Editor: Lloyd Davis Design: Andrew Roberts Printer: Transcontinental Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Sherk, Bill, 1942- 500 years of new words : the fascinating story of how, when, and why hundreds of your favourite words first entered the English language / Bill Sherk. ISBN 1-55002-525-2 1. English language--Etymology. 2. English language--History. I. Title. II. Title: Five hundred years of new words. PE1574.S53 2004 422 C2004-905468-6 1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04 We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions. J. Kirk Howard, President Printed and bound in Canada Printed on recycled paper www.dundurn.com Dundurn Press Gazelle Book Services Limited Dundurn Press 8 Market Street White Cross Mills 2250 Military Road Suite 200 Hightown, Lancaster, England Tonawanda, NY Toronto, Ontario, Canada LA1 4X5 U.S.A. 14150 M5E 1M6 500 YEARS OF NEW WORDS TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword 9 The 1500s 11 The 1600s 73 The 1700s 135 The 1800s 199 The 1900s andBeyond 255 OREWORD Fby Dr. Frederick Sweet, Ph.D. Bill Sherk and I share a mutual affliction. We are both incurable logophiles. In my case, this affliction carried me in the direction of what are generally known as the Dead Languages, Greek and Latin (I will grant that they are dead if others will grant that they remain remarkably vital). By contrast, Bill, a neighbour of mine in North Toronto, has discovered the rewards to be had in creating brand new words. If you haven’t yet read Bill’s splendid Brave New Words or its sequel More Brave New Words — in which you will be exposed to such creative neologisms as “accident-dent-dent-dent” (a chain-reaction car crash) or “parsipetrolambulist” (a person who walks in order to conserve gasoline) — you really should hunt up these volumes wherever they are to be found and settle back for a truly satisfying read. And while you’re at it, try to find the books in which Bill indulges his second great love — his long-standing passion for old cars: The Way We Drove: Toronto’s Love Affair with the Automobile, 1893–1957 and 60 Years Behind the Wheel: The Cars We Drove in Canada, 1900–1960. In the present volume, which is a welcome update of an earlier edition, Bill has had the inspired idea of arranging new words chronologically over the past five centuries. He thus, in one swell foop, gives us both an insight into the origins of words and also an appreciation of the times that produced them. Never has history (Bill’s academic discipline) been so painless or so illuminating. Open this book and open your mind to a reading and learning experience that will leave you richly satisfied and greatly entertained. 9 The1500s By the year 1500, England was beginning to shake itself loose from the Middle Ages. For fifteen years the strong-willed Henry VII had been sitting on a throne he took by force from Richard III in the Battle of Bosworth Field (“A horse! A horse! — My kingdom for a horse!”), and although old-timers still spoke of the Wars of the Roses, the English people were beginning to enjoy the blessings of peace, order and good government. William Caxton had set up the first printing press on English soil in 1476, and a multitude of books poured forth from it, including the Bible. In 1497 Henry VII commissioned John Cabot to sail to the unknown lands across the Atlantic, and Cabot returned to tell about a “newe founde land.” Meanwhile, around the royal court, Henry’s four children — two boys and two girls — were growing up. By 1503 one son would be dead, but the other would survive to become the most famous and the most feared of all English kings — Henry VIII. By the year 1600, the people of England could look back on a century of turmoil, conflict, adventure and change. To obtain a divorce from his first wife, the strong-willed Henry VIII had broken all ties with the Roman Catholic Church and established a new Church of England with himself as Supreme Head. When Sir Thomas More refused to accept Henry as his spiritual leader, the king had his head chopped off (he also beheaded two of his six wives on a charge, real or fabricated, of adultery). During the brief reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI (1547–1553), England drifted toward the Protestant faith. During the equally brief reign of his sister, Queen Mary (1553–1558), three hundred Protestants were 11 BILL SHERK burned at the stake as Mary tried to re-establish the Roman Catholic Church in England. The country was heading for civil war. In 1558 Princess Elizabeth became queen and calmed the troubled waters of religion with her new Anglican Church, a compromise solution that blended Catholic and Protestant faith and doctrine. A new English Bible and Book of Common Prayer gave the English people a heightened sense of pride in the majesty of their mother tongue, a majesty that reached full flower during the Elizabethan Age with Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, and the other poets and playwrights who drew their inspiration from the exciting times in which they lived. Francis Drake had returned home in 1580 from his thirty-five-month voyage around the world, a feat comparable to English-speaking astronauts landing on the moon in a future age of exploration. Eight years after Drake’s epic voyage, English ships and guns (and favourable winds) helped to defeat the “invincible Armada” in the English Channel, a naval victory that paved the way for the growth of English sea power in the New World. The forces and events that changed England and the English people during the sixteenth century are reflected in the English language itself. Thanks to the Renaissance of classical learning that began in Italy in the 1400s, a multitude of new words poured into English from Latin and Greek, including drama, sincere, peninsula, circus, satellite, democracy, stigma and catapult. Thanks to the religious struggles, words like scapegoat, papist and puritan became part of the everyday vocabulary. Recurrent out- breaks of disease contributed words like smallpox, gonorrhea and virus. But the biggest influx of new words came from the geographical discoveries made possible by the daring sailors and navigators who set out from the seaports of England in search of glory, gold and God. The treasures they brought home from these voyages included more than the cargoes in their holds, for they also brought with them strange new words to describe their strange new discoveries: parrot, torpedo, hurricane, typhoon, tobacco, alligator, obelisk, molasses, canary, penguin, mosquito, banana, coffee, and many more. Scholars estimate that ten thousand new words entered the English language during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I alone. Small wonder Shakespeare felt so inspired! 12 500 YEARS OF NEW WORDS 1504 COPARCENARY This word is approximately five hundred years old and can be found in the 2003 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary with this definition: “1) joint heirship; 2) joint ownership.” Apparently even older is coparcener (a joint heir), dating back to at least the fifteenth century. Johannes Gutenberg constructed his first printing press in Germany in the 1450s, and William Caxton set up his first press in London in 1476. Before this time, anything recorded in English had to be written out by hand. Imagine copying the entire Bible by hand, as some medieval monks actually did. The farther back we go in time, the less certain we can be of the precise date of a letter, document, book, or anything written or printed. For all entries older than the year 1500, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary simply indicates the century it dates from, instead of the specific year. All of which brings to mind one of the favourite stories of the Canadian author and retired auto mechanic Gord Hazlett: “A museum guide, leading a tour group, announced, ‘This ancient mummy is two million and nine years old.’ “‘How can you be so precise about something that old?’ asked a skeptic in the crowd. “‘Well,’ the guide said, ‘I’ve been here for nine years, and it was two million years old when they hired me.’” 1505 BOUNDER / HUSSY For this year, you get two words for the price of one. The first refers to a man and the second to a woman. Both words are uncomplimentary. First, bounder, with two definitions in Merriam-Webster: “1) one that bounds; 2) a man of objectionable social behaviour: CAD.” The word cad is fully capitalized in this definition to let you know that it can be found as a main entry elsewhere in the same dictionary.

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