In 1 7 1 3, "The Englishman" magazine
ushered a new word into the English language... orrery.
It was taken from the name of the Earl of Orrery,
who put up the money to build a machine like this...
a mechanical depiction
of the Earth's movement in the solar system.
The motion of the universe itself...
laid bare by Isaac Newton's work on gravity and cosmology...
had been put into miniature order.
An age of reason was attempting to bring order
to everything around it.
And in the 1 8th and 1 9th centuries,
a series of self-appointed authorities
tried to tame the unruly English language.
It was a heavyweight contest.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
The Age of Reason, which began in the late 1 7th century,
was born out of years of massive political upheaval in Britain.
It had seen civil war,
during which the king left London and set up court here,
at Christ Church College, Oxford.
The war made familiar such words and phrases
as "roundhead" and "cavalier",
"plunder", "iconoclast", "cabal", "regicide",
"Lord Protector", "commonwealth",
"Restoration", "papist", "nonconformist",
"Keep your powder dry", and "warts and all"...
a lexicon of faction and dispute, often mortal.
The philosopher John Locke
was educated here at Christ Church
and lived through this turmoil.
He developed his greatest work in the 1 67 0s and '80s,
"An Essay Concerning Human Understanding".
In it, he argued that better use of language
could put an end to disputes and factionalism.
If the definition of words could be agreed
and misunderstanding avoided,
peace would naturally follow.
It's a wonderful example of rational idealism.
Did John Locke, a man of such supreme intelligence,
really believe that by getting the language clear
and the arguments stripped to basic simplicities,
then, as he put it,
"disputes would end of themselves"?
Clearly, he did.
There is blind faith here,
at the heart of what seems pure reason.
It's a fascination in this story, though,
that men of Locke's calibre did think
that, in effect, language was the master of life.
Perhaps it could rule everything.
Locke was a member of the Royal Society,
founded in 1 660 to promote what we call science,
but they called
"physico-mathematical experimental learning".
They tried to write pure and simple English,
to avoid what they described
as "this vicious abundance of phrase,
this volubility of tongue".
At the time, learned books were usually written in Latin,
because Latin was understood internationally
and was regarded as more precise.
The members of the Royal Society
wanted to make English a fit language for scholars,
and English began to make inroads
into the territory of Latin.
Newton had published his "Principia Mathematica"
in 1 68 7 in Latin,
but in 1 7 04, his "Opticks" was published,
written in English...
a new kind of rational English,
larded with terms of enquiry and argument.
MAN: I proceeded by this Analysis to discover
and prove the original Differences of the Rays of Light
in respect of Refrangibility, Reflexibility, and Colour,
and their alternate Fits of easy Reflexion and easy Transmission,
and the Properties of Bodies, both opake and pellucid,
on which their Reflexions and Colours depend.
BRAGG: Here was a new vocabulary of reason and investigation.
"Refrangibility" and "reflexibility"
were words coined by Newton
to allow him to describe his experiments
with refraction and reflection.
"Transmission" had been used before
to mean "passing from one place to another".
Newton changed its meaning
to describe passing through a medium.
And "opaque" had meant "unlit" for 200 years
before the 1 7th century changed it to mean
"not allowing the passage of light".
The word "lens" had only been coined a decade
before Newton used it in his book,
and as he reported his observations,
he also gave English the terms
"indistinctness" and "well-defined".
The scholars were reframing, redefining,
and refashioning the language.
They made it part of their apparatus.
And there's another word that took on its meaning
as the equipment for an experiment during this period.
There appeared to be a growing and general confidence
in the state of English.
Printing presses were no longer licensed
and they had spread and proliferated.
For the first time,
daily newspapers were being printed and circulated.
Reports of events around the globe
went into the hands of ordinary people.
The fashionable meeting places of the day
were the coffeehouses.
It was in places like this
that people read and talked about the news.
This one sold coffee until just a decade ago.
Now it serves up stronger fare.
Printed English had become part of the fabric of daily life
as it had never been before.
Here's the first issue of "The Daily Courant"
for March 1 1, 1 7 02.
The news comes from the War of the Spanish Succession,
that the French have sent over 20,000 troops to Italy.
There was a massive appetite for this news.
Joseph Addison told the readers of his magazine,
"The Spectator",
that different papers cooked the same news in different ways
and that no-one could bear to leave coffeehouses like this one
before they'd read all the different versions.
But co-existing with the exuberance of Grub Street
and the coffeehouses, possibly as a result of it,
there was a deep anxiety
about the state of the English language.
There was no Royal Society here, protecting English from
"vicious abundance of phrase and volubility of tongue".
There was no John Locke pressing the case
for agreed definitions and clarity of meaning.
The greatest worry was that English itself was changing.
The poet Geoffrey Chaucer was still revered
three centuries after he'd written "The Canterbury Tales".
But, by then, he'd become difficult to understand.
The satirist Jonathan Swift,
writer of a series of bogus travel diaries
we know today as "Gulliver's Travels",
voiced his concern.
MAN: How then shall any man be able to undertake his work
with spirit and cheerfulness
when he considers that in an age or two,
he shall hardly be understood without an interpreter?
The aristocracy couldn't be relied on to set the example.
Swift hated the vulgar liberties, as he saw it,
that they were taking with the English language,
the way they clipped vowels out of words
or abbreviated them.
"Rep" for "reputation", "poz" for "positive",
"incog" for "incognito",
and the one that survives as standard English today...
"mob", from the Latin mobile vulgus, the common people.
In coffeehouse society,
elegant English was supposed to consist of long, Latinate words.
These shortenings were considered crude.
And Swift also hated what he thought of
as merely modish words,
like "banter", "bubble", "bully", "cutting", "shuffling",
"palming", and "sham".
Swift found a model in the classical languages
Latin and Greek.
Those languages, it was thought, had survived
because they never changed.
They were carved in stone.
Swift would save English by arresting it,
putting an end to changes.
He would take control of English
and take it away from the anarchy
of the upper-class bloods and their slang.
In 1 7 1 2, Swift proposed the foundation of an academy
for "Correcting, lmproving,
and Ascertaining the English Tongue".
The academy would replace the aristocracy.
"Ascertain" was the big word.
English was to be fixed... ascertained... forever.
No matter that the French and Italians already had academies
that had failed to halt changes in their languages,
Swift's determination was ferocious.
One critic sneered that he was attempting the impossible,
and he said, "May as well set up a society
to find out the Grand Elixir,
the Perpetual Motion, the Longitude,
as to fix our language beyond our own times."
Well, he was wrong about longitude.
Swift even took his case to court
and proposed his scheme to Queen Anne,
saying that only classical English would endure
to report her glory.
But she died two years later,
and her place on the throne was taken by George l,
a German king
who spoke little English and cared about it even less.
Swift's plans were dead.
But English fielded another champion,
an intimidating scholar, the monarch of London wits,
a beacon of his age, a savage melancholic,
and, like Isaac Newton, an effortless eccentric.
He lived and created his masterwork in this house
in Gough Square, just off Fleet Street in London.
Came the hour,
came Dr Samuel Johnson and his great dictionary.
He thought he could write it in three years.
When it was put to him that it had taken 40 Frenchmen
40 years to compile their dictionary,
he replied, "40 times 40 is 1,600.
As 3 to 1,600,
so is the proportion of an Englishman to a Frenchman".
In fact, it took him 7 years, and this is where he did it.
In this garret on the top floor of this house,
he fed material...
43,000 words and definitions,
etymologies and quotations showing how they were used...
to six assistants who wrote them down.
Johnson's achievement with the dictionary was immense
and immensely idiosyncratic.
He left out proper names.
He included obsolete words
if they were found in authors not obsolete
and was criticised for including archaic words
such as "digladation", "cubiculary",
"incompossibility",
"jobbernowl", and "opiniatry".
He confessed to omitting words he couldn't explain
because he didn't understand them.
In a manner which would enrage and amaze
all future lexicographers,
he acknowledged that
"Many terms of art, manufacture, and trade are omitted.
But for this defect,
I may boldly allege it was unavoidable.
I could not visit caverns to learn the miners' language,
nor take a voyage to perfect my skill
in the dialect of navigation."
His dictionary is lacking in the areas of law, medicine,
and the physical sciences.
He left out rude words,
and when two society ladies asked him why,
he responded, "What, my dears?
Then you've been looking for them?"
The dictionary was finally published in two folio volumes
in 1 7 55,
and this is it.
With all his omissions and banishments,
it's a wonder
that the dictionary carried any weight at all.
In fact, it carried immense authority
and also served a purpose of national pride,
that English literature could boast
such a mighty engine of words,
and through the genius, not of a French committee,
but of an English individual.
We like that.
And the personality of that individual shines through...
willful, prejudiced, and learned.
The dictionary becomes an autobiography,
a portrait of an age,
and a book that remains entertaining
way beyond its useful life as a tool.
Though it has to be admitted
that, as a tool, it doesn't stand up by modern standards.
Some of its etymologies,
accounts of the origins of words, are questionable.
And its definitions don't always shed light.
Cough... A convulsion of the lungs,
vellicated by some sharp serosity.
And dross.
He says, "The recrement or despumation of metals."
Sometimes they're biased or inaccurate.
"Oats" he describes as a grain,
which, in England, is generally given to horses,
but in Scotland, supports the people.
Tarantula is "an insect whose bite is only cured by musick".
Dull, he says, is not exhilarating or delightful,
as to make dictionaries is dull work.
When he began his work,
he sounded very much like the inheritor of Swift's great plan.
"The idea," he wrote, "was to make a dictionary
by which the pronunciation of our language may be fixed,
its use ascertained, and its duration lengthened."
But after he had worked on the dictionary
and come to write the preface,
his pragmatism and his honesty
saw a rueful but radical change of mind.
English wasn't going to be tied down.
No dictionary, Johnson added, could embalm a language
and preserve it from corruption and decay,
implying that for Johnson, like Swift,
change was still for the worse.
But I think there's something to celebrate
in the end of the idea of trying to fix the meaning of words.
English would never be lashed down,
and the power of its freedom gave it, I think,
an extra cylinder when it came up against the obstacle
or the opposition of other languages.
MAN: Goat... A ruminant animal that seems a middle species
between deer and sheep.
Electrick... Attractive without magnetism.
Petroleum is a liquid bitumen, black,
floating on the water of springs.
Enthusiasm... A vain belief of private revelation.
Lexicographer... A writer of dictionaries.
A harmless drudge.
Johnson's work won both brickbats and garlands,
but it was rarely ignored.
There was praise from the two European countries
which had established academies to regulate their language,
Italy and France.
A French journal declared
that Johnson himself was an academy for this island.
And although it didn't fix forever the meaning,
or in Swift and Johnson's word, "ascertain", a single word,
the dictionary is still read and enjoyed
in all its eccentric, dusty glory.
The second half of the 1 8th century
was an age when nature itself
was being put into classical order
by landscape gardeners
like William Kent here at Rousham in Oxfordshire,
and a host of grammarians, led by Robert Lowth,
wanted to do the same to the English language.
From now on, things were different from
but certainly not different to
the old individual freedoms.
In some ways, they added clarity.
In other ways, they created pedantry.
"Between you and l" was outlawed.
"Between you and me" was now the only way.
Comparatives were to be used with a pair of objects,
and superlatives with more.
"The better of two", but "the best of three".
Incomparables... like perfect, unique, or round...
weren't to be qualified,
so you should no longer be "more unique" or "less perfect".
"Lie" and "lay" were distinguished from each other,
as were "will" and "shall".
Perhaps surprisingly, Lowth recognised that a preposition
was permissible to end a sentence with,
though avoiding it was more elegant.
Where two ways of using language existed,
one must be wrong.
They carved a single path
through the thickets of English grammar.
And they began to turn their attention to vocabulary.
There were attempts to ban popular words and phrases...
words such as "fib", "banter", "bigot", "fop",
"flippant", "flimsy",
"workmanship", "selfsame", "despoil",
"nowadays", "furthermore",
"wherewithal", "subject-matter", "drive a bargain",
"handle a subject", and "bolster an argument".
All of them had to be wiped out.
Hating English words and phrases isn't as common as liking them,
but the flying squads of opposition are always with us
and sometimes they're to be welcomed.
Today, some people object to what they see
as the misuse of "hopefully", as I do,
instead of "I hope";
to the way "decimate" is losing its meaning
of "to reduce by a tenth";
or the use of "ahead of" instead of "before".
There's a sense in which they can't fail
and they can't succeed either,
because English will find its own words.
The language itself, through usage and natural selection,
will see what is survivable and what will not survive.
The 1 8th century was a paradise for the terrible twins...
class and snobbery...
and in they came, pat on cue.
The new rules and regulations were immensely influential,
not for the upper classes,
who felt no need to change the way they used English,
or for the lower classes, who had little incentive.
But the growing middle class,
or the growing number of people who wanted to be middle class,
regarded knowledge of the rules
as the key to joining polite society,
a badge of entry to the club.
One typical example was William Cobbett,
who became famous as the author of "Rural Rides".
He was a lower middle-class boy
who took a copy of Lowth's grammar
and taught himself the rules.
And he put his reasons bluntly.
"Without understanding grammar," he wrote,
"you can never hope to become fit for anything
beyond mere trade or agriculture.
It's impossible for you to write correctly;
and it is by mere accident that you speak correctly;
and, pray bear in mind,
that all well-informed persons judge of a man's mind
until they have other means of judging
by his writing or speaking."
Writing or speaking.
The word police were also turning their attention
to the spoken word.
English reached the Scottish Lowlands
not long after the first Anglo-Saxon invasions
in the 5th century.
As it replaced Gaelic as the language of lowland Scotland,
it took on a character of its own.
The English-speaking Scots took up words
that were unknown further south.
Contact with the French produced "bonny" from bon, :
"ashet" from assiette, for a serving dish;
and "fash" from the Old French fascher, meaning "to annoy".
I remember it being in common use in the Borders
in "Don't fash yourself", meaning "Don't get agitated."
The Dutch gave the Scots kalant,
which became "callan", meaning "lad";
mudseken which became "mutchkin", a quarter pint;
and the Dutch kolf... a stick or a club...
is the probable origin of the Scottish invention "golf".
And there were hosts of words from the Gaelic.
Cairn, ceilidh, claymore, gillie, glen,
ingle... meaning a fire in a hearth,
strath... a wide valley,
Ioch, sporran, and whisky.
And as well as words,
the Scots had their own ways of talking.
I want to try some of those sausages, please.
It's the apricots I'm not sure about.
...along with neeps, tatties, they're fantastic.
Then the next course.
And the whisky had nothing to do with it?
BRAGG: In 1 7 61, Thomas Sheridan,
Irishman, former actor,
and a self-appointed master of elocution and pronunciation,
came to Edinburgh.
He was on a mission... to teach the Lowland Scots
how to speak English properly.
It's hard to believe
that there could have been a sense of inferiority
among the great and good of Scotland
in the Age of Enlightenment.
This was one of Europe's intellectual powerhouses,
and here in Edinburgh The Signet Library
is filled with the fruits of their learning...
the philosopher David Hume, the economist Adam Smith,
the engineer James Watt, the architect Robert Adam,
the geologist James Hutton,
and the historian William Robertson.
They were the first among many equals.
But there was a sense of inferiority,
and it lay in their use of language.
Since the Act of Union in 1 7 07,
Scotland had been part of a united Britain.
A new idea had swept through the whole country,
the idea that there was only one proper way to speak English.
The idea was partly the result
of the spread of the printed standard English.
More people than ever were reading,
but they weren't reading
the local dialects they'd grown up hearing.
There had always been a gap
between what was said on the page
and what was said on the tongue.
But now, in what could be called the great print shift,
the printed version started to be regarded as correct.
In short, the best spoken English
was increasingly supposed to sound
like the best written English.
But what did written English sound like and who decided?
One simple idea was that words should be spoken
with all the written letters sounded,
which was fine as long as you could read,
but it outlawed those clipped pronunciations
that Swift had so hated.
It put "waistcoat" back in favour
instead of "weskit", for example,
and put "chimney" back
where many people preferred to say "chimley".
But it was no help in deciding how to pronounce the "A"
in "fast", "bath", or "last".
Fast, bath, or last. Long or short?
Both had champions,
and the argument has lasted, or "larsted",
from the 1 8th century to the present day.
And what about the many inconsistencies
of English spelling?
The relationship between sound and spelling in English
is a nightmare.
Our written system isn't phonetic
to the point of being anti-phonetic.
There are, for instance, at least seven ways
of representing what, for most people,
is the same vowel sound... "ee".
BRAGG: What do we do?
Or take the letters "O-U-G-H" in...
BRAGG: The same four letters. Six different sounds.
Dr Johnson had omitted pronunciation
from his dictionary
and wrote that trying to fix it
was like trying to lash the wind.
But that didn't deter others.
The Irish actor Thomas Sheridan
spotted the need for a national elocutionist.
He seized the role.
Sheridan's first and crucial book was published in 1 7 56,
hard on the heels of Dr Johnson's dictionary.
He called it, significantly, "British Education".
Not English. And "Education".
No messing about with ways of speaking or pronunciation.
He went for the key and jugular word.
If you wanted to say what you said in the best way,
then what you needed was an education,
and this book, this man, could provide it,
which, remarkably, he did.
Sheridan toured England,
lecturing to appreciative middle-class audiences.
And then he was invited here to Edinburgh
by David Hume, Adam Smith,
and other members of the city's leading debating club,
the Select Society.
MAN: Pronunciation is a sort of proof
that a person has kept good company,
and, on that account, is sought after by all
who wish to be considered as fashionable people
or members of the beau monde.
The task was the last that the past master could grasp,
but one can't mark his charm harmfully.
BRAGG: Sheridan hit a nerve.
The Scots intellectuals
were worried about appearing uneducated.
The task was the last that the past master could grasp,
but one can't mark his charm harmfully.
Okay, let's hear you all together.
"Look at the cook book."
"Look at the cook book," said the cook,
as he took the pullets and put them in the nook.
BRAGG: Sheridan's great idea
was that if everyone spoke in the same way,
they would talk to each other as equals.
Of course, it didn't work.
The new standard immediately divided people
into those who copied it and those who didn't.
"Look at the cook book," said the cook,
as he took the pullets and put them in the nook.
BRAGG: But some Scots were affronted
by the very suggestion that their speech was inferior.
They needed a standard-bearer,
and the post was not empty for long.
Robert Burns was born in 1 7 59 to a poor tenant farmer
and worked as a ploughboy until he was 1 5.
He loved women to excess. He loved Scotch. He loved Scots.
He published his first collection in 1 7 86...
"Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect"...
and was canny enough to leave out some verses
which he'd written in more standard English.
It was a shrewd move.
The Scots had found someone
to make them proud of their own language.
He came to Edinburgh
and, on his first visit, stayed here at Lady Stair's Close.
He was feted, patronised,
and ruined, perhaps, as the Ploughman Poet.
He died when he was only 3 7, but his legacy is vast...
400 songs,
some of which are recognised as masterpieces,
"The Lea Rig", "Tam O'Shanter", and "A Red, Red Rose".
1 0,000 came to pay their respects at his funeral,
and that was only the beginning of a reputation
which is kept alive
wherever Scots with even a smattering of literature
meet to talk of Scotland, drink whisky,
and toast the ladies and the haggis in Burns' tongue.
MAN: Fair fa' your honest sonsie face,
Great chieftain o the puddin' race!
Aboon them a' ye tak yer place
Painch, tripe or thairm...
Weel are ye wordy of a grace As lang's my arm.
BRAGG: Just south across the border from the Lowlands
where Burns spent his youth,
lie the fells... the Norse word for mountains...
which form the Lake District.
They nursed and nourished another poet
who sought out the common experience,
William Wordsworth.
Wordsworth wrote down a lot of his work
in this small cottage in Grasmere
which used to be a pub.
He liked to use this chair, with its flat arm,
to work on his poems.
Poetry, once the preserve of the high-born, or the high-flown,
was being stormed by romantic and revolutionary language.
His contribution to English poetry
has been well and widely cherished.
Wordsworth's contribution to the adventure of English
is that, in the preface to his "Lyrical Ballads",
first published in 1 798,
he stressed that poetry could be written
in "the language really used by men"
and didn't need a special poetic diction
to express deep feelings.
"Up! Up! My friend, and clear your looks,
Why all this toil and trouble?
Up! Up! My friend, and quit your books,
Or surely you'll grow double.
The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow,
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow."
Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy
planted their garden here, behind the cottage,
with wild flowers they found on their walks
rather than with cultivated hybrids.
It was much the same with the language of his verse.
Poetry wasn't supposed to use such simple language.
Dr Johnson had said it clearly.
"The most splendid ideas drop their magnificence
if they're conveyed by words used commonly
upon low and trivial occasions," he said.
And Johnson thought that Shakespeare had ruined
the tone of "Macbeth" by using the word "knife"...
a tradesman's word used by butchers and cooks,
as he put it.
Wordsworth warned that readers who were used to what he called
"the gaudiness and inane phraseology
of many modern writers"
will perhaps frequently have to struggle in reading his work,
struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness.
They will look around for poetry.
"Books!
'Tis a dull and endless strife,
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music;
On my life there's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! How blithe the throstle sings!
And he is no mean preacher;
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher."
Wordsworth was reviled for many years
by critics and other poets
for daring to bring poetry to the voice of the people.
In a way, to give it back to its bedrock of Old English.
A few years before, in 1 790,
Thomas Paine had written the "Rights Of Man",
also in the plain style,
to demonstrate
that simple language could carry precise thought.
That a work of such influence on political ideas
and a young poet who was to exercise
even greater influence on poetic practice should agree
opened up what's become a major thoroughfare
for the English language.
Despite its exhilarating taste
for excess, obscurity, and the arcane,
its promiscuous nature now led English poetry and prose
to the depth of meaning and feeling and nuance
which could be mined from plain English.
It's possible to imagine a world
without the influence of Paine, Wordsworth, and their followers,
and one of its aspects would be
that a language separate from ordinary English
was the only language in which high thinking
and profound feeling could be expressed.
There's a sense in which Wordsworth kept English true
to its old tried and tested self.
He saved and celebrated and gave lasting literary energy
to the ancient language of ordinary speech.
"One impulse from the vernal wood
May teach you more of man;
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can."
Meanwhile, away from Wordsworth's simple rusticity,
among fashionable and elegant society,
how you spoke was a key to your social standing.
And nowhere was more fashionable than Bath.
If you could not talk properly here,
you were inviting ridicule.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan, son of Thomas the Elocutionist,
set his comedy "The Rivals" here
and gave us one of the most ridiculous speakers of English
in its history.
WOMAN: There, sir, an attack upon my language.
What do you think of that?
An aspersion upon my parts of speech.
Was ever such a brute.
Sure, if I reprehend anything in this world,
it is the use of my oracular tongue
and a nice derangement of epitaphs.
The glorious Mrs Malaprop under full sail,
putting the wrong words in the right places.
Her name comes from French...
mal a propos, meaning "inappropriate".
It entered the dictionary in 1 849 as "malapropism".
"Make no delusion to the past," she says,
and "She's as headstrong as an allegory
on the banks of the Nile".
She could represent Sheridan's dig
at his father Thomas's pedantry.
But she's also a reflection of a society
in which the education of women
was widely thought to be unnecessary.
But that was changing.
Richard Sheridan's grandmother had had no education,
but his mother was an accomplished writer.
At the turn of the 1 9th century,
more and more women were reading as well as writing.
Subscription libraries were making books
widely and cheaply available to more and more readers.
Female readers created
an appetite and a market for novels,
works of romance and sensibility
which earned little respect or no respect among intellectuals.
Yet out of this atmosphere, and out of this city,
came a woman who helped the novel to be recognised
as writing in which wit, brilliance, depth, and variety
could find expression every bit as impressive
as could be found
in the more established forms of poetry and drama.
The novel, especially her novels,
became the benchmark for good English.
She was, of course, Jane Austen,
whose prose was to clarify the English
of that Enlightenment/Romantic era
to a crystalline standard never achieved before
and rarely since.
In a way, she became the academy
Dr Swift and Dr Johnson had dreamed of.
WOMAN: "And what are you reading, miss?"
"Oh! It is only a novel," replies the young lady,
while she lays down her book
with affected indifference or mounting shame.
It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda;
or, in short, only some work
in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed,
in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature,
the happiest delineation of its varieties,
the liveliest effusions of wit and humour,
are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
BRAGG: The world of Austen's novels
is one in which a single man in possession of a good fortune
is in want of a wife
and a single woman
in want of a husband in possession of a good fortune.
But they have to prove themselves worthy...
to each other and to society.
They are judged.
There's a whole lexicon of social acceptability
in Jane Austen's work...
words like "agreeable", "appropriate",
"delicacy", "discretion",
"eligible", "order", "propriety",
"respectable", and "unfit".
Yet Jane Austen has her boundaries.
The language of the streets
is kept firmly outside the Austen door.
The language of bodily parts
was not allowed in the Austen parks and drawing rooms.
In her own way,
Jane Austen was every bit as masterful and controlling
as the men whom time has seen her surpass.
Her own proper and correct use of English
has permeated the minds and sensibilities
of hundreds of thousands of her readers.
Swear words would never do.
The human body had become the great unmentionable
of Jane Austen's time,
and to deal with it,
English had produced a fantastically inventive list
of euphemisms.
These are all polite terms for the male organ
from popular speech or writers of the 1 8th century...
not that Jane Austen or any of her heroines
would have let them pass their lips.
Tailpipe, pilgrim's staff,
Captain Standish, silent flute,
pike of pleasure, mutton dagger,
Cupid's torch, chink-stopper,
Nimrod... the mighty hunter,
His Majesty in Purple Cap,
beloved guest,
picklock, pleasure pivot, pump-handle,
dear morsel, and Dr Johnson...
because there was no-one
that Dr Johnson was not prepared to stand up to.
It can seem comical today,
as though avoiding the word could avoid the thought.
But that's a testament to the power of language.
It was all part of putting English in its place.
English was treated by the self-appointed censors
as if it were an unruly mob, a subversive faction,
a party of revolution.
And reputation was no armour against their assault.
It was the 1 8th century
that first took the scissors to Shakespeare,
removing hundreds of lines
with words like "whore" and "strumpet" and "devil".
This prudery, as we would see it,
was a product of the society
whose idea of elegance and decorum
had produced Johnson and Jane Austen.
It was the ultimate result of Johnson's notion
that language was the dress of thought
and that heroic sentiments were degraded by common words.
Remove the words, remove the thought.
But English wasn't going to lie down.
Johnson, remember, had also objected
to the use of trade terms.
Trade terms had no place in Jane Austen's world,
but trade terms
were about to reinvigorate the English language.
[Water gurgling, steam hissing]
In 1 7 56, the Scottish engineer James Watt
was working on improving the steam engine.
This is a model of one of his designs.
Watt was very tight-lipped about his ideas,
but one of his friends
reported the work to another of his friends.
MAN: The condenser's the thing.
Keep it but cold enough,
and you may have the perfect vacuum,
whatever be the heat of the cylinder.
I also learned that the great difficulty
was to make the piston tight.
Piston, cylinder, condenser.
This is the new language of steam power.
And in the same recollection,
we read about the eduction pipe, the steam vessel,
the reservoir, the air pump, and the siphon.
English was called up for the new technology.
Watt's condenser was the key
to efficient and practical steam power,
and it changed the world.
The industrial revolution had arrived.
The machines of the 1 9th century are still a great attraction,
as we can see here at the Museum of Science and Industry
in Manchester.
But now they're historical curiosities.
Then, they were the cutting edge of technology.
In 1 851, the Great Exhibition
of the Works of Industry of All Nations
opened in the purpose-built Crystal Palace
in London's Hyde Park.
It was a display of manufactured goods of all kinds,
and the greatest attraction was the machine hall.
Queen Victoria was an enthusiastic visitor.
In a lengthy and acutely observed diary entry,
she wrote, "Excessively interesting and instructive.
Here was every conceivable invention."
Here were some of the industrial world's
and the English language's newest arrivals...
hydraulic power, centrifugal pump,
lithograph, electro-plating,
dynamograph,
and, grandest of them all, anhydrohepseterion,
which cooked potatoes in their own juice.
Practical inventions frequently roped in familiar terms.
The men who built the machines
were often clock and watchmakers by trade,
and they brought their language with them.
Wheels, teeth, pinions, leaves, pivots.
Beasts of burden lent their names
to the mechanical beasts which were replacing them.
There was the donkey engine,
which had its output measured by the new standard of horsepower.
In the cotton mills,
there was Samuel Crompton's spinning mule
and other inventions, including the roving billy
and the spinning jenny,
which may be derived
from the common names for male and female animals,
as in billy goat and jenny ass.
But the classical languages, Latin and Greek,
were also employed by scientists,
either through diffidence
or wishing to claim a distinction for their discipline
which matched anything in antiquity.
They took the Greek terms logos, meaning "word",
and nomia, meaning "distribution",
and named new fields of inquiry "-ologies" and "-onomies".
Like biology, petrology,
taxonomy, morphology,
palaeontology, ethnology,
gynaecology, histology,
carcinology, agronomy, geonomy,
phytonomy, and entomology.
In the first part of the 1 9th century,
these islands had become
the world's leading scientific and industrial nation,
and the language became an engine which drove it forward.
"Engine" is a word with a long history in the English language.
For instance, in the Middle Ages,
it meant "skill" or "talent".
Then it became a machine, a weapon, or a snare.
Now it became part of the steam engine,
or the locomotive engine,
and then, in 1 829, the word "locomotive" itself shifted
and stood alone as a noun.
The railway brought new meaning to a whole set of words.
"Track" and "line" were both applied to the metal rails.
Their junctions became "points".
"Coach", "carriage", and "wagon"
all left the road and rode the rails,
while "lorry" began its life as a railway word
and made the journey in reverse.
"Stations" had been places for ships and troops
before the word was first applied
to the building behind me...
Liverpool Road Station here in Manchester.
[Whistle blows]
And behind the locomotive was the train of carriages;
a line of them
in the same way that English had spoken of a train of followers
or the trailing train of a dress.
Within 1 0 years of its first use,
the train meant the locomotive as well as its carriages.
The world was on the move,
taking words and their meanings with it.
What chance now of the 1 8th-century ideal
of ascertaining or fixing it
when words were dealing with so much that was new?
Other words were shifting in meaning, too,
reflecting massive social changes.
Factories had been foreign trading stations
in the 1 7th century.
Mills had once been places to grind corn.
Now they both meant places of manufacture,
and they were getting larger.
The word "industry" had moved away
from the idea of individual diligence, or work,
and come to represent a whole institution.
So had "labour" and "capital",
as the forces they described gathered pace.
These aren't simply changes in the meaning of words.
They represent changes in people's lives,
hundreds of thousands, millions of them.
In the mills, it was often children
who took the cans of cotton fibre
from one machine to the next.
If output slowed down,
blame was levelled at the child who carried the can.
Some workers, like those at Quarry Bank Mill at Styal,
were fortunate.
They had model cottages built for them.
But tens of thousands learned a new word,
a word that English picked up off the London streets
from the slang of the poor,
and that word was "slum".
The economic miracle of the industrial revolution
was also a curse.
There was squalor and poverty
on a scale never seen before in cities,
especially in London.
English was using a new word to describe social status.
Instead of old terms like "degree", "status", or "rank",
it now had "class".
And the slums were the realm of the lower classes,
the working classes.
The 1 8th century ideas of proper speech
became stronger than ever,
as the language police sneered at urban working-class dialects
such as cockney.
Would the cockney speech of that time, of the 1 8th century,
have sounded very much like the cockney speech of today?
What would have characterised it?
Typical features would have been the alternation of "F" and "TH".
So, for example, a pronunciation like "barff"
would have been very characteristic
of cockney of that time,
as opposed to "bath",
which would actually have been
a much more refined pronunciation
of what we now would say as "bath".
So a lot of the markers shift their values at that time.
Another very typical one,
often regarded as a kind of vice of the cockneys,
that's by John Walker in 1 791,
was the alternation of "V" and "W".
So, a word like "well"
would be pronounced as "vell", for example.
This was very much a living reality of cockney speech
throughout the late 1 8th century and into the 1 9th century.
But cockney was regarded as uncouth, wasn't it?
It was regarded as a sign of not being educated.
It was looked down on.
No, cockney was certainly regarded as uncouth.
It was the speech, as another writer said,
"of the vulgar provincialists of the metropolis".
I mean, it was something that was lacking
the educated, literate proprieties
which people regarded as the norm to be aimed for.
Do you think, in the end, it was disabling to our society,
that that's what so many people were concentrating on
so very much?
There was certainly a kind of barrier generated by this,
the image particularly of the accent-less voice.
Obviously, the accent-less voice is a kind of myth.
Everyone has to speak with an accent.
But this barrier erected
between those who had managed to shed a regional accent
and those who then had acquired
what we call the non-localised accent...
an accent that didn't reveal your place of birth.
And this set up a problematic fault line in society
which people strove to try and cross.
You should have put your...
BRAGG: In 1 851,
the journalist Henry Mayhew
identified a new kind of London talk...
"a cadgers' cant, done on the rhyming principle".
- Hello, Mick. - Hello, Tony.
How you going, me old China?
Tell you what, I was elephant's last night.
What? Brahms 'n Liszt again?
I'm just going to go round the Jack Horner.
You haven't got any pie 'n mash, have you?
Pie 'n mash? I lent you a cockerel last night.
Can't keep giving you quids.
- Deep-sea diver? - No, not today, mate.
What was you on? That old Amos again?
- Vera Lynn mix? - What can I say?
I'm going down the frog 'n toad.
Meantime, keep out the battlecruiser
and stay off the Amos.
BRAGG: Cockney rhyming slang
became the most relished characteristic of cockney.
Its wit and innuendo still give it life today.
MAN: Dinky doos, cus.
Mushroom would be "Bobby Crush mush."
Grape, the big hairy ape.
Donkey barrow, marrow.
Like you say, the trousers, like, Lionel Blair's flares.
Claire Rayner's trainers.
City slickers' knickers. Eartha Kitt's tits.
BRAGG: Slang is a code, a way of a group speaking to itself
without being understood by the rest of society,
so it's constantly reinvented.
In Victorian times, there were many such codes
where hidden meanings
could flout conventional respectability,
and one of them was found in the music hall.
Marie Lloyd was once criticised by the moral watchdogs
for singing, "She sits among the cabbages and peas."
She responded by changing the words
to "She sits among the cabbages and leeks."
200 years after John Locke's call
for meanings to be defined and clarified,
none of the self-appointed guardians of English
had been able to tie it down.
Words continued to change, to take on new meanings,
to hide their true faces behind a mask of respectability.
Here at Locke's old college, Christ Church, Oxford,
in the 1 9th century,
Charles Dodgson, a mathematics lecturer,
invented a fictional character
who would have given Locke nightmares.
MAN: "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said
in rather a scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean...
neither more nor less."
BRAGG: Dodgson is better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll,
the author of "Alice In Wonderland".
When he wrote "Through the Looking-Glass" in 1 8 7 1,
he took English further than slang
and into the realms of nonsense.
This is the opening of "Jabberwocky".
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe...
All mimsy were the borogoves
And the mome raths outgrabe."
The only interpreter of this verse that Alice can find
is Humpty Dumpty,
who defines words just as he wants to.
Locke and the language police who came after him
would not have approved.
It's nonsense but intellectual nonsense.
A clever game with words.
Quite different from the way the lower classes speak,
according to an article that Dodgson wrote.
"A word means what the speaker intends by it," he wrote,
"and what the hearer understands by it, and that is all.
This thought may lessen the horror
of some of the language used by the lower classes,
which is often a mere collection of unmeaning sounds."
By the end of the 1 9th century,
attitudes to the class system and language
had been tightly bound together.
The upper classes spoke clearly and were intelligent leaders.
The lower classes grunted and were stupid brutes.
WOMAN: Eeeaaaaoooow.
MAN: Remember that you are a human being with a soul
and the divine gift of articulate speech.
That your native language is the language of Shakespeare
and Milton and the Bible,
and don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
The story of Shaw's play "Pygmalion" is well-known.
A professor of phonetics finds a cockney flower-girl
here in Covent Garden
and coaches her to speak English like the upper classes.
What isn't so well known is that Shaw had a serious purpose.
He thought that the general public obeyed the ruling classes
because they expressed themselves so elegantly,
so authoritatively.
Even their bad ideas sounded convincing
in upper-class English.
And when the play was produced in London in 1 91 4,
there were plenty of bad ideas around.
The well-spoken politicians were on course
for the First World War.
Shaw wanted his play to show
that there was no magic in good speech.
He even thought that if he could break the spell,
he might prevent the war.
The play caused an uproar,
but not because of Shaw's ideas about class and pronunciation.
He broke one of the cardinal rules of polite society
at the time.
He put a rude word onstage.
WOMAN: I must go.
So pleased to have met you.
MAN: Are you walking across the park, Miss Dolittle?
- Lf so, I... - WOMAN: Walk?
Not bloody likely.
I am going in a taxi.
That one word ..."bloody"... was the talk of the nation.
It caused so much fuss
that it erased Shaw's serious message.
When the First World War broke out,
Shaw could only regret how, as he put it,
"War can so easily be gilt
with romance and heroism and the like
by persons whose superficial literary and oratorical talent
covers an abyss of godforsaken folly".
Two centuries previously,
the Age of Enlightenment had dreamed of order
and of a unified language ending conflict.
But it was the First World War
that would begin the long decline of the social order
and its idea that you were a better person
if you spoke proper English.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media