Megan Branch, Intern
Patrick Wright a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London 
Consortium. Wright wrote On Living in An Old Country and its companion, A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (read an excerpt here). On Living in an Old Country looks at history’s role in shaping identity and everyday life in England. Below is an excerpt about the house of Miss May Alice Savidge. Upon finding out that her pre-Tudor house was scheduled for demolition to make way for road work, Savidge dismantled it, shipped it 100 miles away, and began reassembling the house piece-by-piece.
On Camping out in the Modern World
“History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday…” - Karel Kosik
So far I have not identified the political complexion of the local authority in Ware, not for that matter of the national government when the decision to redevelop Miss Savidge’s home was made. This has not been the result of any reluctance to deal with the political implications of Miss Savidge’s story. On the contrary, my point is that these implications will not be appreciable unless one also grasps the extent to which politics, at least in the traditional frame of the major electoral parties, have become irrelevant to the issues finding expression in this affair.
In a phrase of Habermas’s, the political system is increasingly ‘decoupled’ from the traditional measures of everyday life, and Miss Savidge cannot be adequately defined as the victim of one party as opposed to another. She fell instead (and, of course, rose again) on the common ground of the post-war settlement, a ground which is made up of rationalised procedures and methods of administration as much as of any shared policies about, say, the efficacy of the mixed economy or the legitimacy of the welfare state. Miss Savidge’s house stood in the way of an ethos of development and a practice of social planning and calculation which have formed the procedural basis of the welfare state under both Conservative and Labour administrations. Governments have come and gone (at the behest of an electorate oscillating at a rate which itself reflects the situation), but a professionalised conduct of social administration has persisted throughout.
The professionals of this world are almost bound to see the more traditional forms of self-understanding persisting among the citizenry as merely quaint and eccentric, if not more dismissively as obstructive and inadequate to modern reality. While there is always room for an arrogant contempt to develop here, the most frequent manifestation consists of a resigned and pragmatic realism (the bureaucratic sigh which responds to people’s demands by saying that things are always more complicated than that) with which officials draw out and exhaust the discussion and patience of residents’ associations around the country. That this system of planning is less than perfect goes without saying, and Miss Savidge is well stocked with complaints on this score. For anyone who stops to ask she will talk about the callousness of the officials who turned up the Saturday before Christmas (1953) to look at the buildings which they had already decided to pull down—even though this was the first the residents had heard of it. She will mention inconsiderate rules applying to council tenants (no cat or dog unless you have a family, and so on). She will also talk about a general bureaucratic incompetence which, in her experience, made it possible to get a council grant towards the cost of installing a bathroom in a house which was already up for demolition, and which was also evident in the many changes of plan regarding the road development itself. Is it to be a new road with a roundabout, or can the old road be widened, and which local authority (town or country) is to be responsible?
Bureaucratic procedure may indeed be conducted as if its rationality were contained entirely within its own calculations, and in this respect it may well seem to stand impervious: free from any responsibility to the world in which its works eventually materialise. But whatever the appearance, this is obviously not a matter of rationality alone. The system of planning into which Miss Savidge was well caught up by 1969 is characteristic of a welfare state that was both corporatist in character (public discussion and political negotiation simulated in thoroughly institutionalised forms), and caught in the contradictions of its commodifying pact with private capital. More than this, the welfare state has developed through a period of extensive cultural upheaval, and Miss Savidge’s is therefore a story of the times in its discovery of tradition not just in the lifeworld but also in an apparently hopeless contest with modernity. While the dislocation of traditional self-understanding could indeed prepare the way for better possibilities, Miss Savidge stands there as a testimony to another scenario in which the prevailing atmosphere is one of insecurity which develops when extensive cultural dislocation has occurred without any better, or even reasonably meaningful, future coming into view.
By Anatoly Liberman
On seeing the second line of the title, some experts in Shakespeare’s diction may have jumped to the conclusion that they are in for another essay on a scurrilous topic. Not quite, unless the subject English spelling is considered obscene by definition. How is it possible for a single vowel letter to have so many values? “Elementary, my dear Watkins,” as Sherlock Holmes did not say in any tale told by Conan Doyle. (Supposedly, the phrase was first used in 1915 by P.G. Wodenhouse in his novel Psmith Journalist. In Conan Doyle, the exchange between Watson and Holmes runs as follows: “’Excellent!’” I cried. “’Elementary’,” said he”. Those famous familiar quotations that everybody knows! They are like the proverbs of Alfred and the sayings of King Solomon. Dozens of works on word history open with Voltaire’s witticism that in etymology vowels count for nothing and consonants for very little. Yet it does not turn up in any of his written works.)
Unless counterbalanced by drastic reforms, long tradition usually makes spelling appear at best antiquated and at worst irrational. “This happens in all languages. For example, let us take English,” to quote a linguist of my acquaintance. We will follow his advice and “take” the letter o. Consider the following list:
bosom, Boleyn, woman;
love, dove, above, come, done;
move, prove;
on, gone;
one, none;
so, toe, nose.
On and nose (the short and the long of it) are taken for granted (so and toe are, in partly like nose), but the others?
I’ll begin with woman. The Old English for woman was wifman. Its long i designated a sound comparable with Modern Engl. ee in wee. Later that vowel underwent shortening, so that the word’s pronunciation began to resemble Modern Engl. wifman, rather than weefman, whereupon f was assimilated to its neighbor and wifman first turned into wimman (with regard to assimilation, compare lem’me go from let me go and leman “lover” from leofman) and then into wiman, for, as time went on, English lost long consonants. Contrary to professors of elocution, “common people” mispronounce words, slur as much as they can, and in general do not care about their delivery. Otherwise they would not have allowed wifman to degenerate into wimman. But they did not stop there. To articulate w, speakers protrude their lips and are not always in a hurry to spread them again. The result of this laziness was that Old Engl. widu “wood,” for instance, yielded wudu. Likewise, wiman became wuman. In the Middle English period, scribes disliked the sequences wu, um, mu, un, nu, and uv (because of too many vertical strokes the letters were hard to separate in reading, the more so as the usual signs for v and w were u and uu respectively) and substituted o for u. This is how uuuman became uuoman, that is, woman. Present day English has no words spelled with initial wu-. The few exceptions are dialectal forms recorded by linguists centuries after the phonetic processes mentioned here had been completed, and the only one most of us know is wuther, thanks to Emily Bronte’s title Wuthering Heights. In the early modern period, short u, except in the north of England, changed to the vowel of Standard English one now hears in shut up. Hence love, dove, above, come, and others. The story of done is more complicated: the change from long o (as in the modern paw or pore) to long u (as in the modern school), the shortening of that u, and the last step to the vocalic value of u in shut up. Womb and woman, which also have o contiguous to w, are still pronounced with the vowel of wuther. The original sound remained intact under the influence of w-.
The lips are active not only in the production of w but also in the production of p and b, and this is why pull and bull are pronounced the way they are. However, sometimes p- and b- could not save the following vowel from change, and alongside put, pull, and bull we have putty, pulp, and bulb. Unfortunately, the pernicious habit of designating the vowel in words like womb with the letter o resulted in the modern spelling bosom. The long stressed vowel of Old Engl. bosom (again as in Modern Engl. paw, pore) changed to long u (the equivalent of Modern Engl. oo), underwent shortening, and has been preserved. Boozom, boozam, or buzom would have made sense. Bosom reminds us of the word’s image that has not existed for at least half a millennium, and this is its only virtue. Anne Boleyn’s name was also spelled Bullen, but the unnatural variant has triumphed. When a word of Modern English is spelled with oo, we may assume that in the past it had a long vowel, regardless of whether its today’s reflex is long (as in food, mood) or short (as in good, hood). But the vowel of wood hardly ever was long. It is often said that conservative English spelling comes students in good stead, for it provides a window to the history of the language. It does, but those who look out of that window should be warned that the glass distorts the picture more than once.
It is now clear why prove and proof are spelled differently. The digraph oo in proof causes no surprise. Prove joined the words with v after o. The difference between prove, move and love, dove is that in the first group the vowel has remained long. Had love and dove withstood shortening, the four words would have rhymed, as they probably did in Shakespeare’s days. Today love/move is a so-called rhyme to the eye—a fact of no importance, since rhyming poetry is all but dead.
Old Engl. an “one” (with long a, as in Modern Engl. father) should have developed like stan, which is now stone, and it did, judging by the pronunciation of only (from anlic) and alone (a fusion of two words). In Middle English, an became on (on as in today’s awning). The rest is less clear. At that time, long vowels and diphthongs behaved similarly in that they could be pronounced with stress on the beginning and on the end, and this is why leosan, for instance, existed in two variants: leosan and leosan. As a consequence of this alternation, Standard Engl. lose, the reflex of leosan, has a dialectal variant lease, which continues leosan. This is also the reason show has a competing spelling shew (among the greats G.B. Shaw used only shew). If choose had sheared the fate of lose, today we would be asked “to cheese/chease our cheese.” Apparently, Middle Engl. on, that is, oon could be oon or oon, depending on the rhythm of the sentence. The variant oon was pronounced uon and won, rhyming with on. Several other dialectal variants of the same type have also been attested. Won became wun and later won, indistinguishable from the past tense of win. The pronunciation wonly was already known in 1570. As is usual with phonetic novelties, educated people first rejected the “vulgar” pronunciation of one with initial w- but were overwhelmed. The result is that today one is not a homophone of own. Most language historians trace the novelty described here (from oon to wun and won) to the British southwest, but it is hard to understand why the local pronunciation of such an important word should have been adopted by the Standard. Perhaps the forms with w- developed in the London area in the “allegro speech” of the capital (a great melting pot at all times) or under the influence of the “lower classes.” Once and none have aligned themselves with one. Spelling passed this tempest by.
The conclusion is obvious: the letter o has so many values because spelling has not caught up with the history of English sounds. Language retaliates sluggishness by producing spelling pronunciations. The fairly recent innovations often and fore-head are not the only examples of this type. Those who know about Coventry only from books sometimes pronounce Cov- as in cover. And indeed, who won’t be lost among Coventry ~ cover ~ over? Other people think that the name of the poet Donne, a homophone of done and dun, should be pronounced with the vowel of on. We can pity the naïve foreigner who missed the difference between worsted, the past tense of the verb worst, and worsted, the fabric, but sad is the lot of a native speaker who so often feels like a foreigner at home.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of
Word Origins…And How We Know Them as well as
An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins,
The Oxford Etymologist, appears here each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to
[email protected]; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.”
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Wow! I'm not doing so well with this blogging thing, despite all my good intentions. But here we go again. I'm just back from a wonderful 11 day visit with my daughter and son-in-law in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and with my exceedingly brilliant 2 1/2 year-old grandson, Weston.
I know all grandmas think their grandkids are brilliant, but this child is not only speaking like an adult, he's also pondering life in a way most 2 year-olds don't do. I think he's going to be a writer!
Just one small example (which I will use somewhere in a story, I know.)Weston was sitting in his high chair, eating raspberries and staring thoughtfully into space. After a few moments of silence he said, "Mommy, do bunnies have fur so they won't get sunburned?"
I smiled, thinking ah! If only we were furred, I wouldn't need to lather on all that sunblock I was using in that lovely Santa Fe sunshine. But what if we were furred? All different sorts of colors and textures?
I found myself pondering all sorts of story ideas while with Weston--his way of perceiving life delights me. He loves to talk about and draw "plicky fish," his own invention as far as I know. We had lots of discussions about plicky fish, and I must say the world would be empty without them, now that I have seen them through Weston's eyes. According to his most recent picture, they have brilliant blue eyes, a generous mouth that extends the width of their body, and two delightully designed orange fins to keep their balance. Plicky fish have great adventures too.
I can hardly wait until Weston writes about them.
In the meantime, here I am back from Santa Fe, with my next Pockets deadline staring me in the face. As I sit down to begin, I pray to bring to my writing just a touch of Weston's joyful and creative insight.
And who knows? Maybe even a plicky fish or two.
