Read Online The Story of English in 100 Words by David Crystal - Free Book Online

took place in Britain. In pantomimes it came to be used for a comic middle-aged female character, traditionally played by a man. And the comic overtones spilled over into other comic roles, as in the famous case of Dame Edna Everage (aka Barry Humphries). This is as far away from the upper strata of society as it’s possible to imagine.
    The higher up the social scale we go, the more strictly the address rules are imposed. At the highest levels, whole books have been devoted to how we should address a prince, a duke, a baroness, a president, a professor, a cardinal, a judge, a mayor … It can get very complicated, especially in Britain. Is a duke called
Your Grace
or
My Lord
? What about an earl, a marquess or a baron? Most people would have to look up the answer. (All are
My Lord
, except the duke.) Is the sovereign’s son called
Your Royal Highness
? Yes. What about the sovereign’s son’s son? Yes. And the sovereign’s son’s son’s son? No. Getting it wrong would be a terrible
faux pas
, in some circles.

Skirt
    a word doublet (13th century)
    When two cultures come together, the words of their languages compete for survival. We can see the process taking place early on in the history of English, following the Danish invasions of Britain. The Danes spoke a language known as Old Norse, and this had many words that had a related form in Old English. What would people end up saying? Would the Danish settlers adopt the Old English words? Or would the Anglo-Saxons adopt the Old Norse ones?
    In the event, people went in both directions. During the Middle English period we find Norse
egg
and
sister
ousting Old English
ey
and
sweoster
. And Old English
path
and
swell
ousted
reike
and
bolnen
. But there was a third solution: the Old English and Old Norse words both survived, because people gave them different meanings. This is what happened to
skirt
and
shirt
.
    Shirt
is found occasionally in late Old English (spelled
scyrte
), with the meaning of a short garment worn by both men and women.
Skirt
, from Old Norse, is known from the 1300s, and seems to havebeen used chiefly for the female garment – the lower part of a dress or gown. But the word could also be used for the lower part of a man’s robe or coat too. And it is this notion of ‘lower part of something’ which led to the later sense of
skirt
meaning an edge or boundary – hence such words as
outskirts
and
skirting board
.
    Shirt
and
skirt
went different ways during the Middle English period.
Shirt
became increasingly used only for the male garment, and
skirt
for the female. But the distinction has never been complete. Today, women’s fashion includes shirts, and skirts are normal wear for men in many countries (though, kilts aside, rarely encountered in Western culture). Clothing such as the
T-shirt
is gender-neutral. And most of the idioms using
shirt
are too. Both men and women can
bet their shirt
, give away
the shirt off their back
and
keep their shirt on
.
    Cases like
shirt
/
skirt
, where both words survive, are known as
doublets
, and there are many of them in English. From the Danish period, we find Old Norse
dike
alongside Old English
ditch
, and similarly
hale
and
whole
,
scrub
and
shrub
,
sick
and
ill
and many more. There are even more in regional dialects, where the Old English word has become the standard form and the Old Norse word remains local, as in
church
vs
kirk
,
yard
vs
garth
,
write
vs
scrive
and – of especial interest because of its widespread dialect use –
no
vs
nay
.

Jail
    competing words (13th century)
    One of the most noticeable features of English vocabulary is the large number of words that entered the language as borrowings from French, especially in the period after the Norman invasion of 1066. Some of them are illustrated by the cooking and legal terms that form part of the story of
pork
and
chattels
(§ §17 , 18 ). The vast majority of French loans were borrowed just once – which is what one would expect. But on a few