Gift of the Gob: Morsels of English Language History

INTRODUCTION

Why Gift of the Gob?

Several years ago, Gift of the Gab: Australia and Languages was chosen by the Australian Academy of Humanities as the name for its annual symposium.¹ I loved the title and it motivated me to investigate the complicated history of gab and gob. Very colloquial expressions are generally short-lived, but these two have endured. Both gab and gift of the gab show the usual fate of survivors — they generally intrude into neutral style and become standard. Older gob and gift of the gob have also survived, and have managed to stay surprisingly contemporary-sounding — still a little improper and still slangy after nearly 500 years! Much of what I investigate in this book is the vernacular and involves the tug of love that exists between non-standard and standard usage. The slightly shabby expression gift of the gob provides just the right image — unless, of course, it’s one of clots of phlegm!

Clearly, there is a group of people who will not share my fondness for the expression gift of the gob. Suzanne Falkiner, whose linguistic judgements I value enormously, was quite clear on the matter: ‘… gob in my mind was immediately associated with hawking and spitting, and gift of the did not improve the image!’

We have an unfortunate clash of gobs here. The word I have in mind is the Celtic gob meaning ‘mouth’ and more recently ‘talk, conversation, language’. Its respectable twin is gab — a later pronunciation that we know best in the fixed expression gift of the gab, said of someone who’s fluent in speech (compare earlier flash the gab ‘to show off in talk’). Gab wasn’t always respectable though. In Captain Francis Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, it has a place alongside gob:

GOB. The mouth; also a bit or morsel; whence gobbets. Gift of the gob; wide-mouthed, or one who speaks fluently, or sings well.

GAB, or GOB. The mouth. Gift of the gab; a facility of speech, nimble-tongued eloquence. To blow the gab; to confess or preach.

This extraordinary dictionary was first published in 1785, with fuller editions appearing in 1788, 1796 and 1811. Gob and gab are among the 4000 colloquialisms and vulgarisms that have been lovingly compiled — with scholarship and good humour — by the Falstaffian Grose.

The word that Suzanne is referring to is French-inspired gob (or gobbe). It entered English, together with its diminutive gobbet, in the 1300s. Its earliest meaning was ‘lump, mass’, but it wasn’t long before it shifted to ‘mouthful of food’. The sense ‘lump of slimy substance’ emerged in the 1500s, and for many people now ‘large thick expectoration’ is the prevailing meaning. Some know it better in its derived verb form gob ‘to spit’, which arose towards the end of the 1800s.

It is likely that both gobs are ultimately connected. However, they came into English independently from the Gaelic and the French and, ever since arriving, their histories have been completely enmeshed. It is almost certainly the case that gob ‘mouth’ helped to move gob ‘lump’ and little gobbet ‘fragment’ along the semantic path to ‘mouthful’. Mind you, they wouldn’t have needed much encouragement — the shift from ‘portion’ to ‘portion to be swallowed’ is well attested. Morsel has traveled the same road. Either of the gobs could have spawned the 17th-century verb gobble ‘to guzzle’ or expressions like all gob and guts for ‘greedy children’ or ‘talkative adults’. Modern lexicographers keep the two gobs apart, but ordinary usage has lumped them together for some time. You can see that the meanings Grose provides for gob include both ‘mouth’ and ‘morsel’.

Now, it is possible for terms that have degraded to occasionally shed their negative senses and scale the semantic abyss. In this book, we will encounter many cases where unpleasant overtones have gradually eroded over the years. Once-appalling insults like scumbag and ratbag are now playful epithets. Words can also acquire a kind of ‘semantic halo’.² We see this in the socially driven elevation of terms such as democracy and politician (although admittedly the halo on politician is rather precariously perched!). Modern times have shown that it is even possible to deliberately reclaim offensive and pejorative expressions and use them in a positive sense. The term wog is now very much out there in the public realm, as evident in the success of movies such as Wogs Out of Work and the recipe collection The Wog Cookbook. (Of course, when used by those without ‘natural cover’ the label is still potentially derogatory.)

It is time to re-evaluate the semantics of gob. Imagine gobs of good nature, gobs of gold or gobs of pudding. Think of gobstoppers. As Walter de la Mare once said: ‘Are these not good names for goodies?’ (In his day they were probably ‘humbugs’, not the jawbreaker lollies of today.) We’ve been shoving gobsticks ‘spoons’ (more recently ‘clarinets’) into our mouths for centuries. There are so many expressions that gob has given rise to over the years, some remain favourites today: gobsmacked and gobstruck, two lovely words to use when you’re lost for words, and gobbledygook, a delightful way to refer to ‘loquacious nonsense’. So banish all thoughts of hawking or spitting. Gift of the Gob should bring to mind ‘nimble-tongued eloquence’ — mouth-filling morsels of English language history.

These linguistic morsels have all been inspired by the general public — published letters to editors and also personal letters, emails and general feedback I have received over many years of public lectures (for schools, festivals, charities and a range of societies and institutions). They are also the result of more than sixteen years involvement with the ABC, preparing and presenting weekly programs on language for radio and, more recently, for television. During this time, I have been lucky enough to be involved in a number of talkback radio programs and have also been given the opportunity to write regular pieces for ABC Radio’s Soundbank. This book features many of these pieces. The chance to present a weekly language spot on the ABC TV show Can We Help (www.abc.net.au/tv/canwehelp/) has provided me with many more tidbits — far more than I could squeeze into here.

I want to emphasize how grateful I am to all those at ABC’s Soundbank and Can We Help — without them there would be no book. I also want to thank all those people who have contacted me over the years with their observations on language and queries about usage. I learn much and derive a huge amount of pleasure following up on these. There are others I need to thank, too. No book these days appears without layers of wonderful editorial involvement, and this book is certainly no exception. My thanks in particular must go to Susan Morris-Yates, Glenda Downing, Jo Mackay and Mary Rennie. I want also to express my deepest gratitude to Suzanne Falkiner, a name you will encounter throughout this book. Suzanne is a wonderful editor. Her insights and suggestions — everything from advice on infelicitous wording and punctuation to the intricacies of gobs, cut snakes and galvanic skin responses — were invaluable. Finally, on a personal note, thank you to Ross and Daniel for their patience and encouragement (notwithstanding Daniel’s occasional outbreaks at the dinner table: ‘No more talk of the gob, please'!).

In conclusion, I need to provide a quick note on the layout and some technicalities of this book. Like its predecessors, Blooming English and Weeds in the Garden of Words, these short accounts from the history of English are all self-contained entities. I have retained the breakout boxes of the earlier books, but this time have used them as an opportunity to reproduce some of the original questions that triggered the pieces. In addition, I have decided to include quite detailed endnotes for those who feel they would like to follow up any of the themes. On a technical note, I usually render pronunciations in quasi-phonetic spelling (indicated by angle brackets). Only occasionally do I provide phonetic symbols (indicated by square brackets) because I realize that not everyone is comfortable reading phonetic ‘hieroglyphs’. Letters (as opposed to sounds) are always given in quotation marks. An asterisk before an expression indicates that it is a reconstructed form. Finally, like the previous two books, this one is much like a degustation menu. The ‘gobbets’ can be consumed randomly or consecutively — as the diner desires.

CHAPTER ONE

Dictionaries

As sheer casual reading-matter, I still find the English dictionary the most interesting book in the language.

Albert Jay Nock, Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, 1943, p. 15

When is a word a word?

Compiling dictionaries is tricky, especially now when English is acquiring vocabulary at such an extraordinary rate. Many new words are one-offs, of course, spur-of-the-moment, shortlived. People do love to invent words and I gather some even send their creations off to dictionary editors in the hope they might make it onto their lists. However, for inclusion to happen there needs to be some indication of general usage. Stroodle ‘the annoying piece of cheese stretching from a slice of hot pizza to one’s mouth’, like all of comedian Rich Hall’s wonderful inventions, certainly fills a lexical gap but hasn’t yet made it – it remains a sniglet ‘a word that should be in the dictionary, but isn’t’. For the Oxford English Dictionary, a neologism requires five years of solid evidence of use for admission. As the new-words editor Fiona McPherson once put it, ‘We need to be sure that a word has established a reasonable amount of longevity’.¹ The editors of the Macquarie Dictionary write in the Introduction to the fourth edition that ‘to earn a place in the dictionary, a word has to prove that it has some acceptance. That is to say, it has to turn up a number of times in a number of different contexts over a period of time.’

All this was much easier to determine for early lexicographers who sourced their new words almost exclusively from books. It was formal written language, therefore, that typically made it into dictionaries. The words were written on cards each time a new instance of their usage was discovered and, when there was a substantial number of cards, it could be established that a word was in general usage. These were largely respectable words, and any bit of slang that snuck through would be well and truly branded with some sort of derogatory label. These days it is all very different. Lexicographers have to consider newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, menus, memos, TV and radio broadcasts and, of course, emails, chat-room discussions and blogs. The internet makes it easier for dictionary-makers to track a word and to test its currency. However, it is also a trigger for huge numbers of new words to be created, and it is also the reason that they are taken up so quickly.

The expressions of fast and furious speech are no longer confined to the street. The internet gives them a cachet, a new respectability.² ‘The boundless chaos of a living speech’ (as Samuel Johnson put it in the Preface to his dictionary) is now very much a part of writing and, especially in e-communication, it shows all the variation you’d expect of spoken language — regional, social, age-related, even personality-based variation now regularly appears in the written language in ways it hasn’t for centuries. These days, new dictionary entries such as bootylicious (to describe a woman with an attractive rear) and beer goggles (for the fuzzy vision after too much alcohol that makes a member of the opposite sex look more attractive) sit alongside more dignified neologisms such as immunosurveillance ‘recognition and destruction of abnormal cells by the immune system’ and qaly ‘quality-adjusted life year’ (a technical term — Scrabble players will love this one!).

The vocabulary of a language changes more than any other aspect of it, and dictionary-makers are constantly having to redraw the exclusion boundary for marginal vocabulary items. Yeah-no has been around for a few years now (in Australian English probably since the late 1990s). When will it appear in our dictionaries? For many younger speakers several no longer means ‘a few’, but is a proportion of whatever you start off with — for these speakers, several can mean as many as a hundred. When will dictionaries acknowledge this meaning? When will they admit the spelling of accommodation with only one ‘m’? After all, they include many original misspellings. Miniscule is there with the erroneous ‘i’ spelling. Even nucular appears in some dictionaries, alongside nuclear. It is not easy for dictionary makers. They are the guardians of the language and when their dictionaries take on board expressions like yeah-no and nucular, they are letting down the side. Inevitably, there are the howls from some quarters about declining standards. Yet it is also true that people will drop dictionaries like hot cakes precisely for the reason that they have not kept up to date.³ Somehow these word stocks should include only those neologisms that we all approve of!

‘Corruptions of ignorance’

A generous colleague of mine once lent me his magnificent copy of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755). Johnson’s wasn’t the first dictionary of the language, but it was the first standard work in that it looked not just at specialist or obscure terms, as previous collections had done, but rather at everyday language. Moreover, Johnson backed up his definitions with quotations, more than 100,000, in fact — a huge task, especially for one person in the 18th century. After nine long years in the making, the result was a most remarkable dictionary and one that makes for intriguing reading today. Some of his entries are now famous. One of the most well known is the definition of the word oats: ‘A grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’ Later Johnson admitted to greatly enjoying this swipe at the Scots. What particularly interests me is the disreputable vocabulary in his dictionary, the expressions labeled by Johnson as ‘bad’, ‘barbarous’, low’, even ‘ludicrous’. There were various derogatory labels that he would slap onto words he felt weren’t up to scratch, and it is fascinating to look at these.

Johnson complained in his Preface that the English language had ‘suffered to spread … into wild exuberance, resigned to the tyranny of time and fashion, and exposed to the corruptions of ignorance, and caprices of innovation’. One of his aims was to rid the language, as he put it, of ‘barbarous corruptions’, ‘licentious idioms’ and ‘colloquial barbarisms’. So how is it that some words are condemned in this way? Typically, the linguistic items that end up on someone’s hit list are the words and word usages that are believed to threaten in some way the identity of the culture in question. Authenticity is the keyword here, and it has two faces.

One is the desire to rid the language of unwanted elements and to protect it from foreign influences. Borrowings, especially from French, irked Samuel Johnson greatly. Words such as finesse and ruse he described as ‘neither elegant nor necessary’, trait as ‘scarce English’. In the Preface, he warned that more such borrowings would ‘reduce us to babble a dialect of France’. The other face of linguistic purism is the struggle to arrest change and to retain the language in its perceived traditional form. Johnson strongly objected to the words mighty and wondrous as intensifying expressions, as in mighty thoughtful and wondrous fair. ‘Not to be used’, Johnson wrote, ‘but in very low language.’ (You might compare your own queasiness at modern-day expressions such as absolutely and even awesome.)

Much of his disparagement was aimed at meaning shifts. For example, in Johnson’s day the meaning of sensible ‘having the power of perception’ was in the process of giving way to the modern-day meaning ‘showing sound judgement’. Such usage Johnson described as ‘low’. He was also extremely critical of shortenings, such as hyper ‘barbarously curtailed from hypercritick’; phiz ‘a ridiculous contraction from physiognomy’; thro’ ‘contracted by barbarians from through’. He disapproved of the verb to colour, ‘a low word, used only in conversation’. Presumably, Johnson opposed the conversion of the noun colour to a verb, just as people today despise coinages such as to beverage and to stretcher. Also condemned was the verb dumbfound, a blended construction combining dumb and confound. I assume it was the mongrel origins that were at fault here. Other negatively branded entries were plentiful in his dictionary: clever, coax, chum, horrid, mishmash, flippant, fuss, banter, simpleton, and many more. Presumably the worst examples never even made it into the collection.

Clearly, many of these expressions were contemporary slang. In his Preface, Johnson advised against ‘compliance with fashion’ and ‘lust of innovation’. Entries like the one for shabby (with the meaning ‘ungenerous, mean’) are revealing: ‘A word that has crept into conversation and low writing; but ought not to be admitted into the language.’ The label ‘slang’, however, was not available at this time to describe such language. In Johnson’s day, slang referred specifically to the argot of criminals, and it wasn’t until the early 1800s that the current meaning emerged.

Much like today, the appearance of works like Johnson’s dictionary triggered acrimony, since what was correct to one person was frequently incorrect to another. Often a lot of the conflict was concerned with what can probably be regarded as stylistic variation. In his Elements of Orthoepy (1784), Robert Nares takes Johnson to task for mis-accenting the words bombast, carbine and finance in his dictionary. Nares wanted the stress to fall on the initial syllable (the newer stress we know today). As with any act of censoring, these 18th-century practices were tied firmly to the censors’ own personal beliefs and preferences. For instance, the word belly-timber ‘food’ appears in Johnson’s work, but without any disparaging label. This expression was widely condemned by many at the time for its ‘frivolous nature’ and ‘vile and despicable origin’. Johnson obviously didn’t agree!

Prescriptive scholars like Johnson and Nares often failed to conform to their own prescriptions. When Johnson railed about French borrowings, he was objecting to the fashionable use of French among the cultivated upper classes, who peppered their conversations with French words and phrases. Yet his own language was abundantly Latinate in style! Puristic endeavours necessarily promote a kind of mental dishonesty, and those who attempt them soon find themselves bemired in contradiction. In fact, as soon as he’d produced his dictionary, Johnson recognized the futility of his original aim to ‘ascertain’ or ‘embalm’ the language — an expectation, which (as he put it) ‘neither reason nor experience can justify’. ‘Tongues, like governments,’ he concluded, ‘have a natural tendency to degeneration.’ He might have been correct about governments, but it should be abundantly clear from even this small selection that ‘barbarous’ language, if it survives (and most doesn’t), eventually forms part of the standard language. Meanwhile, of course, new ‘corruptions of ignorance’ and ‘caprices of innovation’ turn up. And so the battle goes on.

As an aside here, dictionary-makers of Johnson’s time and earlier are famous for creating words. Samuel Johnson himself couldn’t resist the temptation and admits to having planted three or four words in his dictionary.⁴ Such ‘hot-house words’ are then raised and nurtured in the dictionary — even picked up by other collections, by which stage no one would dare doubt the words’ existence. Such is the clout of the standard language and its arsenal of dictionaries and handbooks!

DOCTOR’S PROSCRIPTION

Here are some of the labels that Dr Johnson slapped on vocabulary he felt wasn’t up to scratch for his Dictionary of the English Language:⁵

bad (a general term of condemnation); applied to fraughtage ‘cargo’

familiar (used in conversation, colloquial); applied to abominably

ludicrous (not fit for serious usage); applied to chitchat

low (informal, not polite and not suited to dignified writing); applied to frisky

burlesque (jocular unsuitable language); applied to ribroast ‘to beat soundly’

barbarous (impure, unsuitable language); applied to nowadays

cant (the jargon of a group, especially criminal); applied to bamboozle

unauthorized, of no authority (not supported by any authority); applied to spick and span.

Johnson would conjoin labels for those words he particularly disapproved of — fun, glum and lingo were branded as ‘low cant’; woundy (’excessive’) and cudden (’a clown’) as ‘low bad’; and shab (’to play mean tricks’) as ‘low barbarous cant’. Other critical labels used at this time included ‘vulgar’, ‘rude’, ‘ungenteel’, ‘inelegant’, ‘disgustful’, ‘improper’, ‘familiar’, ‘vile’, ‘rustick’ and ‘country’ — certainly, no such descriptions appear in any dictionary today!

NODE

The New Zealanders among you should be happy. The word chillybin (the NZ equivalent of the Australian esky) has made it into one of the Oxford English dictionaries, not the Oxford English Dictionary, though. This is a new one with a subtly altered title — the New Oxford Dictionary of English, affectionately called NODE for short. This new dictionary seems quite different from other Oxford works. For a start, it is tied much more to actual usage than other mainstream dictionaries, so that there are a good many new informal entries and some surprisingly slangy ones among them. It also includes a good dollop of expressions from Englishes around the world; more than 11,000 entries, in fact. With the increasing internationalization of English this is an inevitable development, and the editors are probably right when they claim that NODE is ‘the first genuinely international dictionary of English’.

What struck me when I looked at a sample of the new additions was the number of blended expressions, words that have been created from a combination of two that already exist. In the past, blending hasn’t been considered a terribly significant method of coinage. However, times have changed and this dictionary is the evidence. It has dozens of brand-new blended creations (of the type that Johnson condemned so roundly). Some of them are lovely. There are those for new crossbreeds of dogs such as the cockapoo (or cockerpoo), a mix of a cocker spaniel and poodle, and, of course, the labradoodle, the cross between a labrador and a poodle.

Beyond the canine bitsers, there is Hinglish for the variety of English used by speakers of Hindi; and Lollywood, the popular film industry based in Pakistan. Like Bollywood, this is a clever blend, this time of Lahore and Hollywood. There’s also dramedy, a combination of drama and comedy, used to describe television programs or films whose comic elements derive from character and plot development. The word greige also makes an appearance for the first time; this is a combination of grey and beige, as you’ve probably figured out. I gather this has been used for some time in the clothing industry as a technical term for untreated fabric; those in the Australian rag trade seem very familiar with it. One of my favourite blends in this new dictionary is chugger. Next time you’re accosted in the street for a donation or subscription, you’ll have a word for it — the chugger, or charity mugger.

Not all are happy with this new dictionary, it seems. One complainant in the UK’s Daily Telegraph described it as a ‘dumbed down version of the Oxford English Dictionary’. This is often the reaction to a new dictionary or a new edition of an existing one. When current usage is acknowledged, people complain — those same people who will stop using the dictionary if it doesn’t update. Sticky wickets, cleft sticks, rocks and hard places always come to mind when I think of the plight of the dictionary-maker.

McDonald’s and the dictionary

Some of you might recall the campaign launched by the McDonald’s Corporation in 2007. McDonald’s wanted the Oxford English Dictionary either to remove altogether or fix the entry for the word McJob. As it now stands, this reads: ‘McJob: an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects’. Walt Riker, a spokesman for McDonald’s, said at the time that the dictionary definition was misleading and humiliating to his company’s employees. He is quoted as saying on Chicago Public Radio, ‘McJobs is dead wrong, and it’s an unfair description of the kind of opportunity that we provide at McDonald’s.’⁶ Another spokesman, David Fairhurst, told Time magazine that the dictionary definition of McJob should be changed ‘to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime’.⁷

Recall what Humpty Dumpty said in Lewis