Ten ‘Modern’ Words with Older Literary Connections
If you think ‘totes’, ‘fangirl’, and
‘trick out’ are recent idioms, then we’re here to surprise you. In this list,
we study ten words which have grown in status in recent years, but which have
literary origins extending back many decades, and in some cases many centuries.
Unless stated otherwise, all citations are to be found in the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED).
1. Totes. The word ‘tote’ meaning
‘the total amount’ is first found in print in a volume of essays from 1772:
‘That this was the whole tote of his case is notoriously known.’ Meanwhile,
‘totes’ is recorded from 1887 in the sense of ‘total abstainer’ in E. J.
Mather’s book Nor’ard of Dogger: ’The fishermen are all “totes”‘ (as in total
abstainers from alcohol). This is the forerunner to the modern word ‘totes’,
slang for ‘totally’, used as an adverb rather than a noun, as in the infamous
recent phrase, ‘totes amazeballs’.
2. Simples. Known in Britain thanks
largely to a meerkat-led marketing campaign, this word – used often as a
colloquial variant of the more usual adjective ‘simple’ – is found in James
Joyce’s modernist classic Ulysses (1922): ‘The first fellow that picked an herb
to cure himself had a bit of pluck. Simples.’
3. Unfriend. The word ‘unfriend’ as
a noun dates from around 1275, meaning ‘one who is not a friend’. It is found
in Layamon’s medieval epic poem Brut, which also provides us with the first
recorded use of our next word (more of which anon). Meanwhile, ‘unfriend’ as a
verb is attested from 1659 in a work by a T. Fuller: ‘I Hope, Sir, that we are
not mutually Un-friended by this Difference which hath happened betwixt us.’
Fuller got there nearly 350 years before Facebook.
4. Muggle. Also from Layamon’s epic
poem Brut (which tells the story of the founding of Britain), ‘muggle’ appears
in the mid-1270s with a slightly different meaning from the one originated by
J. K. Rowling for her Harry Potter series. In Layamon’s work, a ‘muggle’ was ‘a
tail resembling that of a fish’ rather than ‘someone born without magical
abilities’.
5. Trick out. As slang for ‘adorn’
or ‘decorate’, the verb phrase ‘trick out’ was first used by Sir Walter Scott
in a letter of February 1822: ‘I must trick out my dwelling with something
fantastical.’
6. Email. Thomas Nashe’s 1594 work
The Terrors of the Night includes the word ‘email’ – used as an alternative
word for enamel, derived from the French. The modern sense of ‘email’ as in an
electronic communication is, of course, much more recent (1979), but it’s
interesting to learn that the word had been used nearly 400 years earlier, to
denote a different thing altogether.
7. Google. This word is most famous
as the name for the search engine founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin
(originally under the name BackRub). They wrote: ‘We chose our systems name,
Google, because it is a common spelling of googol, or 10100 and fits well with
our goal of building very large-scale search engines.’ (‘Googol’, the word for
this very large number, had been invented by the nine-year-old nephew of a
mathematician back in 1940.) But the word ‘Google’ with this spelling is much
older than the search engine. It appears in a 1953 letter written by Raymond
Chandler to his agent: ‘The sudden brightness swung me round and the Fourth
Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator
and Google had told me it wasn’t enough.’ But Enid Blyton’s 1941 novel The
Magic Faraway Tree refers to a ’Google Bun’ while another book by Blyton,
Circus Days Again (1942), features a clown called Google. Meanwhile ‘google’ as
a cricketing term (as in ‘googly’) is found in 1907 in the Badminton Magazine.
But don’t take our word for all this: you can always Google it.
8. Reem. This will be familiar to
some British readers because of the ITV2 programme The Only Way is Essex, about
the lives of a group of young people from the English county near London. This
show has popularised the word ‘reem’ as an adjective meaning ‘cool’ or ‘good’,
but the word existed with an earlier meaning long before the programme. The
word ‘reem’ is first found in English in 1607, in reference to an ox-like
animal mentioned in ancient Hebrew literature.
9. Bang. The word ‘bang’ appears to
have been used as slang for sexual intercourse as early as 1677 in Aphra Behn’s
play The Rover: ‘We’ll both lie with her, and then let me alone to bang her.’
For more on this, see this site.
10. Fangirl. The word ‘fangirl’ is
first recorded in 1934, in a novel by humorist A. P. Herbert called Holy
Deadlock. ‘Fanboy’ is found as early as 1919…
So there we have it! Are there any
we’ve missed off the list?
PS The original list is at Ten ‘Modern’ Words with Older Literary Connections