One of the highlights of my summer has been recording a programme for Radio 4 about a tiny book once considered so dangerous it had to be smuggled into England inside bags of flour and bales of cloth. Its author, William Tyndale, would eventually be executed for the treachery of producing a Bible in English without the sanction of the authorities, bypassing the Latin of the Vatican that had until then ensured every word of Scripture was mediated via the gatekeepers of the church. Remarkably, despite this cruel end, modern English is still studded with Tyndale’s phraseology.
As I discovered in the course of making the programme, it isn’t just Tyndale’s idioms - from ‘den of thieves’ and ‘in a twinkling of an eye’ to ‘making light of’, ‘good luck’, and ‘run wild’ - that have survived so spectacularly. For me, it is his attention to the rhythm and musicality of natural language that makes his legacy so special. The Oxford scholar was well aware that few amongst his Bible’s audience could read and would therefore need to be read to, and so he strived to achieve an auditory memorability that would allow his listeners to fully absorb the message of God. One of the ways in which he managed that was by doing something surprising: Tyndale, just like Shakespeare after him, was a master of a technique that many of us assume to be a very modern infestation of English: he verbed.
Turning nouns into verbs, part of a process known as ‘conversion’ or ‘functional shift’, has been a feature of English since the Middle Ages. Tyndale liked nothing more than moving a word from one part of speech to another. Some of his creations are surprising even to modern ears: he used ‘midwife’ as a verb, as well as ‘money’ and ‘advantage’. Others are now so established we pass them by, such as ‘harness’, ‘corrupt’, and ‘appropriate’. His habit of playing around with existing structures was just one part of the exuberance that fizzed through his Bible translation.
This makes it all the more surprising to me that, today, verbing is almost guaranteed to make us wince. The moment we hear someone ‘medalled’ or ‘podiumed’ at the Olympics, or a colleague announces they will ‘circle back’, is a moment we would like to forget. The blame is almost always placed at the supersized feet of North Americans, who, we are convinced, create new and ugly verbs willy-nilly. This is despite the fact that the historical dictionary will tell you that most examples, such as ‘actioned’, are centuries old and very much British in origin.
In looking at Tyndale’s examples I wondered for the umpteenth time why, 500 years later, so many of us blame anything we don’t particularly like about our language’s evolution on the influence of US English. It’s not the ‘proper’ kind, we say - more a lazy rip-off that cheapens the whole affair. Even the wonderful J.R.R. Tolkien (once a lexicographer at the Oxford English Dictionary) compared American English to the British version ‘after being wiped over with a dirty sponge’.
Groans such as these leave me completely baffled, not least because a lot of the so-called Americanizations we love to hate (more of that z anon) were ours to begin with. I am talking about such obviously American words as ‘sidewalk’ here, as well as ‘fall’ instead of ‘autumn’. The truth is that both were happily settled in British English long before, when ‘sidewalk’ (16th century) quite happily served as the name for a path by the side of a road, and ‘fall’ (also from the 1500s) was second only to ‘harvest’ for the season of mellow fruitfulness. Once the Normans had settled in and French became the language of prestige, we decided to adopt our version of l’automne instead.
