In England, the Renaissance was a time of expansion—not only of English trade (in Europe) and imperialism (in less fortunate parts of the globe), but of the English language. After centuries of living in the shadow of the more prestigious Latin, English finally began to emerge as a learned language in its own right.
True to the name of the times, this was a real moment of rebirth. Centuries before, English had already been cultivated into a scholarly tongue by the Anglo-Saxons, who had used it to write works of history, medicine, and theology. But after the Norman Conquest in 1066, English had been displaced from these and many other spheres of use by Latin and Norman French.
English, of course, continued to be spoken for humdrum, everyday purposes in England—and, over time, it crept back into use as the primary language of literature, court proceedings, and government administration. But it would take four centuries and the arrival of the printing press before the English plucked up enough linguistic pride to start using their mother tongue as a language of the arts and sciences once again.
The trouble was, by then, English no longer had the necessary vocabulary to talk about the arts and sciences. English scholars got around this problem by borrowing vast droves of words from languages that did have the vocabulary—mostly Latin, but also other learned tongues. A lot of these borrowed words filled genuine gaps in the English language, like affidavit (from Latin), anatomy (ultimately from Greek), and algebra (ultimately from Arabic).
However, many other loanwords did not meet an obvious need in English, but were borrowed simply for literary effect or out of sheer enthusiasm for neologisms. Not everybody approved of this zeal for Englishing foreign words—or Anglifying them, to use a term that was, yes, coined from Latin at the time. The author William Fulwood complained in 1568:
the fayrest language that may bee, is the common and familiar speache, and not […] inckhorne termes skummed from the Latin.
‘Inkhorn term’ became a pejorative phrase for any learned foreign word that was perceived to be an unnecessary addition to the language—not a ‘proper’ English word at all, but one that some overly pretentious writer had fished straight out of their ink-pot.
The lexicographer Henry Cockeram voiced a similarly dim view of frivolous word-borrowing in the preface to his English Dictionarie of 1623. He explained that he had felt compelled to include in his dictionary not only the ‘choisest words themselues now in vse, wherewith our language is inriched and become so copious’, but also:
the mocke-words which are ridiculously vsed in our language, that those who desire a generality of knowledge may not bee ignorant of the sense, euen of the fustian termes, vsed by too many who study rather to bee heard speake, than to vnderstand themselues.
Cockeram’s criticism of ‘fustian termes’ will probably be met with sympathy from anyone who’s ever had to sit through a modern academic conference. But it was also outrageously hypocritical.
Cockeram’s own dictionary is filled with words that had never before seen the light of day in English, but that were borrowed from Latin and Greek by Cockeram himself. This is a startling departure from our modern idea of what the job of a dictionary-writer is—’not [to] form, but register the language’; ‘not [to] teach men how they should think, but relate how they have hitherto expressed their thoughts’, as Samuel Johnson would explain in his own Dictionary of the English Language in 1755.
The motive behind Cockeram’s borrowing is now lost to us. Perhaps he simply wanted to bulk out his dictionary, to justify his boast on the title page that it contained ‘some thousands of words neuer published by any [dictionary] heretofore’. Perhaps he genuinely believed that the words he added to the language would prove useful to his readers. Still, it’s hard to imagine how some of his neologisms would ever have come up in casual conversation:
- Agelasticke. One that neuer laughes.
- Antelucidate. To worke by candle light before day.
- Bulbitate. To befilth ones breech.
- Calamist. One hauing his haire turning vpward.
- Celeripedean. A swift foot man.
- Depalmate. To giue one a box on the eare.
- Galactopoton. One that still drinkes milke.
- Mulierositie. The vice of louing many women.
- Pupillate. To cry like a Peacocke.
- Zoograph. Any one that painteth beasts.
A lot of Cockeram’s loanwords have never seen much, or any, use in English in the centuries since he wrote his dictionary. But sometimes Cockeram got lucky, and borrowed a word that would go on to have a vigorous life in the language. He is, for example, the first known English user of the words abduction (‘A leading away’), cremation (‘A burning’), and inhalation (‘A breathing in’). But my favourite of Cockeram’s coinages is tardigrade.
Nowadays, tardigrades are microscopic, slow-moving, water-dwelling animals, first identified by the German zoologist Johann August Ephraim Goeze in 1773. Goeze named them Wasserbären (‘waterbears’), but in 1776 the Italian scientist Lazzaro Spallanzani rechristened them tardigradi (from Latin tardus ‘slow’ and gradus ‘step’). This word was shortly afterwards borrowed into English as tardigrade.
Presumably no one involved in the transfer from Latin via Italian to English was aware that the word had already entered the language almost two centuries before in Cockeram’s English Dictionarie. Cockeram, of course, had had no knowledge of microscopes or minuscule animals. He was just taking bits of Latin, throwing them against the wall of English, and seeing what stuck. To him, a tardigrade was simply ‘A slow goer’.
Secondary Sources
Oxford English Dictionary Online. (2000–). Retrieved from http://www.oed.com.
Romano, F. A., III. (2003). On Water Bears. Florida Entomologist, 86(2), 134–137.
Oxonisms 