The Scrivener: Out Of The Closet
Master wordsmithBrian Barratt has been looking into the origins of well-known ‘Americanisms’ – with surprising results.
This is the first in a series of three articles. The second in the series will appear in Open Writing next Friday.
For further intellectual stimulation and delight do please visit Brian’s Web site The Brain Rummager www.alphalink.com.au/~umbidas/
A few years ago I researched about 60 ‘Americanisms’ and found that many are simply spellings or usages which early settlers took with them when they left Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. Let’s have a look at a few.
Autumn or Fall? In 1545, a British writer referred to the four seasons of ‘Spring tyme, Somer, faule of the leafe, and winter’. Fall is a picturesque word and a very apt opposite of Spring.
Footpath or sidewalk? In British English, footpath was used in the 1500s. Sidewalk, a pathway by the side of a road, was used in Britain in the 1600s. It was the word preferred by the American dictionary makers. Pavement was originally a 13th century term for a hard floor made of paving slabs, but in Britain it is used to denote a footpath.
Agreeance is an unusual one. I have heard it only twice in speech, and have not come across it in print. An American friend used it in conversation in about 1995. In January 2001, during an Australian television interview, a cricketer was asked if he was in agreeance with certain plans.
The word comes from early 16th century English. Like agreeingly, from later in the 16th century, if has fallen out of use in British English. Agree and agreeable, first recorded in Chaucer's writing in the 14th century, have stayed with us. Agreement is first recorded early in the 15th century.
Bandwagon is an Americanism — and a very cheerful one — that adds colour to our language. It originated around 1855 in the days of the great travelling circuses in the USA. One of the gaudily decorated wagons in the circus processions carried the band. Just the thing for children to run after or even jump onto! In Australia, we’ve been jumping onto figurative bandwagons ever since without really considering where they might take us.
Closets were popular in some circles in Australia in the 1970s — they were places from which homosexuals emerged when they ‘came out’. The metaphor was borrowed from the USA where closet is the word for a wardrobe or small room for keeping clothes. In Australia we prefer to use the word wardrobe. As far as I know, that is still the British preference.
In the English language, both words are at least 600 years old. A closet was originally a small room used for privacy. A wardrobe was a small room where clothes could be kept safely. The same word could also denote the small private room wherein one performed defecation. Shakespeare refers many times to the closet as a private room, a bedroom, a room where one stores one’s treasures. This example is from Romeo and Juliet:
JULIET. Nurse, will you go with me into my closet
To help me sort such needful ornaments
As you think fit to furnish me to-morrow?
Having said all that, I do hope that you are in agreeance that we should not return to the practice of using our wardrobes for defecation. That would not be nice.
© Copyright 2003, 2007 Brian Barratt
