As a first step in research for my new book I have continued to work my way through David Crystal’s inspirational The Story of English in 100 Words. I hit the 25-word mark yesterday, and thought this would be a good time to blog about what I’ve learned since my previous post, which covered Crystal’s Introduction and his first few words.

To begin with, I’ve learned lots of fun facts about my own language! Here are a few:

• The word out serves as a verb, adverb, exclamation, preposition, adjective, and noun. Wow!
• The word street was one of the first borrowings into English from Latin. It was applied to the paved, straight roads that the Romans built, while the earlier Anglo-Saxon word weg (now ‘way’) was relegated to older paths.
• The groom of bridegroom was originally guma, a somewhat poetic Old English word for ‘man’. Speakers substituted the similar-sounding groom when guma dropped out of normal usage. Groom originally meant ‘boy’ but had acquired its current equestrian meaning by the time of this substitution.
• The only cookery words that come from Old English, not French, are grind and dough. Who knew?
• Many legal expressions like goods and chattels, fit and proper, and will and testament, originally combined Germanic and Latin words so that they would be widely understood.
• The game of Monopoly caused American jail (apparently descended from Parisian French) to overtake the (apparently Norman) gaol outside of the U.S.
• Middle English didn’t have separate words for ‘spring’ and ‘summer’, but merged them both into sumer, as in the famous English round (song) Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu.
• We think of wee as Scottish, but it originated in Northern England, not over the border in Scotland.

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As I’d hoped, Crystal’s book is giving me interesting ideas for my own book about Spanish, or at least questions:

• Does Spanish have phrases with deliberately bilingual origins, like goods and chattels in English?
• What word can I discuss that is only found in legal Spanish? (Maybe the future subjunctive…)
• Crystal includes the title dame. What Spanish title should I discuss?
• I should definitely include some Spanish word pairs that consist of a newer word and an earlier one from a different source (as in street and way). Some possibilities are abarca/sandalia, simiente/semilla, vianda/comida, and/or hostal/hotel. Of course, sometimes a new borrowing completely overwrites an earlier word, for example French té, which ousted Portuguese cha (itself borrowed from Mandarin).
• Apparently pork meant ‘penis’ in American slang of the 1930s. Are any Spanish slang words for body parts worth discussing?
• Speaking of slang words for body parts, Crystal points out that cunt is taboo enough to sometimes be referred to as “the c-word”, which can also mean ‘cancer’. English also has the “f-word” and the “n-word”. Does Spanish have any such words that, like Voldemort, must not be named? I will include some taboo words in any case.
• The lack of separate words for ‘spring’ and ‘summer’ in early English reminds me of the lack of modern Spanish words for ‘evening’ and ‘night’. Were there earlier Spanish uber-terms that eventually split into two words? (And what can I call them instead of “uber-terms”, which I just invented? Portmanteau means something else, doesn’t it?) Did this happen, in recorded history, with color terms, which tend to proliferate as languages evolve? (See e.g. Guy Deutcher’s Through the Language Glass, one of my favorite linguistics books written for a general audience.)
• English slang frequently uses negative words as positives, e.g. wicked, mad, insane, crazy, and of course bad. Is there anything like this in Spanish?
• Crystal’s discussion of phrasal verbs like take out and take away, which are distinctively English (perhaps Germanic, more generally?) reminded me that I should definitely discuss pronominal verbs (reflexive and otherwise), which are distinctively Spanish.
• Crystal says out that the word count, as opposed to countess, was initially avoided because its earlier pronunciation was similar to that of cunt. This reminded me of Tom Lathrop’s assertion that the verb jugar, originally jogar, ‘evolved’ its u to make the verb sound less like joder. Is this assertion taken seriously? Are there other examples of this avoidance process in the history of Spanish?

Unrelated to Crystal’s book, I’ve also made notes to myself to include

• Words that illustrate spelling changes, like saqué or empecemos. Maybe the best way to do this is with a word like cero or cebra.
• Diminutives, aggrandatives, and so on. Spanish has a wealth of derivational suffixes! Likewise I should include interesting prefixes such as re- prefix, which can be an intensifier (rebueno) or a repeater (rehacer).
• The full range of parts of speech.
• Words from a broad range of semantic categories such as the 24 used in the WOLD project.

On a final note, the New York Times “Connections” game, which I play every morning — my current streak is 69! — recently included the word loanword. Many commenters on the Connections blog complained that this word was too obscure. So did my husband. NOT ME!!!