By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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three-quarters of a mile of rough track. There were no pressure water supplies in the area, and the nearest static water was the Menai Straits, 450 yards away down a one-in-three gradient.
By the time they got some water onto it, the fire had taken hold. One of the red-hot girders even snapped in half when water was sprayed upon it. It was a raging inferno inside the roof space – though curiously, because of the enclosed nature of the bridge, for some time no fire could be seen from the outside. But once it broke through, the line of flames extending across the Straits was as spectacular as it was horrific. You can see a video clip, and an interview with one of the teenagers, at a BBC Wales website.
One estimate of the damage was over £1 million, but as the bridge cost over £600,000 to build in 1850, that was surely a low guess. The railway was out of action for four years. Irish ferries to and from Holyhead had to be diverted to Morecambe. The economy of the area took years to recover.
A new single-track railway bridge was back in action in 1974, supported by arches, and they put a road on top of it in 1980. It’s now the main link between Anglesey and the mainland, carrying the A55. Three of the imposing towers are still there, and the road passes underneath them, right on top of the railway line.
You can’t see the lions from the road, but they’re still there too, beside the railway. You can visit the two on the Anglesey side if you take a path by the Carreg Bran Hotel. A small section of the original tubular bridge is also displayed on the Bangor side. You can see it from the train.
I was planning to head south into mid-Wales, where I had my next appointment with Welsh accents, so I took the Britannia Bridge out of Anglesey, and turned towards Caernarfon past the thousand-acre Vaynol estate. The Old Hall there dates back to Elizabethan times, and maybe earlier. These days they hold major cultural events in the park. Local boy Bryn Terfel started a glittering annual music festival there in 2000, and regularly performs there. They say that when he’s singing you can hear him in Cardiff. Only when the wind’s in the right direction, mind.
If you look carefully at the wall near the entrance, you can still see the faded image of a piece of anonymous biblical graffiti text, whose original white-paint impact has long been erased. I photographed it when it first appeared. It reads: ALL SHALL BE WELL!
All was well, and it was a fine sunny day when I stopped to eat a sandwich at the top of a hill overlooking the Straits. A lovely view back across Anglesey, and plenty of opportunity to observe bees – and wasps – out in force, and especially interested in my sandwich.
Dylan Thomas got it right about wasps. In his short story ‘Conversation about Christmas’ he tells a small boy about his childhood Christmas presents. Some of them were books, he says, ‘that told me everything about the wasp, except why’.
A bee meandered into view. It must have been the general impression of bees flying directly to their food or to the hive which led to the emergence of that phrase, making a beeline. In fact, radar – or for that matter, common observation – shows that there’s nothing particularly straight about the flight-path at all. Bees wobble about a lot. Nor do they have the sense of urgency or rapid movement that is usually intended when someone is said to ‘make a beeline’ for something.
The earliest recorded usage of the phrase is 1830, but it must still have felt very new a decade later. When Edgar Allen Poe used it in one of his short stories, ‘The Gold Bug’, published in 1843, he felt he had to explain it. His character Legrand describes how he worked out where some pirate treasure was hidden. What he did, he says, was draw ‘a bee-line, or, in other words, a straight line’ from one point to another. That’s a sure indication that a usage is recent. People don’t bother explaining the sense of a word if it’s well established.
It’s hardly ever possible to say when a word first comes into a language. Who knows when king was first used, or eggshell, or inconsequential? Or by hook and by crook?
Just occasionally we can be in on a word-birth.
One such moment was in New York in 1907 at a publishing trade
association dinner. Huebsch had just published a successful book by the American humorist Gelett Burgess, called Are You a Bromide? (A bromide was Burgess’s word for a dull, conventional person.) Free copies were given out to those present, printed – as was the association’s custom – in a special jacket.
Burgess was there, and he didn’t like the jacket. He felt it was much too conventional. A much better idea, he thought, was the practice of contemporary lurid novels, which always had a delicious damsel posing on the front cover. So he decided to draw one. He sketched out a buxom blonde on one of the jackets, and labelled her ‘Miss Belinda Blurb’.
The name caught on. Any excessive testimonial for a book, on front or back covers, was soon being called a blurb. In a little wordbook he wrote a few years later, he defined his own term:
1 A flamboyant advertisement; an inspired testimonial.
2 Fulsome praise; a sound like a publisher.
Blurbs have been with us ever since.
Actually, blurb was quite fortunate. Most of the words we make up on the spur of the moment never catch on. It doesn’t matter even if you’re gifted and famous. Shakespeare is the first recorded user of about two thousand words, but nearly half of them fell out of use sooner or later. From his list, we continue to use abhorred, abstemious, accessible, and accommodation; but nobody uses adoptious, aidance, allayment, or annexment any more.
Why did abstemious stay and adoptious go? One of the great mysteries of language change is why people decide to use one word and not another.
Sometimes you can sense the nature of the choices available. For instance, frequency is recorded in English from 1553. A century later, frequentness appeared. This is something which happens quite a lot. A word with a good Anglo-Saxon ending (such as –ness) is put into competition with an already existing word with a foreign ending (the Latin/French –ency, in this case). Which won? Today the dictionaries all include frequency and only occasionally even bother to mention frequentness.
Perhaps it was the shorter length of frequency which made it appeal. Or the desire to sound educated. Or the fact that it was recognized in the leading dictionaries. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much that people preferred frequency as that they disliked frequentness. Maybe it was the slightly awkward pronunciation, as they tried to get their tongues around the –ntn – sequence in the middle. Maybe they didn’t like the sound of the two n’s.
But frequentness didn’t totally disappear. If you listen out in everyday conversation, you will quite often find the Anglo-Saxon constructions being used in place of the expected forms. I have heard immenseness, immediateness, and delicateness as well as frequentness. None of them is a recommended dictionary form. The dates of their earliest and latest recorded uses, according to the OED, are:
immenseness: 1610–1798
frequentness: 1664–1862
delicateness: 1530–1873
immediateness: 1633–1882
They should be dead; but they live on.
It’s an interesting exercise to explore the use of suffixes, trying them out to see the different meanings and effects they convey. I tried it once with a school group. The idea was to see how many suffixes could attach to a noun like bee. Modern dictionaries usually don’t give any. I found bee-like in one, and that was all.
Within minutes they had concocted a story about an imaginary beedom (from kingdom), in which a queen bee (your beeness) had offered beehood (from knighthood) to a brave worker who had saved the hive from attack. They went on to form a beeocracy. Outsiders who criticized their way of life were displaying beeism and considered beeist. The heroic worker was eventually beeified.