Tutor Lesson

English begins its recorded journey after the Romans departed Britain. They left straight roads but little Latin in ordinary local speech. Angles, Saxons, and Jutes then arrived from continental Europe with Germanic dialects. The names of the Angles and Saxons produced the term Anglo-Saxon, while the Jutes received less recognition in that label.

• house
• woman
• Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday were named for Anglo-Saxon gods; Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were the three exceptions.
• Christian missionaries encouraged the adoption of Latin-derived religious terms such asmartyr,bishop, andfont.
• Scandinavian Vikings supplied energetic words includingdrag,ransack,trust, anddie.
• Their roughly 2,000 contributions also included the paired everyday wordsgiveandtake, along with the comic warning about a man carrying an enormous axe.

William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066 and brought French across the Channel. French became the language of rulers, law, and official affairs, Latin remained in the church, and ordinary people continued speaking English. The lesson jokes that communication across this divide depended on English speakers talking more slowly and loudly.

• French supplied official and legal terms such asjudge,jury,evidence, andjustice.
• English-speaking farmers usedcow,sheep, andswinefor the animals they raised.
• French-speaking elites usedbeef,mutton, andporkfor the meat, beginning the joke about unreadable restaurant menus.
• English took in about 10,000 Norman words, although the speakers supposedly never mastered French cheek-kissing customs.
• The later vocabulary of conflict includedarmies,navies, andsoldiers.
• That terminology served during the Hundred Years' War against France, which lasted 116 years. English eventually replaced French as the language of power.

Dictionaries credit William Shakespeare with roughly 2,000 words and phrases. His attributed vocabulary ranges from useful everyday coinages to more conspicuous literary terms. The account playfully says that alligator appeared when crocodile offered no more rhymes and that his supposed invention of the Hobnob won over tea drinkers.

• Practical examples:eyeball,puppy dog, andanchovy.
• More elaborate examples:dauntless,besmirch, andlackluster.
• Enduring expressions includeflesh and blood,house and home,good riddance, andgreen-eyed monster.
• Further examples arebreaking the ice,dead as a doornail,money's worth, andshort shrift.
• The list also includeslaid it on with a trowelandhoist with his own petard.

Other speakers may have used some of these forms earlier. Dictionary makers often cite Shakespeare because his widely read works supplied memorable contexts, including cross-dressing and violent eye-poking. His poetry presented English as emotionally powerful and richly expressive, while the narrative jokes that he also found time to open Stratford tea rooms.

In 1611, a group of scribes produced the King James translation as a broadly understandable Bible. The account describes their task through phrases such as wisdom of Solomon, went the extra mile, all things to all men, heart's desire, fight the good fight, filthy lucre, root of the matter, and salt of the earth. Small books and church preachers helped its wording spread across Britain.

• a leopard can't change its spots
• a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
• a wolf in sheep's clothing
• a fly in your ointment

Like a biblical genealogy, this translation generated a broad inheritance of metaphor and morality that still influences spoken English.

Scientists became conspicuous in seventeenth-century Britain, with Robert Hooke, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton among the figures named. The Royal Society grew from the Invisible College. Its members initially worked in Latin, but the repeated difficulty of telling Newton's falling-apple story in that language helped them recognize that using their shared English would speed discussion of the universe.

• acid
• gravity
• electricity
• pendulum
• cardiac
• tonsil
• ovary
• sternum
• The termspenisandvaginamade sex education easier to follow, althoughclitorisremained the subject of a joke about confusion.

Discovery was moving faster than existing vocabulary. New scientific and anatomical names prevented meetings from becoming an endless guessing game and allowed researchers to describe the universe and the body more precisely.

Once English had become associated with science, Shakespeare, and the Bible, Britain carried it through imperial expansion. The empire pursued territory, wealth, resources, and obedience while also collecting vocabulary from the places it controlled.

• From the Caribbean camebarbecue,canoe, andcannibal; the last supposedly made the journeys sound more adventurous.
• India contributedyoga,cummerbund, andbungalow.
• Africa suppliedvoodooandzombie, jokingly linked to teenage horror films.
• Australia suppliednugget,boomerang, andwalkabout, plus the comic claim that it contributed chain pubs.

Between Napoleon's defeat and the First World War, the empire expanded to about 10 million square miles and 400 million people, accompanied in the joke by almost 100,000 gin and tonics. New varieties of English consequently developed worldwide.

As English expanded, lexicographers attempted to control what the narrative calls the anarchy of differing spellings. Samuel Johnson spent nine years creating his Dictionary of the English Language. The volume stood 18 inches tall and held 42,773 entries, so the joke suggests it could also serve as a step for reaching a shelf.

• Readers could discover the exact meanings and standard spellings of insults such aspickle herring,jobber now, andfop doodle.
• Because new words continued appearing, work on what became the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857 and took another 70 years.
• Its first editor left to become an archbishop.
• The second editor died of tuberculosis.
• The third was described as so dull that half the volunteers departed and one entered an asylum.
• The OED appeared in 1928 and has remained under revision ever since.

British settlers in America needed names for unfamiliar plants and animals. They borrowed raccoon, squash, and moose from Native American languages, while the narration sharply adds that they also took most Native territory. Later immigrant communities contributed further vocabulary.

• Dutch arrivals sharedcoleslawandcookies, accompanied by a joke about their relaxed view of drugs.
• German immigrants broughtpretzelsfromdelicatessens.
• Italian arrivals contributedpizza,pasta, and themafia.
• Capitalist vocabulary includedbreak-even,bottom line,blue chip, andwhite collar.
• Commuters requiredfreeways,subways, andparking lots.
• Corporate change producedmergeranddownsizing.

• fall remained in American use where Britain preferred autumn.
• faucets remained where Britain used taps.
• diapers remained where Britain used nappies.
• candy remained while the British side of the joke moved on to NHS dental care.

American English later crossed the Atlantic in the other direction as British audiences adopted the language of cool movies and groovy jazz.

The first email was sent in 1972, before the internet became a worldwide place for sharing information, ideas, and cat pictures. Whereas spoken interaction had previously driven much linguistic change, online communication restored typing to prominence—and, in the joke, produced repetitive strain injuries.

• New technical vocabulary includeddownload,toolbar, andfirewall; the physical meaning of the last term prompted a joke about an insurance claim and burned wallpaper.
• IMHOshortenedin my humble opinion.
• BTWshortenedby the way.
• LOLcould meanlaugh out loudor, confusingly,lots of love.
• failbecame a compact response to an accident presented as amusing.
• The closing response to complaints about such changes isug2bk, meaningyou've got to be kidding.

Brief online exchanges also encouraged activities described by verbs such as blog, poke, and reboot. Some internet forms subsequently entered spoken English, showing that typed communication could reshape everyday speech.

In the 1,500 years after Rome left Britain, English repeatedly absorbed, evolved, invaded, and—as the narration admits—stole. Germanic settlers began the process; the resulting language later traveled by sea and then by broadband. It borrowed from more than 350 languages and became a global institution despite spelling and an alphabet portrayed as poorly matched to pronunciation.

• Of approximately 1.5 billion English speakers, about one quarter are native speakers.
• A further quarter use English as a second language.
• The remaining half are jokingly described as able to request directions to a swimming pool.
• Hinglishcombines Hindi and English.
• Chinglishcombines Chinese and English.
• Singlishis Singaporean English, not the spoken parts of musicals.

Because present-day English is now so detached from England alone, the conclusion asks whether it should still carry that name. Its final joke proposes that any replacement might appropriately be coined in Chinese.