From 'happineſſ' to 'gizmo': a language that won't stand still

"Among these are life, liberty, and the — purÅ¿uit of happineÅ¿Å¿?" he asks, puzzled.

"That's 'pursuit of happiness,'" Jefferson replies.

"Well, all your s's look like f's," Franklin grumbles.

"It's stylish," says Jefferson. "It's in, it's very in."

Micah and I thought that was hilarious, and for years it became a favorite joke. But I hadn't thought about Jefferson's breezy assurance for decades when I stumbled recently across a fascinating experiment in how radically the English language has changed over the centuries. Jefferson wasn't wrong about those funny-looking s's being "stylish" and "very in." In his day, they were!

The experiment was devised by linguist Colin Gorrie for his Substack newsletter, Dead Language Society. He composed a fictional blog post — a traveler's account of visiting a quaint English coastal town called Wulfleet. The twist is that the blogger's language keeps getting older. With every few paragraphs, the English in which it is written shifts to the vocabulary, spelling, and voice of the previous century.

The narrative opens in 2000, with a chatty, internet-era travel blogger ("Not going to lie though: so far, it's totally worth it"). By 1800, the same narrator has become a Georgian diarist, ruminating on "the particular hospitality of country innkeepers, which is liberal beyond what prudence would advise." A few paragraphs later, he's invoking "Plinie" and writing in the plain, sober style of Daniel Defoe.

The spelling gets stranger. "That night I was vntroubled by such euents as I had vndergone the night before," the traveler writes in the English of 1600, before u and v had become separate letters. Sure enough, the s's frequently look like f's — or rather, like Å¿'s. As Gorrie explains, they were variants of the same letter, whose use was determined by its position within a word.

By the time the diarist is writing as if it were 1400 — "his countenaunce was hidous and so dredful þat my blood wexed colde to loken on hym" — a modern layman can just barely make out his meaning. By 1200? Forget it. The text looks almost wholly foreign, even though it is actually a more authentic English. As Gorrie explains, it is what the language looked like before the Norman French vocabulary, which gives English so much of its richness, had fully taken root.

I had always imagined that English changed very gradually and uniformly, but I realize now that the changes can come in lurches. Written English has been remarkably stable for the past 300 years. If you can read "Harry Potter," Gorrie notes, you can read "Robinson Crusoe." But go back a couple more centuries, and floor simply gives way. The language we speak and write and love is, historically speaking, a fairly recent achievement.

Which makes me cherish it all the more, and so happy that my mother tongue is one with such an extraordinarily rich vocabulary.

There are so many words in English that I find captivating. Isn't jalopy a terrific word? Isn't it wonderful that English had the nimbleness and creativity to evolve a word that so perfectly conveys the sense of an old, barely-running heap of a car? I feel the same way about blizzard and gizmo and nincompoop and rubbish. These words don't just mean something — they feel like something. They have personality and attitude.

Some words I love because of the way they sound: vermilion, lithe, fetching. Others have a jagged, kinetic energy that I find irresistible: festoon, gallivant, rambunctious, thwart.

Needless to say, I am far from alone in feeling this way.

In 1934, a copywriter named Robert Pirosh quit his job at a New York ad agency in order to pursue his dream of working as a screenwriter. He sent his resume to every studio in Hollywood, with a tour de force of a cover letter that conveyed an almost erotic joy in English words.

"Dear Sir: I like words," he began. "I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory." Pirosh was hired by MGM and went on to become an Academy Award-winning screenwriter.

The Oxford English Dictionary lists some 200,000 English words, the accumulated bounty of a thousand years of borrowing, blending, and invention. No one will ever know them all. But what a treasure to draw from, and how fortunate we are to be the inheritors of it.

Jefferson — well, Stan Freberg's Jefferson — was right. Those funny-looking s's went out of fashion around 1800. But the language they were part of? It's in, it's very in.

Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.

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