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The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Third Edition(8652s).pdf

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Richard Evans Schultes, Ph.D., Jeffrey Professor of Biology and Director, Harvard Botanical Museum (Emeritus) James Trefil, Ph.D., Clarence J. Robinson Professor of Physics, George Mason University
Sociology...

A. Bartlett Giamatti* Sports executive; educator; Commissioner of Baseball; formerly President, National Baseball League; formerly President, Yale University Francine du Plessix Gray Writer Linda Gregerson Assistant Professor of English, University of Michigan Patricia Hampl Writer; Professor of English, University of Minnesota The Hon. Mark O. Hatfield U.S. Senator from Oregon The Hon. S.I. Hayakawa* Writer; educator; President Emeritus, San Francisco State University; formerly U.S. Senator from California Mark Helprin Writer; Contributing Editor, Wall Street Journal; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute Oscar Hijuelos Author; recipient, Pulitzer Prize, Rome Prize Douglas R. Hofstadter College of Arts and Sciences Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science; Director, Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, Indiana University, Bloomington; recipient, Pulitzer Prize Gloria Hom Educator and consultant; Chair, Economics Department, Mission College; member, California State University Board of Trustees; member, Board of Trustees, Dominican College of San Rafael Paul Horgan* Novelist, biographer, and historian; Professor Emeritus and Author in Residence, Wesleyan University; recipient, Pulitzer Prize The Hon. Shirley M. Hufstedler Senior Counsel, Morrison & Foerster; formerly U.S. Secretary of Education; formerly Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit John K. Hutchens* Retired member, Editorial Board, Book-of-the-Month Club; retired literary and drama reviewer, New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Boston Evening Transcript Molly Ivins Journalist; syndicated columnist; author Jennifer James Cultural anthropologist; writer Joyce Johnson Writer; recipient, National Book Critics Circle Award William F. Johnston* Associate Professor and Newspaper Internship Coordinator, School of Communications, University of Washington Erica Mann Jong Poet, novelist, and essayist The Hon. Barbara Jordan* Educator, attorney, and writer; Lyndon B. Johnson Centennial Professor in National Policy, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin; formerly U.S. Representative from Texas June M. Jordan Poet; Professor of African American Studies and Women's Studies, University of California, Berkeley Alfred E. Kahn Robert Julius Thorne Professor of Economics Emeritus, Cornell University; formerly Economic Adviser to the President of the United States Roger Kahn Author; journalist Justin Kaplan Writer; recipient, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award...

Armistead Maupin Author Alice E. Mayhew Editorial Director, Trade Division, Simon & Schuster The Hon. Eugene McCarthy Writer, poet, and lecturer; formerly U.S. Senator from Minnesota David McCord Poet; essayist; Honorary Curator of the Poetry and Farnsworth Rooms, Harvard University Library Kenneth McCormick Senior Consulting Editor, Bantam Doubleday Dell; formerly Editor in Chief, Doubleday & Company, Inc. Mary McGrory Journalist; columnist, Washington Post and Universal Press Syndicate; recipient, Pulitzer Prize Leonard Michaels Professor of English, University of California, Berkeley James A. Michener Writer; recipient, Pulitzer Prize and Presidential Medal of Freedom Hassan Minor, Jr. Vice President for Government Affairs, Howard University Richard Scott Mitchell* Mineralogist; educator; writer; Professor of Environmental Science, University of Virginia; Executive Editor, Rocks and Minerals Jessica Mitford Writer Lance Morrow Essayist and Senior Writer, Time; recipient, National Magazine Award The Hon. Daniel Patrick Moynihan U.S. Senator from New York; formerly Professor of Political Science, Harvard University Cullen Murphy Managing Editor, Atlantic The Hon. Maurine Neuberger Formerly U.S. Senator from Oregon; formerly Oregon state legislator Ambassador Thomas M.T. Niles U.S. Ambassador to Greece; formerly Assistant Secretary of State for European and Canadian Affairs, U.S. Representative to the European Community, and U.S. Ambassador to Canada David Ogilvy, C.B.E. Advertising copywriter; Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters (France); past Chair, United Negro College Fund Cynthia Ozick Novelist; essayist; member, American Academy of Arts and Letters Robert S. Pirie Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Rothschild Inc. Alvin F. Poussaint, M.D. Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School Ellen F. Prince Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania Jane Bryant Quinn Journalist; syndicated financial columnist, Newsweek and Good Housekeeping Tony Randall Actor William James Raspberry Syndicated urban affairs columnist; Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism, Duke University; recipient, Pulitzer Prize...

A NATURAL H I S T O R Y OF ENGLISH: LANGUAGE, CULTURE, AND THE AMERICAN HERITAGE
LEE PEDERSON...

ficient evidence to prove it. He does not so much assert as exhibit. He has no transient or private purposes to serve....

in their respective translations of the Medieval Latin (Matthew 6:9) “pater noster, qui est in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum”: NORTHUMBRIAN Fader urer thu arth in heofnas, sie gehalgad noma thin Father our thou art in heaven, be hallowed name thy MERCIAN Fæder ure thu the in heofunum earth, beo gehalgad thin noma Father our thou which in heaven art, be hallowed thy name WEST SAXON Fæder ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod Father our thou which art in heaven, be thy name hallowed Despite differences in pronunciation, word formation, and syntax, simple and effective conversation was surely possible among speakers of these different regional dialects of English. Conversation was also possible between the English and their Viking conquerors, the Norwegians and the Danes, many of whom settled primarily in what are now the northeast counties and took up peaceful ways with English wives. The fact that cultural interaction extended through most of the Old English period (449–1066) is evidenced in the greatest literary monument of the Anglo-Saxons, their epic poem Beowulf, which has a thoroughly Scandinavian setting and cast. Words shared by Anglo-Saxons and Vikings include bring, can, come, father, folk, house, life, man, mine, mother, see, sit, smile, sorrow, summer, thine, wife, will, winter, and wise. In addition to hundreds of such intimate correspondences, the Scandinavians gave English many other familiar words through cultural interaction: anger, fellow, happy, husband, meek, root, rotten, skill, skin, skull, sky, and ugly. A second and much greater influence was brought to bear on the language and culture after the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the Normans, French-speaking descendants of the Vikings, arrived from Normandy....

More French loan words entered English during the 14th century than during any comparable period before or since. As the French language fell into disuse in England, many of its culturally useful words were borrowed. Here the relationship between speech and writing is an important consideration. The documented evidence of the written forms is conservative and lags behind current usage. After King John lost the province of Normandy in 1204, French influence on English society began to decline. Before the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) began, English speech had already returned as the native tongue of the nobility, and before the century closed, it had replaced French in the courts, Parliament, schools, and finally the highly formal documents of title, deeds, and wills. Chaucer composed The Canterbury Tales in his native Southeast Midland dialect and so demonstrated the appropriateness of London speech as a literary medium, but The Canterbury Tales did not mark the triumph of a standard language within the culture at large. Just two years before he began his masterwork, Chaucer worried about the diversity of current speech in his envoy for Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385):
And for ther is so gret diversite In Englissh and in writyng of oure tonge, So prey I God that non myswrite the[e], Ne the[e] mysmetre for defaute of tonge; And red wherso thow be, or elles songe, That thow be understonde, God I biseche! But yet to purpos of my rather speche....

and elles but ignored it in tonge, understonde, speche, and other words in the same stanza that comprise those seven iambic pentameter lines of rhyme royal. At the outset of the Early Modern English period (1500–1700) fewer than 5 million people in the world spoke English, as compared to 12 million speakers of French, 10 million of German, and 8 million of Spanish. During the next two centuries those “intelligent beings expressing their minds” in English included More, Tyndale, Milton, Newton, Locke, and Dryden. At its center was Elizabethan English, the language of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Donne, Raleigh, Spenser, and the queen herself. From this stage of linguistic development came the earliest varieties of American English. By 1700 the number of English speakers had nearly doubled, while German, Italian, and Spanish had scarcely maintained their numbers of two centuries earlier, and only French surpassed the growth rate of English among the western European nations. As an emergent world language, English advanced with the spread of the London Standard and general education, with the loosening of class distinctions, and through the influence of what would today be called the mass media. By the year 1500 printed books in all of Europe included 35 thousand titles, most of which were in Latin. During the next 140 years 20 thousand English titles appeared in print, and scribal composition of manuscripts became virtually a lost art. England regained its cultural self-reliance with those new sources of influence and the spread of empire. In 1579 E.K., the anonymous editor of Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, commended his author and reflected the spirit of the age:
For in my opinion it is one special prayse, of many whych are dew to this Poete, that he hath laboured to restore, as to theyr rightfull heritage such good and naturall English words, as haue ben long time out of vse and almost cleane disherited. Which is the onely cause, that our Mother tonge, which truely of it self is both ful enough for prose and stately enough for verse, hath long time ben counted most bare and barrein of both....