A history of the English Language

215.
Language as a Mirror of Progress.
Words, being but symbols by which people express their ideas, are an accurate measure 
of the range of their thoughts at any given time. Words obviously designate the things a 
culture knows, and just as obviously the vocabulary of a language must keep pace with 
the advance of the culture’s knowledge. The date when a new word enters the language is 
in general the date when the object, experience, observation, or whatever it is that calls it 
forth has entered public consciousness. Thus with a work like the 
OED,
which furnishes 
us with dated quotations showing when the different meanings of every word have arisen 
and when new words first appear in the language, we could almost write the history of 
civilization merely from linguistic evidence. When in the early part of the nineteenth 
century we find growing up a word like 
horsepower
or 
lithograph,
we may depend upon 
it that some form of mechanical power that needs to be measured in familiar terms or a 
new process of engraving has been devised. The appearance in the language of words like 
railway, locomotive, turntable
about 1835 tells us that steam railways were then coming 
in. In 1839 the words 
photograph
and 
photography
first appear, and a beginning is made 
toward a considerable vocabulary of special words or senses of words such as 
camera, 
film, enlargement, emulsion, focus, shutter, light meter
.
 Concrete
in the sense of a 
mixture of crushed stone and cement dates from 1834, but 
reinforced concrete
is an 
expression called forth only in the twentieth century. The word 
cable
occurs but a few 
years before the laying of the first Atlantic cable in 1857–1858. 
Refrigerator
is first 
found in English in an American quotation of 1841. The words 
emancipation
and 
The nineteenth century and after 283

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abolitionist
have for every American specific meanings connected with the efforts to 
abolish slavery, efforts that culminated in the Civil War. In the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century an interesting story of progress is told by new words or new meanings 
such as 
typewriter, telephone, apartment house, twist drill, drop-forging, blueprint, 
oilfield, motorcycle, feminist, fundamentalist, marathon
(introduced in 1896 as a result of 
the revival of the Olympic games at Athens in that year), 
battery
and 
bunt,
the last two 
indicating the growing popularity of professional baseball in America. 
The twentieth century permits us to see the process of vocabulary growth going on 
under our eyes, sometimes, it would seem, at an accelerated rate. At the turn of the 
century we get the word 
questionnaire,
and in 1906 
suffragette
. 
Dictaphone, raincoat,
and 
Thermos
became a part of the recorded vocabulary in 1907 and
 free verse
in 1908. 
This is the period when many of the terms of aviation came in, some still current, some 
reflecting the aeronautics of the time—
airplane, aircraft, airman, monoplane, biplane, 
hydroplane, dirigible
. 
Nose-dive
belongs to the period of the war. About 1910 we began 
talking about the
 futurist
and the
 postimpressionist
in art, and the 
Freudian
in 
psychology. 
Intelligentsia
as a designation for the class to which superior culture is 
attributed, and 
bolshevik
for a holder of revolutionary political views were originally 
applied at the time of World War I to groups in Russia. At this time 
profiteer
gained a 
specialized meaning. Meanwhile 
foot fault, fairway, fox trot,
and 
contract bridge
were 
indicative of popular interest in certain games and pastimes. The 1933 supplement to the 
OED
records 
Cellophane
(1921) and 
rayon
(1924), but not 
nylon, deep-freeze, air-
conditioned,
or 
transistor;
and it is not until the first volume of the new supplement in 
1972 that the 
OED
includes 
credit card, ecosystem, existentialism
(1941, though in 
German a century earlier), 
freeze-dried, convenience foods, bionics, electronic computer, 
automation, cybernetics, bikini, discotheque
. Only yesterday witnessed the birth of 
biofeedback, power lunch, fractal, chaos theory,
and 
cyberspace
. Tomorrow will witness 
others as the exigencies of the hour call them into being.