Mind your language
This year we celebrate the centenary of the coining of the word aeroplanist. It meant the driver of a flying-machine, a device that had been invented three years earlier. After two decades of struggle, aeroplanist gave way to pilot, which in this sense arrived in 1907. Interestingly enough, sky-pilot, meaning a clergyman, predates the invention of heavier-than-air flight. The first recorded use of sky-pilot is in this very magazine, in the issue of 30 December 1893.
Another aerial usage from 1906 that failed to fly was aerodyne, which seemed at first more stylish than flying-machine. The word that settled down as the English for the Wright brothers’ invention was aeroplane. This had been in use technically since the 1870s, but its future was gradually undermined by the slangy plane, which emerged in 1908. Americans generally preferred airplane, introduced in 1907. The neutral term aircraft, in use from 1850, was at first used to refer to balloons, and still has the advantage of including helicopters.
Neologisms are seldom very cheerful creatures, and the crop from 1906 is fairly depressing. From John Ayto’s entertaining Twentieth-Century Words (Oxford, 1999), I have gleaned: atomic energy, brogue (shoe), central heating, coin-box, conditioned reflex, conveyor-belt, dreadnought, lowbrow, microsecond, muck-raker, paedophilia, plastic explosive, probation officer, psychoanalysis, to send off (the pitch), shadow cabinet, suffragette, supertax, teddy bear, town planning, traffic police, trial marriage, tyrannosaurus and war crime. Of these the only moderately comfortable inventions are brogue and teddy bear. Slang terms from the year sound a little less horrific: beat it, beddy-bye, the limit, spiflicated and undies.
Words born in 1906 that have become practically extinct are: deficient (as a noun referring to a person), electrobus, flake (dogfish), inhalatorium, marcel (as a verb), nutter (butter-substitute made from nuts) and stalloy (a steel alloy). Of these I think flake is still in use (though not by me) instead of the more twee rock-salmon. The agency called Food Standards Australia New Zealand recommends a limited diet of flake because of the presence in it of mercury.
Marcel is still understood by us women as signifying a kind of permanent wave, but we would not use it as a verb. It was named, I find, after the hairdresser François Marcel Grateau (1852–1936), who introduced it in 1872 and became rich. There is a monument to him at Lagnicourt, on the Bapaume to Cambrai road in the Pas de Calais. The place was renamed Lagnicourt-Marcel in 1924 after its most famous son, who contributed to the rebuilding of the village after the first world war.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
