I was cleaning up my messy mail box when I cam across this classic. It
certainly has been quite some time now ... --rod.
To: british-cars@encore.com
Subject: This happy breed of men, this little world
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 91 15:12:05 PDT
From: sfisher@Pa.dec.com
Status: OR
> Notice the peculiar formation of the word "imperial". Derived from
> "empire", with all or the i's changed to e's and all of the e's changed
> to i's, and "al" suffixed. One might have thought that it should have
> been spelled "empirial", but noooo... Only in the Queen's (and many
> prior Kings' and a few prior Queens' too) English. Except maybe that
> the French would have done it even more peculiarly. Nevermind.
Excuse me, but if you're going to go about slandering the
glorious melange that is the English language, you'd best
have half a clue before you started. Pull me a pint of your
best bitter, alewife, and draw up a chair.
Imperial is actually closer to the original word, a good Latin
word, imperium. The Romans called Julius Caesar "imperator,"
and in fact our word "imperative" comes from the same root.
The original emperors (imperatori) were elected for brief periods
during times of emergency and given temporary but absolute power
("for the duration plus six months," more or less). (If I had
hypertext, I'd include a link to Cincinnatus here. Email me if
you would have clicked on it.)
The problem is, the puff-brained French, their mouths full of
snails and spoiled sheep's milk, couldn't pronounce this, and
they decided to spell it "empereur/empire." Big Chuck (aka
Carolus Magnus, aka Charlemagne) was probably called something
like "empereur" during his lifetime (I'm not up on mediaeval
French).
Things got hazy when a bunch of Scandinavian cutthroats sailed
up the Seine in their high-tech flexible longboats and started
cutting up the good citizens of France for fun and profit.
The King of France (I'd bet on his being named Louis, but I
wouldn't bet on a number other than guessing at its being < 9)
foresaw Neville Chamberlain by a fair milennium and gave a
swampy, desolate, fogbound region of France known only for
its applejack and its peat bogs to these ruffians in the hope
that they'd stay away from Paris. This lutefisk-laden Sudetenland
worked for Louis, though, mainly because it put the blond
barbarians a mere 23 miles over choppy seas from the scourge
of the fleur-de-lys then as now, that royal seat of kings,
that sceptred isle, England. Louis figured that the Normans
would go and pester the English, and he was right.
Well, it turns out that England's kingship was in disarray after
some two or three hundred years of continued attacks by various
Scandinavians on their coastline, beginning with the odd Irish
monastery about 780 AD and continuing right up into the modern,
civilized eleventh century, when William the Bastard and his
buddies were enjoying the generosity of the King of France. There
were two pretenders for the throne, one named Harold Godwinson
who had the advantage of having sat on it for a few years, the other
named Harald Hardraada ("Harold Hard-ruler"), a fjord corsair (heh)
whose mother's cousin's uncle's stepbrother's sister-son twice
removed had once scraped the bark off the rooftree of the King of
England's country cottage, so he reckoned he'd be a shoo-in to
rule this green and pleasant land.
So Harald (who had the presence of mind for the sanity of
future generations of chroniclers to spell his name with two As)
rounded up all the out-of-work cutthroats he could scrape up
between Frisia and Uppsala and landed on the east coast of
Britain, with the intent of telling Harold that he'd best seek
a new line of work. There was a furious battle; Harald's troops
were bested by the trained army of Harold, and the Viking threat
dissipated into the wilds of East Anglia, and I promise not to
make a fjord Anglia pun.
But William the Bastard thought it would be the perfect time to
take a cross-channel pleasure cruise with a few thousand of his
closest friends and drop in on Harold. Weather was bad for the
first couple of weeks of October, but for a couple of days the
Channel got what would be called "Indian summer" in another 430 or
so years and William sailed to Hastings, in the very shadow of the
white cliffs of Dover.
Things got hot when Harold and his own crew showed up. They had
run out of victuals (and the cold hard stuff with which they could
purchase same) in the fracas with Harald, and we all know what an
army travels on. Up the cliffs came William's buddies, with the
benefit of a fascinating new invention that they'd picked up from
their soujourns in the wilds of central Europe, where Scandinavians
had long been available for odd jobs such as killing off the entire
ruling family of a Rhenish fiefdom to the seventh generation or
defending Byzantium against the Turks. This invention didn't
amount to much more than a loop of rope tied to one's saddle bows,
but if you hooked your feet through it you could get a lot more
leverage when riding on a horse and charging at an opponent.
William's fresh, well-fed troops rode down the flower of English
chivalry, poor Harold got an arrow in his eye, and the next thing
you know it's Domesday.
But I digress. William and his pals had taken to speaking French
during their stay as feudal vassals of Louis (I think it was really
Charles, but my encyclopedia is at home), though they were the joke
of the continental set for their hokey pronunciation and usage.
Still, when they took over Harold's wooden fort in the old Roman
port of Londinium on the Thames, one of William's first acts was to
make French the official language of his henchmen. From the safety
of the imposing foursquare stone edifice they built, the White Tower,
they were able to control the rich fields of Britain through a combination
of tyranny, good accounting, and linguistic snobbery for a couple
hundred years anyway. French stayed the court language in Britain
until the Tudor era (damn, where's that fjord Tudor when you really
need it?), which curiously came about after a little mixup called
the Hundred Years War in which the descendants of William wanted to
rule bits of France as well as Britain. (Considering that one of
the bits they especially wanted was the Acquitaine, which contains
what is now called Bordeaux, one of the world's premier wine-producing
regions then as now, one can hardly blame them.)
Anyway, about the end of the Hundred Years War, two things happened
in Britain that made life interesting. One was that a poet named
Geoffrey Chaucer published a wonderful book of stories called The
Canterbury Tales, told nor in Frenssh nor in Latyn but in Englysshe
of the common man. He captured the speech of the day and the
imagination of his countrymen. Not long (well, not in England,
where a hundred miles is a long way and a hundred years isn't a
long time) after, when the new printing press came across the channel,
William Caxton set type for Chaucer's ribald stories, using his own
prejudices and Chaucer's inconsistent conventions to set down the
text in characters. Caxton or one of his successors fell back on
"imperial," imperative," and the like, but "empire" and "emperor"
still showed the effects of William the Bastard and the long tenure
of the Plantagenets.
And *that's* why it's so bloody hard to learn to spell English.
I know that I should not be mad
To learn the past of play's not plaid,
Or that stay does not turn to staid,
Or yesterday, the donkey braid.
Is this Bill Caxton's golden calf?
It ought to be enough to laugh.
--Scott "The Venerable Bede meets Cecil Adams" Fisher
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