Evolutionary Quirks of the English Language

How many times a week do you utter that you’ll “Google it” when faced with a forgotten song title or the desire to know the current population of Peru? Are you guilty of hashtagging words or phrases, even when you’re not on Twitter? The English language is a fascinating and ever-changing beast – these are some of our favourite of its idiosyncrasies.

Verbing

When we say that we’re going to ‘Google’ something, we’re turning a noun into a verb. It’s a trend that seems to have spiked in recent years (much to the dismay of some linguists), yet in actuality we’ve been doing it for centuries. Even the Bard was known to verb the occasional noun, as evidenced when Brutus “ghosted” Julius Caesar.

Hashtag

You might be thinking that the Twitter hashtag doesn’t have much to do with the English language. However, professor of linguistics Vyvyan Evans would like to prove you wrong. She argues that the hashtag, much like the rest of language, is symbolic. In other words, it doesn’t resemble the thing that it stands for. Instead, you must already know what it means to understand it. This means that the hashtag can now exist outside of Twitter, used as a tool to add emphasis rather than just being a way to see who is talking about a particular topic online.

Life spans

Words, quite literally, have lives. It’s estimated that words have life spans of between 1,000 and 20,000 years, and, according to Reading University, ‘who’ is the oldest known word in English at 20,000 years. Fortunately, there’s no sign of us ‘running out’ of new words, as new ones are supposedly created every 98 minutes.

Synonyms

The English language is not easy to learn, and it’s made all the more difficult by our tendency to have more than one word with the same meaning. If you need further proof of how labyrinthine our language can get, then look to Paul Dickson. The lexicographer enjoyed his 15 minutes of fame when he collected 2,964 terms for the word ‘drunk’, making him the record holder for finding the most synonyms for any word in the English language.

The breadth of the English language fascinates the proofreaders and copywriters at Proofreading London, and we’re always on the hunt for weird and wonderful facts to keep our knowledge-hungry minds satisfied. If you’re in need of a linguistic maven to craft your content or to take a detailed look at existing copy, then get in touch with the team today.