The Secret Life of Words by Henry Hitchings

Author:Henry Hitchings
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

The faithless Cherokee obeys,

Rich Senegal her tribute pays,

And Ganges’ tyrant shakes with fear,

For vengeance whispers, ‘Clive is near.’37

One prolific source of new terms connected with abroad was Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She was an accomplished networker, who brought to Britain the practice of inoculation against smallpox and started a magazine entitled the Nonsense of Common-Sense. Above all, she travelled: to Florence, Geneva, Avignon, Brescia and Venice, and through Hungary, Bohemia and Germany. She spent seventeen months in Turkey, with her husband, Edward, who was the British ambassador in Constantinople. A prodigious letter-writer, Lady Mary penned ‘highly polished bulletins’. Yet what look to be ‘the epistolary equivalent of vers de société, products of a decorative, brittle sensibility’, are sustained by both ‘the strong undertow of melancholy’ and a gift for embellishment.38 Her imports are wide-ranging: she can ask for a letter to be directed chez an aristocratic friend, or refer to a fracas breaking out in polite company, in addition to adopting words like cicisbeo (a married woman’s approved bit on the side) and feridgi (a Turkish garment, not unlike a nightgown). She may well be the first British author to use née to introduce a married woman’s maiden name, to refer to the pleasurable condition of volupté (although voluptee, meaning ‘lust’, can be found in Wyclif ’s translation of the Bible), and to mention an homme d’affaires – explaining, ‘Every pasha has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires.’

Montagu’s writings were an antidote to the often ill-informed works of her contemporaries. For instance, John Campbell and Charles Thompson both managed to produce accounts of the Levant without ever going there. There was, moreover, a fashion for imaginative and sometimes moralistic forays into the Islamic world, which can be dated to the Antoine Galland’s 1704 translation of the Arabian Nights. Their subject matter includes caravans, elephants and camels, flowers and jewels, and a common trope is the impenetrability of the East, its religions and mysteries.39 Thus in Samuel Johnson’s play Irene, which was written in the 1730s, we hear of the nymph known as a houri, in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) of a ghoul (from the Arabic), in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) of a kanoon (a type of zither), and in Felicia Hemans’s unfinished poem ‘Superstition and Revelation’ (c.1820) of ‘the glistening serab’ – that is, a mirage.

Although trade with the Near and Middle East shrivelled in the eighteenth century, the distribution of traders was wider than ever. Syria exported to London mohair yarn, raw silk and galls for use in the production of dyes, while indigo and spices from British India and woollens from England were sent to the markets at Aleppo.40 Robert Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec (1757) heightened interest in Islamic architecture, while Richard Pococke’s Description of the East (1743-5) provided for nonspecialists an account of Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Cyprus. Pococke affords us a first sighting of the word fellah, a term for Egyptian peasants – commonly encountered in the plural fellahin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.