The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Mark Forsyth (The Villains of the Language) #28

The Villains of the Language

History is written by victors. The Elizabethan poet Sir John Harington once wrote:

Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?

Why, if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.

But history is a lot fairer than language. Language takes your name and applies it to whatever it likes. Sometimes, however, it is fair, as with the word quisling.

Vidkun Quisling was a Norwegian maths prodigy and invented his own religion. He also embarrassed himself rather during the Second World War by trying to get Norway to surrender to the Nazis so that he could be the puppet Minister-President. He succeeded in his plan and ten weeks after his appointment The Times wrote:

Major Quisling has added a new word to the English language. To writers, the word Quisling is a gift from the gods. If they had been ordered to invent a new word for traitor … they could hardly have hit upon a more brilliant combination of letters. Aurally it contrives to suggest something at once slippery and tortuous. Visually it has the supreme merit of beginning with a Q, which (with one august exception) has long seemed to the British mind to be a crooked, uncertain and slightly disreputable letter, suggestive of the questionable, the querulous, the quavering of quaking quagmires and quivering quicksands, of quibbles and quarrels, of queasiness, quackery, qualms and quilp.

And it serves him right. However, language isn’t always on the side of justice. Consider these three names: Guillotine, Derrick and Jack Robinson. Which of those do you think was the nasty one?