The Penguin Guide to Plain English

contexts, smacks of artifice and pedantry. There is always the risk that

the writer or speaker who readily makes use o f them will appear to be

showing off.

A R C H A I S M S

The vocabulary of a language changes over the centuries. We have seen

how English has acquired new words throughout the ages. It has also of course lost words. And sometimes words are half-lost, or nearly lost.

They disappear from popular general use, but turn up from time to time

either in special circles w ith strong traditionalist leanings, or in the

utterance of knowledgeable people who find them useful and, perhaps,

irreplaceable. Where words stand for things once part of the environment but which have now disappeared from daily life, it is natural that they

should get lost. We come across such words, say in reading Shakespeare,

and when we discover that they refer to items of dress or armour long

since discarded, we find the loss quite understandable. But words are also

lost, not because the things they stood for have gone from the modern

scene, but because they have been replaced by other words. We read

Hamlet’s question, ‘W oo’t drink up eisel?’ and learn from the glossary

that ‘eisel’ is vinegar, so the question is ‘W ould you drink up vinegar?’ However, quite apart from nouns, which may stand for things no longer

used, or for things for which we now have other names, there are words

which we class as ‘archaisms’ for another reason. They have ceased to be

used altogether, or ceased to be used much in general parlance. They

sound quaint. Such is the adverb ‘eke’, meaning ‘also’ or ‘moreover’. As

‘eek’ it was a favourite word of Chaucer. He tells how the m onk’s bridle

would jingle in the w ind ‘And eek as loude as dooth the chapel belle.’ It

is to be distinguished from the verb which we use in saying that someone

‘eked ou t’ a living on a poor croft. It is a useful w ord to cite as an instance

because in James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man we meet a close

friend of the hero Stephen, one Cranly, whose habit of using the w ord

‘eke’ adds comically to his ironic pose of scholarly solemnity.There are words which have not entirely disappeared from current

usage yet which carry an archaic flavour. This archaic flavour is not strong

enough to prevent our use of the words, but it is strong enough for us

to hesitate before using them for fear of sounding affected and preten­

tious. Thus we may hesitate before using ‘albeit’ instead of ‘although’.