Professor David Crystal: The Influence of the King James Bible on the English Language

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments

Loved this.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Sep 19 2015 🗫︎ replies
Captions
[MUSIC PLAYING] Good evening, everyone, and welcome. For those of you who haven't had the chance to meet earlier, my name is Mark Robson. I'm the director of English at the British Council. I have one-- I've been asked to do one piece of housekeeping. I'm not going to do the fire exit routine, but I am going to ask you to make sure you've got your mobile phones turned off. So if you haven't, please do so now. Welcome to the magnificent surroundings of Dartmouth House, home of the English-Speaking Union, to whom I would like to extend my thanks for agreeing to host tonight's lecture by Professor David Crystal. Before I introduce Professor Crystal, I'd like to just take a couple of minutes to set the scene. At the British Council, we share with the English-Speaking Union the fact that English is at the core of what we do, this because we passionately believe that acquiring English language skills can provide people with life-changing opportunities. A recent piece of research that carried out on our behalf by Euromonitor in five developing countries across Africa and South Asia demonstrated that a competent English speaker can expect to earn, on average, 30% more than a similarly skilled person without English. We also share with the English-Speaking Union the aim, through English, of providing people worldwide with the possibility to dialogue, exchange ideas and opinions, and hopefully break down mistrust between cultures. The English-Speaking Union has a tremendous history in promoting the virtues of the English language. For over 90 years, it's provided scholarships, bursaries, and exchange opportunities for English speakers around the world, as well as promoting debating skills to school and university students worldwide. Turning to the British Council, this year, we're proud to say that we'll reach 170 million teachers and learners of English worldwide through a range of different types of work. We're extremely active in teacher training these days, and taking India as an example, we're working with Indian state governments and nearing our goal of training 3/4 of a million state school English teachers over a three-year period. We are actively embracing technology and have a burgeoning portfolio of web, mobile phone, radio, and TV products for remote learners and teachers of English, which are, of course, of particular relevance to the developing world. And, of course, there is our fantastically successful network of 70 face to face teaching centres in 43 countries and also the nearly 2 million English proficiency exams we deliver each year, including our world leading high stakes English proficiency test, IELTS. Here in the UK, we've reinvigorated our programme of English work of late and have recently won European integration funding to develop materials for learners and teachers in the UK ESOL community, so we look forward to getting stuck into that very soon. This is the last in a yearlong series of seminars which has brought together hundreds of teachers of English in various locations across the country, providing access to a diverse range of presentations and topics. And it's fitting that the finale to the British Council seminar series tonight sees us working together with the English-Speaking Union and in support of the King James Bible Trust to celebrate the foremost writer and lecturer on the English language, Professor David Crystal. Now David really needs no introduction. Being the world-renowned eminent linguist and scholar that he is, he is, of course, the author of such notable works as English as a Global Language, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of the English Language, and, of course, tonight's focus, Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, copies of which will be on sale after the lecture. It is also my particular pleasure to be able to wish David many happy returns, because yesterday was, in fact, his 70th birthday. [APPLAUSE] Congratulations, David. So thank you for listening. That's enough from me, and without further ado, I give you Professor David Crystal. Well, I don't feel 70. I mean working with the British Council as long as I have and the ESU also keeps you young, you know. Really, it really does. Thank you for coming. Obviously, you are all here, because you were unable to get tickets for the Harry Potter world premiere. And this is very much a second best, but I'll try to live up to the wizardry of that amazing series. You have then noticed, have you, that it's the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. I thought you might have noticed. It's been very difficult to avoid noticing. Anniversaries are an amazing thing, aren't they? They focus the mind. Last year, this time last year, nobody was paying any particular attention to the King James Bible any more than any previous year. This year, how many times have you heard the entire King James Bible read aloud from beginning to end? I know of at least 10 occasions this year, where that has happened. Oh, they're great events, certainly. They start off fine with great enthusiasm, and Genesis and Exodus are really exciting. But when you get on to Numbers and Deuteronomy, there is a kind of falling away of interest on there. And then it sort of livens up again when you get to the New Testament, if you're still alive by then. It's been quite an amazing year from that point of view. Anniversaries are like that. Of course, we're already planning next year. Dickens next year, of course. They're already planning 2016-- Shakespeare's death, 400 years. Oh, they're already planning 2016. So this year has been quite remarkable for bringing the King James version into the public eye, a version that has attracted an extraordinary campaign of public relations, really, apart from anything else. Just think of the accolades it's received over the years. Oh, just take in the last 50 years, Churchill, for example, referring to it as a masterpiece of the English language. We'll go back a century, Coleridge claiming that the King James Bible would keep anyone from being vulgar in point of style. If you follow the King James style, you will avoid vulgarity, by which he meant, of course, using a style that was unelegant in some way. Oh, all the famous people have commented in this way. Charlton Heston-- I mean, you know, let's go up a notch to Charlton Heston. He said at one point, "The King James Bible has been an enormous force in shaping the development of the English language," Charlton Heston, that well-known expert on English language studies. But you see, why was he such-- why was he so enthusiastic? Because he had to read the whole thing. Why did he read the whole thing? Because he was playing Moses, wasn't he, in The Ten Commandments. And while he was making that film, he did, indeed, read the whole of the King James Bible. And he was very impressed by it. And we have that quote. And then we have people who have pointed to the relationship of the King James Bible to the English language as we know it today. And here, things tend to go a little out of control, it seems to me, because people say here that the modern English language has been shaped by the King James Bible. Without the King James Bible, there would be no modern English. People say things like this. Melvyn Bragg, for example, whose splendid book of books, by the way, came out a little while ago, a year ago he was saying things like this, that the King James Bible was the DNA of the English language, a theme that Frank Field picked up. And it got limited publicity this-- the DNA of the English language. Now that's really quite a strong claim I mean DNA-- I don't know very much about genetics, but one thing I do know is that DNA is everywhere. So what we're saying, if we're saying that the King James is the DNA of the English language, is that there isn't a word that you can say that doesn't show the influence of the King James Bible in some way. And that, to me, is going well over the top. That is exaggeration, because when you actually look at the King James Bible and start to read it or listen to it, the thing you notice more than anything else, it seems to me, are the differences between the language of 1611 and the language of today. You look, for example, at the way in which the spellings have changed over this period of time-- hundreds of spellings different in the King James version compared with today, words like asswaged, spelt A-S-S-W-A-G-ED, pluckt, spelled P-L-U-C-K-T, and so on and so forth-- lots of spelling differences. Punctuation differences-- huge differences in punctuation. The punctuation system was only coming into existence at the end of the 16th century. Words like "comma" and "semicolon" and so on were being used for the first time. And so you got many differences in punctuation. Most of you here, I have no doubt, have a certain degree of hatred for what is often called the green grocer's apostrophe. Have you not hatred for it? I am quite sure that the ESU and the council combined together-- the green grocer's apostrophe. That is the one but you put an apostrophe in to express the plural, potato's, apostrophe S, apostrophe for the plural-- not standard English today. You will find it throughout the King James Bible. In King James, you will have words which are pluralized with apostrophe S, as you do in Shakespeare. You will find words like ours, spelled O-U-R, apostrophe, S, theirs spelled T-H-E-I-R, apostrophe, S. The punctuation system hadn't settled down at that time, so big differences there. Vocabulary differences-- go through a concordance to the words in the King James Bible, and what strike you more than anything else are the differences, words like peradventure and tari, and wot, W-O-T, meaning no, that sort of thing. Grammar-- the grammatical differences between 1611 and today-- very, very striking when you go to King James. The word endings, E-T-H, moveth, creepeth, diggeth, and so on. We don't have that. Past tenses-- builded, I builded it. I digged it. Adam digged and so on. We don't have those. Word order variations-- in the likeness of God made he him, made he him. I laughed not, where today we'd say, I didn't laugh. Lots of word order variations-- in the day but thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. And that one sentence summarises, really, the extraordinary differences between the language of the King James Bible and the language of the present day. Also, there are stylistic traits in the King James version and in all the bibles of that period, actually, which are out of fashion today. The style is not entirely one that we use now. While there are fantastic features of the King James style that anybody today would admire and want to emulate, there are, nonetheless, features which have gone out of fashion. Take this quotation, for example. "And they came, both men and women, as many as were willing hearted, and brought bracelets and earrings and rings and tablets, all jewels of gold. And every man that offered, offered an offering of gold unto the Lord." "And every man that offered, offered an offering of gold unto the Lord." If I wrote that in one of my books and sent it into a publishing house, the copy editor would strike out two of those offerings. They would say, you've used the same word three times. You must change the word. Very the word. That kind of repetition is out of fashion these days, but it was very fashionable in those days. Or take this one. Let me introduce it by way of a question. How many of you were taught, once upon a time in school, that it was bad to introduce a sentence with the word "and"? I'm not going to look. Everybody is going to put their hands up, because we were all taught this once upon a time. It was a prescriptive rule that came in in the middle of the 19th century, and many of us have been taught this. But if you believe that, if you believe it is bad to introduce a sentence with the word "and," then you immediately eliminate 3/4 of the King James Bible. And God did this, and God did that, and God did the other. Opening chapter of the book of Genesis, 31 verses, 29 of them begin with a word "and." It's a Hebrewism. It's the influence of the original Hebrew that's coming through there. But the point is it was a perfectly normal style in those days. And so there are lots and lots of differences between King James and the present day. So when we're asking the question, what is the influence of the King James Bible on the English language, we have to be rather judicious. We have to be rather cautious. Influence there certainly is, but you have to look for it and explore it and be careful about generalising about it. I guess if you were asked, as really I'm asking you now, to reflect for a second on the aspects of the Bible that are most immediately apparent in present day English, probably most of you would think of the idioms, of the phrases from the Bible that have come into the present day. That's what most people consider to be the main influence. There are other influences, of course, influences of rhythm, for example. But most people think of the idioms. They think of things like thorn in the flesh or fly in the ointment or out of the mouths of babes or phrases of that kind. And that is the area, indeed, that is the focus of the talk this evening, because the question I want to ask is, just how much influence of that kind is there? This is the area where most influence is manifest, not in vocabulary. The King James does not introduce large numbers of new words into the English language. Shakespeare did. We know that Shakespeare invented lots of words into English, but King James did not. And the reason is that the King James translators, well, were deliberately conservative. They were looking back rather than looking forward. They weren't trying to be daring in language as Shakespeare was. They were trying to reflect a tradition of biblical translation, which went back several decades. They were told to do this. The preface to the Bible says at one point, we are not trying to make a new translation, but rather a principal good one. We're trying to make an old one better. And they were instructed that they had to use, as their first source of reference, the Bishop's Bible in its 1602 two translation. And if that was wanting, they could look at other earlier translations. It was a conservativism of approach in King James. So they were not in the business of inventing new words, as Shakespeare was. But on the other hand, if you are going to look back at tradition, if you want a bible that is going to be used by everybody, appreciated by everybody, understood as 100 years before it was said by the man who drives the plough, then you want to make sure you tap into the idiom of English as it has been passed down. And so it is in this area of idiom that you are most likely going to encounter an influence that was not only present in 1611, but has continued until the present day. And so I put it to you, there are phrases like "a fly in the ointment" and "my brother's keeper" and all of these. How many such phrases are there in modern English that come from the King James Bible? That's the question. How many? What comes into your head? 10? 20? 50 of them? 100? 200? 500? 1,000? 5,000? Of course, you have no idea, nor had I. And that's why I wrote Begat, because when the idea came to write a book on the influence of the King James Bible and the English language, I looked at what I had written previously in other books. And I see there that I wrote the King James Bible has been a huge influence on the English language through its idioms. And I asked myself the question, I'm jolly glad that nobody asked me exactly how much influence it has had, because I would not have been able to answer. So I thought, it's time to answer. And so that's what the book is about. And that's what I did. I spent a very interesting Christmas a couple of years ago reading the whole thing from beginning to end, from chapter one, verse one of Genesis to the very last full stop in the Apocrypha. And what I did was I went through, and I looked for these idioms. And every time I found one, I highlit it. Well, it was all done on screen, you understand, but electronic highlighting I mean. And then to make sure I hadn't missed any, I read it through again. Nobody in the history of civilization has done that. [LAUGHTER] I am absolutely convinced that nobody has read the King James Bible through twice, once after the other from beginning to end. This is my real claim to fame, I think, that I have done this. And I found the answer. I now know exactly how many idioms have come into English from the King James Bible. The answer is-- I'll tell you that in a little while. When you do this kind of exercise, you have to be alert, because it's not as if they're going to turn up on every page, you see. There are long stretches and sometimes entire books where there are no influences of this kind whatsoever. And then there are other stretches, where they're tumbling out to you every few lines. Matthew's Gospel, for example, has dozens, but you can go to some books of the Old Testament and not find one at all. Let me illustrate the effect. I want to try and reconstruct for you the feeling I had when I was doing this exercise. I'm going to read a section from the Old Testament, and I want you to notice the point at which you recognise the modern idiom. And it's going to take a while, because I'm going to read 10 verses. And, well, to warn you, you know nothing is going to happen in the first nine. But that's the point. That's the point. Check that I'm right. Listen, and say, is there anything modern in this whatsoever? And then the modernism will come. It'll hit you between the ears, and you'll say, oh, yes, of course, there it is. There it is. So the beginning of Genesis, chapter four, the Cain and Abel story. "And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bear Cain." No. Why don't I read it in the pronunciation of 1611, the way it would have been pronounced in 1611? 400 years of pronunciation change, but not that different from the present day, but different enough to make it a very interesting auditory experience. "And Adam knew Eve, his wife, and she conceived and bear Cain and said, they have gotten the man from the Lord. And she, again, bear his brother, Abel. And Abel was the keeper of sheep. But Cain was a tiller of the ground. And in process of time, it came to pass that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. And Abel, he also brought of the first lines of his flock and of the fact thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering, but unto Cain and his offering, he had not respect. And Cain was very rough, but his countenance fell, and the Lord said unto Cain, quiet the rough, and where's the countenance fallen? If they doest well, it shall not be accepted, and if they doest not well, sin layeth at the door. And unto they shall be his desire, and those should rule over him. And Cain talked with Abel, his brother. And it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, his brother, and slew him. And the Lord said unto Cain, where is Abel, thy brother? And he said, I know not. Am I me brother's keeper? Am I me brother's keeper? I am my brother's keeper? Yes! 10 verses in. Whoof, am I my brother's keeper? Of course, I recognise that one. I've heard it 1,000 times. You'll see it in a moment being used in all sorts of modern circumstances. But the previous nine verses-- nothing really of note, just the story being told in the usual way. That's one reason, then, why it's tricky sometimes to place a decision on the issue of counting the idioms in the King James version. You can sort of almost fall asleep as you read and read and read, and one can slip past you without you recognising it. You've got to be alert for the occasional occurrence of the idiom. Second thing you've got to be alert for is the fact that the idiom may not actually be the same as it was in King James. The modern idiom may have changed the King James version in various ways. Let's take a modern idiom, a phrase that we all know-- eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die, for tomorrow we die, something like that. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die-- biblical expression, isn't it? No, it isn't. That expression turns up nowhere in King James or in any other Bible translation for that matter. What you get is a conflation of two things. In Isaiah, we read, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we shall die-- no mention of being merry. In Luke, we read one of Jesus' parables about the rich man who tells his soul, take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry, but no mention of dying. So what has happened is that somehow or other over the centuries, the Isaiah and the Luke have come together. And now we eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth-- very familiar one, right out in the Bible, isn't it? No, it isn't. Matthew provides us with weeping and gnashing of teeth-- no mention of wailing. At another point, he talks about wailing and gnashing of teeth-- no mention of weeping. And in Esther, we get weeping and wailing, no mention of gnashing. Somehow or other, they have come together, and we have weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth. This is the point, you see. You've got to read behind the idiom to find the modern version. One of the most famous is "fly in the ointment," Ecclesiastes. "Fly in the ointment--" straight out of the Bible. No, it isn't. What you get in King James is an extraordinary line, really. This is what you get in Ecclesiastes 10. "Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour." That's what you get. "Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savour." And from that, somehow, we have got fly in the ointment. How? Hm, that's interesting. Talk about that later. So the idioms that we're talking about have sometimes a direct relationship to King James in that the exact idiom might be found there. Sometimes it is an amalgam of various snippets that have come from different parts of the Bible. And the general point is that these items are sporadic. In some places, as I said before, rather fuller in their representation of others, but at no point can one, as it were, take a page of the Bible, read it, and say to oneself, oh, yes. There is definitely an influence on modern English. It is not as strong as you might think. So in what way, then, has the King James Bible been an influence on modern English? If these idioms are sporadic, turning up here and there, and the total number that will be in the order-- ah, you have to wait for that. But it's not going to be very large. Am I then saying that the King James version has had no influence on English or only a limited influence of English? No, I'm not, and the reason is this. Because once an idiom comes into modern English, then it is used, and it is adapted. Then it is manipulated. Then it is played with. And we now find the idioms being-- turning up in all kinds of circumstances, places where you would never expect the Bible to be at all show the influence of these idioms. In other words, there is a huge use being made of a relatively small number of idiomatic expressions. Now in order to show this to you, I have to prove it to you, really. Now the best way of doing it is to show you some slides. When I first started to give this talk at the beginning of the year, I gave the examples I'm about to show you. And people said, you've made them up. They're so bizarre, some of them, you've invented them. No, every one of the examples you will see this evening is genuine. And I begin with "fly in the ointment." Why not? That's a perfectly good place to start. Fly in the ointment-- you and I say that's the fly in the ointment. Teachers are-- books of idioms on English will have "fly in the ointment." Students are taught to say "fly in the ointment' and so on. But if you go to the press, you begin to see things like this-- "Bush is the fly in Blair's ointment." This is the sort of thing I mean. The idiom is there beneath the surface. Imagine somebody who is unaware of the idiom, fly in the ointment, is not aware that it comes from the Bible. What is he going to do with this? Bush is fly in Blair's ointment? What ointment has Mr. Blair, please? You know, I mean you're going to get total confusion. You've got to know the idiom is there before you can understand the adaptation of it. It's not just a British thing. This next example illustrates the same sort of thing happening in an American context, the fly in Congress's ointment, says this particular headline. Once you know, of course, that fly in the ointment is a metaphor, is not being used literally-- yes, it was originally, dead flies cause the ointment to stink. But when we say, fly in the ointment, we simply mean that there is a problem of some sort, yes. But now that we've got to that stage, of course, you can reverse the situation and use the expression literally as in this next example. Here is an Innovation Canada example. This is about the household fruit fly. People are hoping to find, by using the fruit fly, a solution to a range of genetic disorders. So the journalist headed the piece, fly in the ointment, meaning literally a real fly in real ointment. So this is a second generation of playfulness, you see, that is taking place here-- very subtle to try and understand the levels of meaning behind this. Now in order to give you an example of how a particular expression is so widely used in modern English, I thought I would take one, and then I'll show you some more, where I'm just going to show you how it turns out in all kinds of circumstances. And the expression-- I will take the one from Cain and Abel earlier on, my brother's keeper. Journalists love the phrase, my brother's keeper, and not just journalists either. We all do. If you had to write an article, for example, reporting on events in any institution, which cares for people-- a borstal, a hospital, a mental health institution, a nursing home, anywhere, or a prison even, anywhere where people look after or guard or care for-- you might well head it, my brother's keeper. It's the sort of thing that happens. I've got dozens and dozens of examples of that happening. Rather more unexpected is when you see it turning up in the middle of a television series, where you wouldn't expect the Bible to be present at all. "My Brother's Keeper" has been the name of over a dozen episodes of television series, such as Knight Rider, Law and Order, Hee Haw, Tales from the Crypt, for heaven's sake. One of the episodes was called "My Brother's Keeper." The very first episode of Miami Vice was called "My Brother's Keeper." For those of you who are slightly less young, you will remember The Brady Bunch from the 1970s. One of their episodes was called "My Brother's Keeper." And those of you who are still less young than that will probably remember the 1948 film starring Jack Warner called, voila, My Brother's Keeper. Several books have been called My Brother's Keeper, such as this one by Marcia Davenport. At least two songs have been called it, and at least two record albums-- here is one-- My Brother's Keeper by the Williams Brothers there. Many websites call themselves My Brother's Keeper. Here is one. This is about health. It's about health disparities, and the name is, if you can see, My Brother's Keeper. My Brother's Keeper is also the name of a genealogy site, organising information about family history. There's its logo. They call themselves Brother's Keeper. I don't expect you'd want to expect to find the name turning up in a motorcycle organisation, like Hell's Angels, would you? Not really the place where you expect to see the Bible turning up, but it does. Here's an organisation, a motorcycle club. They call themselves My Brother's Keepers. If you meet them in the middle of the night, don't expect to receive a prayer. There are lots of organisations that call themselves Brother's Keepers. There's an anti-racism group from Germany. You can't see the name on the front of their album, but that particular group call themselves My Brother's Keepers. There's a limit to what you can do. So after a while, people start to change the grammar of the phrase. What can you do? One thing you can do is you can change the pronoun. My brother's keeper-- well, let's have some other pronoun there. So there is a Walt Disney cartoon, for example, The Gargoyle series called "Her Brother's Keeper." There's an organisation, which offers support to people with AIDS. They call it Brother's Keepers, you see here, but the actual name of the organisation is Our Brother's Keepers Foundation-- Our Brother's Keepers this time. There's an article here coming up on traffic congestion in American cities headed-- do you see-- "Their Brother's Keeper." That's one thing you can do, then. You can change the pronoun. Another thing you can do is you can change the gender of the noun. Several books and films have been called "My Sister's Keeper." Here's one by Jodi Picoult. Quite a number of sites, of course, go out of their way to avoid sexism. I mean brother-- hm, male biassed. Sister-- hm, female biassed. Need to avoid this, so let's have both together. This is a Roman Catholic organisation called Big Sisters and Big Brothers, and the heading of this particular page is, Am I My Brother's and Sister's Keeper? Won't satisfy everybody, of course, who would prefer it to be, Am I My Sister's and Brother's Keeper? This kind of thing can go right up to the top. Barack Obama, in his Christmas Day message in 2008, made a very strong statement. "Now more than ever," he said, "we must rededicate ourselves to the notion that we share a common destiny as Americans, that I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper." That's what he said. It was reported in the newspapers like this. "Be your brother's keeper," President-elect Barack Obama urges. No, he didn't say that. He said, brother's keeper and sister's keeper. But that was presumably a little bit too long for the headline writer. It's not just brothers and sisters. Any relatives can be used here. Any story of someone who has had to look after an ageing mother or father can motivate such usages as "My Parent's Keeper," as in this particular example. And some of you will remember that very moving 1985 book by the daughter of film star Bette Davis, which was called My Mother's Keeper. What else can you do to the phrase? Well, one thing you can do is you can increase the number of possessives that turn up before the final noun. In 2008, a Wisconsin court in America ruled that a homeowner looking after somebody else's dog was responsible for any personal injury caused if the dog runs out onto the street and bites somebody. This was a big court case, and it was reported like this. [LAUGHTER] "Am I My Brother's Dog's Keeper?" You can go on and on. There is no limit to the number of apostrophe S's that you can have in front of the noun. I've been looking for the longest sequence ever. The longest one I found so far is this one from a blogger, who gave an account of how he was reluctantly persuaded to go to the aid of a relative in computational trouble. And he started his blog like this. [LAUGHTER] "Am I my brother's sister-in-law's computer's keeper?" Well, you can see how you could keep it going if you wanted to. Another ploy is to give the word "brother" an attribute of some kind, an adjective of some sort. The economic downturn of 2008 was a perfect example. I saw this next example several times. "Am I My Lehman Brothers' Keeper?" You remember Lehman Brothers was the name of one of the organisations involved. Rather more daring is to tweak one or other of the salient words. Sometimes it's the word "keeper," which provides the focus, like this one heading an article on a soccer transfer deal, a soccer transfer deal, or this one heading an article on health care. "Am I my brother's gatekeeper?" Now, obviously, there are plenty of words in English which end in "keeper," as you can see the potential, can't you? You know, housekeeper and gamekeeper and so on-- any of them, obviously, could attract the usage. It's less easy to play with the word "brother." More usually, the whole word is replaced. For example, a political commentator began, am I my senator's keeper? That's the sort of thing you find. Or this piece about the environment-- am I my water's keeper? Or one of my favourite examples, but it might shock some of you-- this one by a former sex worker about legalising prostitution. [LAUGHTER] It has to be admired, doesn't it? You know, whatever your view about the content, the ingenuity in the language is extraordinary. Am I my brothel's keeper? Yes, lots of words ending in "keeper." An article about an American church minister who discovered an accounting error made by a colleague began like this-- "Am I my bookkeeper's keeper?" And I could go on and on and on, but let me just end this particular sequence by telling you the joke about the ape in the zoo caught reading Darwin and asking, am I my keeper's brother? [LAUGHTER] [CLAPPING] Oh, listen. It's funny the first time you hear it, but not the hundredth time. You look it up on Google, you'll see how often that joke is retold. So what can I do to illustrate the point? I mean that example I could replicate hundreds of times for the other idioms that they're talking about this evening. There isn't time to do that. That's what the book is all about. But what I thought I would do was give you my top 10, as it were, of idioms that I find have been manipulated in the most ingenious way. Let me begin with Exodus, manna from Heaven. We all talk about [INAUDIBLE] manna from Heaven. Wonderful, isn't it? So here is a site about a West Country cooking recipe using local produce. They call themselves "Manna from Devon," which I thought was rather nice. And then you remember the Cuban ballet star, Carlos Acosta, from Cuba, ballet? This article about him-- "Manna from Havana." Now that is very clever, because it's a double pun, isn't it? You get the man and the Heaven both working together at the same time. Lots of variations on manna from Heaven. A coat of many colours-- well known, of course, because of the musical as much as anything else. So here is an article from The Guardian on holiday travel to Zagreb in Croatia, and they call the article, "A Croat of Many Colours." This next one, Matthew 25, well done, though good and faithful servant. You might not expect that one to be as popular as it turns out to be, but it's all over the place, as in this example, a farewell to a Whitehall retiree began, "Well done, thou good and civil servant." Here's one that you can do in advance of me, if you like. Matthew 5, blessed are the peacemakers. If you had to write an article about the treatment for heart conditions, what would you call it? Of course, you would, and there is an example of it in real life. You see, this is something we can all do, and there is a motivation somehow deep within us to do this, to take a famous phrase, and to play with it, and to show how original and clever we are, except we find it on Google 1,000 times. Except each time it turns up, it seems fresh. Actually, it doesn't seem cliched, and that's the amazing thing. Number six-- number one, two, three, four, five, number five, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, Matthew 6. This next example, you might not be able to read it. It's from an online forum. It says here, "sufficient unto the day is the email thereof," which is so true. What about this one, Luke 2-- lay them in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn. No room in the inn-- this report of a council unable to cope with waste after Christmas. "No room at the bin." What about Matthew 7, seek and ye shall find? Seek and ye shall find. Well, this next slide is actually slightly out of date, but at the beginning of the year, when I put the slides together, this was the heading of a blog about the search for Osama bin Laden. "Seek and ye shall seek." Of course, they found him, so the slide is now dated, but the principle is as alive as ever. The Gentiles are a law unto themselves. Romans, anybody called "law" is now just waiting for this headline. And who do we know best called "law"? The film star, Jude Law. Not surprising, then, that an article on his rise to fame is going to be called something like this. "Jude Law-- a law unto himself." You can get very subtle with the word "law." In France, there is a river, the River Loire. What is little known is that there is a tributary of the River Loire also called the Loir, but without a final E. A travel brochure about visiting this lesser known river was headed "A Loir Unto Itself." Here's another one that you can all do without me helping you. Matthew 13, some seeds fell by the wayside. So now your job is to write an article about Wimbledon. [LAUGHTER] What will you call it? You'll call it something like that. Here's one. [INAUDIBLE] this is about golf, of course, which also has seeds. Any seeded sport motivates the use of the phrase. And then my 10th example, which I use, because it is, in my view, the worst possible pun that I've ever come across in all my analysis of biblical idioms and their playfulness. I never expected Isaiah, I am holier than thou. I mean that's a common enough phrase. He's very holier than thou, isn't he? I mean we all know the phrase. I never expected it to be the name of a studio for tattooing and body piercing. They call themselves, Holier Than Thou. Yes, at this point, you can either groan or decide to leave. The point is all human life is here. Biblical expressions are not restricted to only the most elegant of circumstances, the most comfortable of circumstances. Even occasions like brothels and sex stores and all the rest of it, they use the phrases as well. And this is really what makes the Bible so unbelievably exceptional, that people have taken extracts from it and use them in circumstances where you might not ever have expected them to appear. You'll see them turning up on t-shirts, for example. "Judge not, lest ye be smacked in the mouth," says this particular t-shirt. Or this one, "Geekier than thou." That's for people into IT, of course. Would you expect a biblical expression to be the name of a pub? What about this one, this pub? It's called The Goat of Many Colours. It's real. There is a picture of it. I looked and looked and looked for examples of this kind in writing this book. Sometimes it took a long time to find an example. For ages, I couldn't find anything to do with a pillar of salt, for instance. And then I was driving through Bury St Edmunds and going up the street, and I stopped, and I was talking to somebody. And it transpired that this little thing in the middle of Bury is actually called, by the locals, the Pillar of Salt. Yes, thank you very much. That's just exactly what I was looking for. So what have we got? We've got a situation, where a certain number of biblical idioms are being used in an extraordinary variety of circumstances. But how many exactly? I promised you a total, and the total I came up with, having gone through that highlighting exercise I mentioned earlier on, was 257. That's my total. Is it more than you were expecting or less than you were expecting? I suspect most of you are thinking less. Most of you were thinking, there's going to be hundreds and hundreds, maybe 1,000 such-- but no, not at all. 257. In my judgement, if you went through the exercise I did, your intuition being different from mine, you might spot something that I ignored or disregard something that I spotted. So you might end up with 258 or 259 or 254. That's not important. The point is it's 250-ish. It's not 500 or 1,000 or anything like that. It's not very many. But here's the next point. How many of those 257 are unique to the King James Bible? That's the interesting question. And the answer there will really surprise you. 18 only. 18. All the other expressions are to be found already in the earlier translations of the Bible in the 16th century. You will find them in the Bishop's Bible or the Geneva Bible or the Coverdale Bible or the Great Bible or especially in Tyndale's Bible of 1525, and some even earlier than that in the Wycliffe translation, the very first translation into English many years before. It's Tyndale, who introduced most of the idioms that we're talking about. It's him and Wycliffe that were stressing over and over, we want a translation for the boy that drives the plough. And as a result, they introduced idioms that were, in some cases, innovatory. Innovatory-- innovative, innovative, novel. They were idioms that people were likely to remember, idioms that had a good rhythm that were part of the natural rhythm of spoken English-- fly in the ointment, head in the dust, you know, that sort of thing, tum-de-de-dum, that kind of rhythmic character that you find so often in, for example, Shakespeare and the other playwrights. They wanted memorable phrases. And one of the things they did, of course, was they introduced into their translations idioms that were already in the language that everybody would recognise. You're the apple of my eye. She's the apple of his eye, apple of one's eye-- a biblical expression. Indeed, it is. It turns up in all these translations. But the Bible guys already-- it was already in English. They took it from old-- apple of the eye is in old English, around about the year 1000. And it was a part of normal English idiom. So if you were doing a translation that you wanted everybody to understand, you would obviously introduce into your translation as many of these things as possible. So here's the interesting point. King James is not originating these idioms. It is, however, popularising them. Unlike any other Bible, King James popularised the idioms. These idioms, especially the new ones, were not coming into English in the 16th century. These things like fly in the ointment and so on, they didn't come into English in the 16th century. They came in a century or more later. In fact, it took quite a long time before the idioms finally percolated through into English, 1611 for the Bible. You don't find many examples in the 17th century of these idioms turning up in the texts that we have available. But in the 18th century, you start to find them. There are one or two exceptions. Root and branch, for example, turns up in the middle of the 17th century. Why? Because there was a political movement called the Root and Branch Movement. So that's the reason for that. But most of these idioms don't turn up until a century later, and the vast majority of them don't turn up until the 20th century. Virtually all of that playfulness I showed you earlier on is 20th century playfulness. Now why? The answer is very simple. Because of the blasphemy laws. The 19th century blasphemy laws would have come down on you like a tonne of bricks if you started to play with biblical expressions, especially the sayings of Jesus in the way that some of the modern journalists have chosen to do. And so it's in the 20th century and in the second half of the 20th century that you actually find this proliferation of ludic manipulation of biblical texts. Notice, by the way, that the biblical origin of the text is not critical to the ludic manipulation. You don't have to know the Bible, in other words, in order to appreciate the point. What you have-- when I say "know the Bible," I mean know it in the sense of being a believer in it and somebody who wants to live it and so on. You need to know its origin. Otherwise, you don't get the point. If I say, be fruitful and multiply, then you've got to know that there is a biblical echo in the etymology there. You can't have second language learners of English going up to people and saying, be fruitful and multiply. You know, going up to a pregnant lady and, you're being fruitful. You are multiplying. You know, that that will not work. You've got to know that there is a restriction on the usage here. But having said that, you don't have to be a believer in order to use these idioms. You and I can say "fly in the ointment" whether we believe in the Bible or not. Whether you are Christian or Jewish, doesn't matter. People with an Islamic background, if they've learned English, will say, fly in the ointment. If you don't have any religion at all, you can still say, fly in the ointment. The point is that's the point, that these idioms have entered English and not just a Judeo-Christian English. That's the important point to take away. So the only thing I had to do at the end was decide what to call my book. When I decided to put all this sort of thing together, what do I call the book? I hit on the perfect title. I was going to call it A Book of Many Colours, a lovely title, a nice play on the biblical expression. And I sent it into Oxford University Press with that title, and there was a silence. And then they said, no, I can't have it. Why do you think I can't have it? Somebody else [INAUDIBLE]. No, not-- no, not because somebody else had used it, no. Nothing to do with racism, no. No, nothing to do with blasphemy laws. Too many words on the cover. Not because too many words on the cover. It's simpler than that. [INAUDIBLE] No, nothing to do with that. It's much simpler. [INAUDIBLE] Because the spelling of the word "Colours" is C-O-L-O-U-R-S in British English and C-O-L-O-R-S in American English. And they could not produce a book, which had, as it were, two titles. I said, why not? That's-- I mean, well, who am I? Anyway, they wouldn't have it. So we had to come up with a different title. And I'm glad, actually, because the title I ended up with, the word "begat," is a fine, punchy title. It's a great usage, because it's probably one of the most-- it is the most distinctive word, I think, in the Bible in terms of frequency. It turns up over 200 times in both Old Testament and New Testament. All kinds of people begat, beget all kinds of people, and it's usually past tense. You notice it in the long genealogical lists of Chronicles 1, and then, of course, it's recapitulated in Matthew, where the listing runs from Abraham down to Jesus. Archaic past tense form of the verb "beget," it's taken and played with as you might expect. All sorts of people beget. Films do it, for example. Jaws 2 begat Jaws The Revenge. Cars do it. "Mini begat Mini, begat new Mini." People are still allowed to begat as well, not just cars and films and so on. For example, especially in politics, very popular political journalists-- the Washington Post in early 2008 had this particular heading-- "Bush Begat McCain." The New York Times, at the end of 2008, there was an argument at the time that the positive presentation of a black family had been much influenced by The Cosby Show and that somebody actually argued that The Cosby Show laid the foundations for Barack Obama's presidency. And so you get headlines like this one. "Did Bill Cosby beget Obama?" And there was a follow-up piece illustrating the influence of women in the issue. And so you get, "And Clair Begat Michelle," talking about the two wives. One thing, though, of course, people don't fully understand the grammar of the verb, beget. And so you get some very strange usages in the public domain, a brand new verb like this one. "T4 shall begat T5." I mean somebody obviously thinks that "begat" is a verb just like a normal verb in English, and so it can have all the variations. They don't really understand. So begat [INAUDIBLE] in which I decided to name the book. I'm glad I did. I think it's a very punchy title indeed. And that, for me, summarises the influence of the King James Bible on the English language. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE]
Info
Channel: British Council
Views: 154,130
Rating: 4.865334 out of 5
Keywords: English, language, linguistics, idioms
Id: lgSDd6Bkatg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 60min 22sec (3622 seconds)
Published: Mon Jul 18 2011
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.