Asking only for land, wealth, natural resources, total obedience to the crown and a few local words in return.
They went to the Caribbean looking for gold and a chance to really unwind – discovering the ‘barbeque’, the ‘canoe’ and a pretty good recipe for rum punch. They also brought back the word ‘cannibal’ to make their trip sound more exciting.
In India there was something for everyone. ‘Yoga’ – to help you stay in shape, while pretending to be spiritual. If that didn’t work there was the ‘cummerbund’ to hide a paunch and - if you couldn’t even make it up the stairs without turning ‘crimson’ – they had the ‘bungalow’.
Meanwhile in Africa they picked up words like ‘voodoo’ and ‘zombie’ – kicking off the teen horror film – and even more terrifying, they brought home the world’s two most annoying musical instruments – the ‘bongo’ and the ‘banjo’. From Australia, English took the words ‘nugget’, ‘boomerang’ and ‘walkabout’ - and in fact the whole concept of chain pubs.
Between toppling Napoleon (1815) and the first World War (1914), the British Empire gobbled up around 10 millions square miles, 400 million people and nearly a hundred thousand gin and tonics, leaving new varieties of English to develop all over the globe.
【English in Ten Minutes】The age of dictionary or the definition of a hopeless task. With English expanding in all directions came a new breed of man called lexicographers, who wanted to put an end to this anarchy a word they defined as what happens when people spell words slightly differently from each other. One of the greatest was doctor Johnson, whose Dictionary of English Language which took him 9 years to write. It was 18 inches tall and contained 42,773 entries meaning that even if you couldn’t read it’s still pretty useful if you want to reach a high shelf. For the first time when people were calling you a “pickle herring”, ”a jobbernowl ” or a “fopdoodle” you could understand exactly what they meant and you’d have the standard spelling. Try as he might to stop them, words kept being invented and in 1857 a new book was started which would become the Oxford English dictionary. It took another 70 years to be finished after the first editor resigned to be an archbishop, The second died of TB and the third was so boring that half his volunteers quit and one of them ended up in an Asylum. It eventually appeared in 1928 and has continued to be revised ever since proving the whole idea that you can stop people making up word is complete snuffbumble
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