A Migration of Words
English as a Restless Flock; each language is a landscape but in the English sky words fly like the birds. They come in groups, stay for a while, breed with the natives, and migrate away; leaving only echoes of their song in place names, phrases, and the forgotten origins of ordinary language. The delicate art of loving English is a migration, never finished, never still, always a little wild on the edges.
Let the variety of items come into our mouths sink in. The term “Sky” originated from the old norse word which was brought by the viking settlers who also used different names while watching the clouds from the sky. The words of sugar have come drifting in from Arabic via Sanskrit and Persian, and sugar was a sweet traveller on the trade routes. Ketchup was probably originally a Hokkien term for a fish sauce, which picked up the way through Malay and into English kitchens. The words appeared from Japan (tsunami), Nahuatl (chocolate), Arabic (algebra), Hindi (pajamas) and German (kindergarten). No question for any of these words asked for permission. It seems they just come in, settle down and make themselves at home.
Here lies the first truth about England — the emphasis is on hostile rather than on fortress; ever on the move, it is a wetland for the itinerant. Throughout its long history, the language is a place of gathering, a crossroads on which travelers stop and exchange songs. It was not just French that was forced upon English ground, but also a host of new words — justice, parliament, beauty, cuisine. A thousand years later the Empire and trade brought the English dominating the world, while the world came to the English, and the English are now better called a flight log — and that is using a literary term — than a family tree for the OED.
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It’s a flock of what? It is estimated that English has more than a million words, and they’re continuing to drop like small birds onto the wire of usage: ‘doomscrolling’, ‘gaslighting’, ‘algorithm’ and ‘selfie’. Some stay, some leave again (donkeys). Migration is an ongoing journey. Within ten years a word formulated in a lab or group message could be as common in novels and treaties as “right is right”. This is its overwhelming gift; it carries the fresh in its arms.
Migration is not just movement, it is rhythm. This has always been understood in English verse. Consider the momentum of Shakespeare’s sentences like a tidal rhythm; the seasonal cycle of Keats’s odes and the hovering dashes of Dickinson between branches of trees. Poets are great watchers of the demon of flight — they see where words come from and where they are going to and they know that the best words are the ones that come farthest. In The Waste Land we hear many voices today, rowed hearing against the ruins: a migration of voices across a broken landscape. In reading Seamus Heaney there are Old English and Irish voices, there are voices of Latin, they are all roosting in the same line.
It’s so sad, but it’s such a great love to have a language that’s always on the move. It implies that it is never completely ours. English is not the property of England, or of America, or of any single shore — it belongs to all those who utter it, understand it, shape it to their weather conditions, and pass it on. There are new habitats and English dialects of arrival: Nigerian English, Indian English, Caribbean English, Singaporean English. The flock grows and molts, and learns new songs. Any living thing in motion is moving naturally — what some label corruption. Adaptation is the natural evolution of anything alive in motion — what some call corruption. This is the last reason why migration is important. Still Water Thins. A traveller’s language remains productive & prolific, surviving, adapting & crossing pollinating. English’ longevity to its living, comes from the fact that it has never feared the air. It has borrowed from conquerors and cooks, of poets and printers, of sailors and scientists. Has shed and grown its feathers. It has been trained, like the best birds, to perform its song in more than one register.
When we say that we love English, let me be clear about what I mean: I don’t love a still monument, I love a moving thing, a fleet of flocks We love its borrowed feathers, its foreign tunes and its eager settling. We love it because it’s never finished, another word will come tomorrow and we’ll look up and say, ‘Oh where did that come from?’, and we’ll make room.
