English as a Linguistic Transient : WORDS IN TIME : The Social History of English Vocabulary <i> by Geoffrey Hughes (Basil Blackwell: $24.95; 256 pp.) </i>

“Linguistic change has been the norm in English for at least a thousand years,” Geoffrey Hughes reminds the reader who somehow believes that there was at one time a golden age of the language, an age that the reader often associates with the period of his own education. Not so, Hughes points out; English has been marked by continued “transience in spelling, in grammar, in syntax and in semantics.”

As an example, Hughes cites the religious terminology that has become part and parcel of our secular society. Cell is a monastic term; office is a liturgical term; sanction originally referred to the imposition of penance, and propaganda dates from the Counter-Reformation. Goodby was originally “God be with you”; gospel was “God’s message.” And, another example, from salt have come such diverse words as salary, salad, sauce, saucer, sausage, silt and souse.

This book is full of such surprising derivations and sidelights on the development of the language: The word moron was coined as late as 1910; Britain’s Guy Fawkes Day was still called Pope Day as late as 1903; in Chaucer’s “Prologue” the poet described earthy, hearty types in rural Anglo-Saxon words and such affected types as the “pseudo-French Prioress” in largely Latinate derivatives; Swift described a fanatic as having “his head filled with maggots.”

You may criticize his failure to distinguish between yuppie and yumpie, to record such bits of economic jargon as disinflation and stagflation, or to be aware that the use of negative to mean “no” goes back at least as far as the World War II Navy, but you have to admire his coinage of “upward nubility.” Magnificent!

There are some fascinating insights: for instance, that “printing fundamentally and irreversibly altered the balance of power which had hitherto existed between hearers and speakers, or readers and writers”; or that once printing and the electronic media break the organic link between language and society, words can be created, exterminated, warped and manipulated semantically by a group of vested interests or even a single person.” His epigraph from Marshall McLuhan is revealing: “Well . . . of course, people don’t actually read newspapers. They get into them every morning like a hot bath.”

He has strong and bitter words for advertising, in which “impact is achieved at the cost of clarity.” After a political campaign heavy with quasi-consumer advertising, it is difficult not to agree with his closing sentences:

“The serious damage is done by the potent combination of the institutionalized verbicide of the marketplace and the political doubletalk of the authorities. The tower of Babel, a haunting image combining technological progress--absurdly directed--willing slavery, and semantic confusion, no longer seems such a remote, desperate symbol.”