Silk and serge, I thought, were as different as chalk and cheese. Oh yes, they’re both fabrics, materials used in the making of clothes, but that is where the similarity ends. The word silk conjures up images of softness and smoothness, of refinement; silk is the fabric of the wealthy. Serge, on the other hand, is coarse; it’s the material used in the making of clothes for the “common man” – for the worker; it’s the cloth from which denim is derived, the stuff of which jeans are made.

Yet linguistically, serge and silk come from the same source. The words originated in the Far East, in China – in the Chinese word si, which meant silk. The word was brought to Europe along an ancient route that was known as the Silk Road, by the silk traders. The Greeks referred to the Chinese as Seres – that is, the “silk people”. Variations of the word are evident in numerous ancient languages: in sirghe (Manchurian) and sirkek (Mongolian); it is the source of the Latin word sericum, and the Gaelic word siric; in the Russian word shelk and the Lithuanian word shilkai; and more recently, in the French word sarge, the Danish word silke and the English word silk.

The English word serge obviously has clear links with the French word sarge; and sarge, interestingly enough, derived from the Latin expression lana serica – which translates literally as “wool or the Seres” – wool of the Chinese people.

How do I know all this? I’ve been dipping into the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins. The book was first published in 1990 in hardback; this is the first paperback edition. And for wordaholics, this is a welcome reissue.

In its introduction, Ayto writes:

“The average English speaker knows around 50,000 words. That represents an astonishing diversity – nearly 25 times more words than there are individual stars visible to the naked eye in the night sky. And even 50,000 seems insignificant beside the half a million recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. But looked at from an historical perspective, the diversity becomes more apparent than real. Tracing a word’s development back through time shows that in many cases what are now separate lexical items were formerly one and the same word. The deep prehistory of our language has nurtured little word seeds that over the millennia have proliferated into widely differentiated families of vocabulary.”

So we discover that serge and silk are cousins, almost brothers; and denim is a second cousin. How? The fabric which has come to be called denim was simply serge – a coarse material used in the making of working clothes. When gold was discovered in America, the gold rushes ensued; there was a need for strong working pants, and that is where jeans originated. At the time, the French city of Nimes was a major producer of serge, and the Americans imported large quantities of the stuff. Prior to shipping, the bales or serge were stamped : Serge de Nimes which meant serge from Nimes. Over time, this became shorted to “de Nimes”, which eventually became denim.

But why should denim trousers come to be called jeans? It’s a similar story. The French weren’t the only ones who could produce cloth. The Italian city of Genoa produced a cotton fabric which came to be known as jean fustian – which literally means “cotton fabric from Genoa”. And the word jean was derived from the Old French name for Genoa: Janne.

Dungarees, a sufficient popular form of apparel to spawn a song back in the 50s – Pat Boone’s Dungaree Doll – completes the trifecta; they derive their name from the Indian city in which they were made: Dhungaree. Gabardine on the other hand comes from Old German, and originally meant pilgrim’s garment.

I remember having to learn page after page of Greek and Latin roots in preparation for my Matriculation – University entrance – exam, back in 1960. It was dreary work, committing to memory a whole lot of lifeless words from the page. Back in those days, our teachers told us that English was derived mainly from those great products of Classic civilisation: the Greek and Latin languages. In fact, the sources of English – and in fact all of the world’s languages – go back much further than the empires and civilisations of the expansionist Greeks and Latins. The Romance languages – Italian, Spanish, French; the Germanic languages – German, Dutch, English; the languages of Scandinavia; Greek; even the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit – all derive from a language that dates back to prehistoric times, a language which linguistic historians have named Proto-European.

The development of languages has been a history of borrowings – humans have traded words in much the same way as they have traded goods. Languages are in a constant state of flux, and this is especially true of the English language, which has drawn on almost every other language to build up its astonishing lexicon.

Of course, many of our words come from Latin – words like abbot, prime, procrastinate, the names of the months; and the Greek language has been plundered over the past four centuries, especially when we sought new words for new things: telephone, television, photograph.

And the meaning of words is in a constant state of change. My father used the word grouse to mean complain or grumble; by the 60s, the word was in everyday use as a term of approval:

“How was the movie?”

“Grouse!”

Already I’ve made a few discoveries, and been reminded of a few things I’d forgotten. For instance:

The word “girl” – which Shakespeare spelled in a delightful variety of ways, including ghirl and gherl – has a long, though clouded history. It may have derived from the Scandinavian languages, which have the word gurre, meaning lamb. Originally the word girl simply meant child, rather than female child; hence, in the 15th century, writers referred to knave-gerlys, meaning male child.

In the 1500s, bully meant sweetheart. It is thought to have come from a Dutch word: boele, meaning lover. A hundred years later it meant “fine fellow”, later still, “blusterer”; in the 18th and 19th century, bully was used to refer to a pimp. However, its current meaning : bully = someone who harasses or physically intimidates another – has been in use for nearly two centuries. I wonder how it relates to “bully beef”?

Buxom originally meant obedient, capable of being bent. The word from which it derived – buhsum – also gave rise to the English word bow – the bent wood and string construction used for firing arrows. Over several centuries, the word buxom has moved toward its present day meaning as follows: beginning as “compliant” and “obliging”, it became “lively and jolly”, then “healthily plump and vigourous”, and finally “large breasted”. It is most likely also the source of bosom.

Yuppie emerged in the 1980s, as an acrostic: Young, Upwardly mobile. The 80s gave us many such words: dinks – Double Income, No Kids. There’s nothing new in this, of course. The word news comes from just such a source: North, East, West, South. And the second word war term: snafu = Situation Normal – All Fucked Up – is another example.

Googol is an interesting one. In the 1930s, the American mathematician, Edward Kasmer, wanted a word to express an unimaginably high number. He asked his 9 year old nephew, who suggested googol. It means: 10 to the power of a hundred. (I still much prefer squillions, myself.)

The Bloomsbury Dictionary tells the histories of over 8000 words. Each entry is a short story. And whilst each history is brief – most are 100 to 200 words – the writing is clear and concise, and entertaining too. It is a great source book, a reference well worth adding to the writer’s shelf.