October: Where do words come from?
I remember seeing an advert for the Tate a few years ago and feeling shocked. It featured a poem that started:
CHAV
Council Housed and Violent
A phrase created with one intention… A new word.
The ad was well meaning (it was questioning people’s need to single out and ridicule working-class youngsters), but chav isn’t a new word, and it has never stood for ‘council housed and violent’ – that’s a backcronym. It actually comes from the Romani word for child, charvi. (In the North East of England, you’ll hear people using the word charvver, which has the same origin.)
FYI: There are loads of everyday words that come from the Romani language, like pal, wonga, gibberish and togs.
Understanding where words come from, especially more zeitgeisty ones, is crucial when you’re a copywriter, otherwise you might inadvertently be using offensive language.
Even spelling can be problematic
I listened to a great podcast episode recently with Dr Erin Pritchard, an academic who speaks up for the rights of people with dwarfism.
I learnt that dwarfs spelt with an ‘fs’ is the correct plural of people with dwarfism (although, as Dr Erin Pritchard stresses in the podcast, it’s better to refer to people as people, not a collective noun that others them for their disability) and the ‘ves’ spelling was invented by J.R.R Tolkien. Newspapers today (Google ‘dwarves’ and the name of a newspaper in quotation marks to see for yourself) use the spelling from The Lord of the Rings, as if they’re talking about Tolkein’s magical, fictional characters – not people with dwarfism.
Dr Erin Pritchard also explained how she received threats after her campaign was successful in persuading Mondelez and M&S to change the name of their sweets, ‘Midget Gems’. Some brands still sell sweets under this name, despite the word being an offensive slur.
Every day’s a school day
We can’t always get it right. I recently felt very ignorant when a friend explained the history of the word spooky to me. While it’s plastered all over the high street every year during Halloween, the word’s use is being questioned by brands and organisations in the US because of its racist connotations in the past.
In real life, when you learn the problematic origin of a word, you can apologise and make sure you never say it again. As a copywriter working for a brand however, we have to get it right first time.
On a lighter note, this week I discovered that the seemingly innocent insult berk comes from the Cockney rhyming slang Berkley Hunt, which rhymes with… a word that a brand would never ever say.
That’s why it’s so important to not just do our research before adopting new, on-trend words, but to regularly take a deep dive into how everyday words have risen to popularity – and from where. Their backstories might be surprising.