Festival season is upon us and the mind naturally wanders to haplology. No, that’s not the science of urinating in a plastic pint pot while watching Kassabian, it’s a term coined by 19th century philology professor Maurice Bloomfield for that thing we do when we shorten words by running two syllables into one. (That wasn’t exactly how he defined it).
Library, for example, is more commonly pronounced ‘libry’. Similarly, January and February become simile, Janury and Febury. It’s just quicker, innit? Presumably Bloomfield stumbled upon haplology while looking for an easy way out when people asked him what line he was in at parties. It’s not easy saying ‘philology’ with a mouthful of vol-au-vent.
Ampersand is another example. That funny little symbol began as ‘and per se and’, recited by Victorian schoolboys as part of the alphabet. And how many people go to the trouble of giving Worcestershire Sauce it’s full moniker? Your beans would go cold. It has to be Wooster Sauce.
Then there’s ‘Manster’. When I was a kid my Mum’s boss, a Spurs season ticket holder, used to take me to White Hart Lane when United came down. He had a friend who was one of those people who refused to abbreviate the names of football teams, so while the rest of us were calling them Spurs and Man U, he spent the whole journey talking about ‘Tottenham Hotspur’ and ‘Manster United’. It could take him from Croydon to the Blackwall Tunnel to finish a sentence. He wasn’t abbreviating Manchester so much as haplologising it – or, as the Bolivian army might say, taking out the ‘che’. This was back in the days when United were rubbish, by the way.
Hmm…
Just as an aside, is it me or has Jose Mourinho reinvented football along the lines of Bridge and similar trick scoring card games? Rather than going all out to gather as many points as possible, he seems to have got it into his head that the aim of the game is to pick a league position based on the strength of your squad and try to finish exactly in that position – no higher and no lower. At one point a few weeks back it looked like United were in danger of leapfrogging City and Liverpool into third, but no – Mourinho played his cards to perfection to make sure he secured sixth. Genius!
Thanks for allowing me that brief departure. I feel better now. Anyway, let’s return to the subject. From hapless to haplology. The process works in reverse too. England becomes Engerland, especially when playing at Wemberley. There are prolly other examples but I can’t think of any right now. Maybe you can suggest some. Ironically, the one word that’s crying out for a bit of haplology is haplology, but maybe that was Bloomfield’s idea of a joke.
So what’s all this got to do with festival season? I’ll tell you. I happened upon the word haplology while researching the origin of the word carnival. And I was researching the origin of the word carnival because, contrary to what you might assume, it has nothing in common with the origin of the word festival. There’s more to that ‘val’ than meets the eye, as John Noakes used to say.
Briefly, festival is an old French adjective meaning ‘a bit festive’, in the same way that cerebral means ‘a bit brainy’. You might not realise this as you’re dancing down Portobello Road in your sequined thong and feathers but carnival is a haplological simplification of the old Italian word carnelevale, meaning ‘meat lifting’, in the same sense as shoplifting, i.e. taking away the meat. It’s all to do with Lent, see? So the Notting Hill Carnival isn’t strictly speaking a carnival at all, whereas Mardi Gras is. Mardi Gras translates as ‘fat Tuesday’, or Shrove Tuesday to you. Pancake Day.
And why was I researching the origin of the word festival? Because it’s festival season, of course.
Warm up for Glastonbury at Reigate New Music Fest. It’s cheaper and you won’t get covered in p…
