Modern English continues to expand as it begs the imaginations of people who love language, borrows from other languages, and steals outright from everywhere.
Among them: anonymous, catastrophe, expectation, lunar, and pathetic. But language progressives won the day and a flood of Renaissance-era inkhorn words were embraced. Had they prevailed, we might today be using simple, derivative words such as ‘gleeman’ for musician, ‘inwit’ for conscience, ‘yeartide’ for anniversary, ‘starlore’ for astronomy, and ‘speechcraft’ for grammar. The purists agreed that the language needed more words, but thought they could be created out of what people already knew. “The most ancient English wordes are of one syllable, so that the more monosyllables you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the Inkhorne.” George Gascoigne, 1575. “Inkhorn term” was originally used derisively in the late 1500s, (during the transition from Middle English to Modern English), by purists defending the Anglo-Saxon language against the incursion of Latin, Greek, and French words being introduced by writers to combat the limitations of the largely four-letter-word A-S vocabulary. Animal horns were used, like powderhorns, to carry quills and ink and were once a symbol of the writer’s trade. Who knows anymore what the heck an “inkhorn” is? … even “ink” is not understood as it once was … perhaps better known now as the fluid an octopus employs for defense than as the medium of writers. If the “tips of shoelaces” deserve “aglets” (from French, aguille for needle), then surely a noble handle is due what were once called “inkhorn terms.” The words that writers and speakers invent or derive to enhance and color our communications, ought to have a name. I have, at times, referred to them as “writerly” inventions, but that’s not a name that sticks as “inkhorn terms” once did. I was relieved to know it, because I have long felt at a loss for what to call all the wonderful words, phrases, and expressions writers come up with to make our language more vivid. I discovered it recently in The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten, by Jeffrey Kacirk. It’s a shame that this noun phrase is no longer in common use.
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