Today is Halloween. All over North America, in the UK, and in other countries, children will be knocking on the doors of nearby houses saying “Trick or Treat!” in the hope that they will be given sweets (if in the UK) or candy (in North America). And people will put candles inside grinning, hollowed out pumpkins.

Like a lot of festivals, Halloween began in pre-christian times, then became a date in the christian calendar, and is now a largely secular event. It is believed that the original festival at this time of year was to celebrate the end of summer. When the church adopted the occasion, it was as the eve of All Saints Day. The word hallow is another (old and mostly obsolete) word for saint, and so the day was known as All Hallows Eve, or All Hallows Even, shortened to Halloween, and sometimes written Hallowe’en. But unlike Christmas Eve, which is followed by the full celebration of Christmas Day, the day after Halloween goes largely unnoticed by many who join in the activities of the evening before.

A recent study used a Twitter-based corpus to examine the relationship between language and gender. One of the things it looked at was “gender-skewed words” – words used by one gender more than the other. Among the words used predominantly by girls and women were: feel, love, hair, sleep, wait, cute, yummy, totally, aww, ugh, and wanna. (Males hardly feature on the list of most gender-skewed words, offering just google and http.)

That men rarely use cute has been reported before. Jane Mills, in Womanwords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Patriarchal Society, quotes Cheris Kramarae writing in the Quarterly Journal of Speech:

As one male student in my speech class said, ‘If I heard a guy say something was “cute”, I’d wonder about him’. That is, his masculinity would be in question.

Obviously it depends on the context, so let’s take a closer look. Cute comes from acute, which comes from Latin acuere “sharpen”, from acus “needle”. Centuries ago, cute and acute were used to describe people – males and females alike – as sharp, that is, clever or quick-witted. Over time, cute came to be used principally to refer to appearance, while the “sharp” sense receded somewhat and took on negative connotations.

Cute has three senses listed in Macmillan Dictionary, two of them having to do with physical attractiveness. The third, described as mainly American, is “clever in a way that shows a lack of respect or honesty”, as in the example supplied: “Don’t you get cute with me, young man!” In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler wrote: “The boys with their feet on the desks know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with” – in other words, too clever for their own good.

In Ireland, things are a little different. Irish English has a version of this lesser sense of cute that is typically heard in the colloquialism “cute hoor”. Hoor in this case derives from whore but doesn’t have anything necessarily to do with sex; rather, it’s a general term of abuse applied usually to males, often corrupt ones. A cute hoor is someone cunning and devious. It’s commonly heard in political contexts, and has given rise to the noun phrase “cute hoorism”:

This is the kind of political cute hoorism that has the economy where it is today.
(Irish Times, 30 June 2011)

Like many Irish insults, hoor is sometimes used with affection, even respect. It can also indicate strong or unhealthy fondness (“He’s an awful hoor for the horses/drink”). So you could say I’m an awful hoor for the words, and I would not be offended. I might even find it cute.

First, a little history to set the scene. We think of cricket as a very ‘English’ game, and nowadays it’s mainly played in parts of the former British empire: Australasia, the Indian subcontinent, South Africa, and the Caribbean. But its history is more complex. In a recent novel, Netherland, the protagonist is a Wall Street trader who plays for a cricket club in the unlikely setting of New York City. We learn that ‘cricket was the first modern team sport in America’ and had been played there since the 1770s – declining in popularity only from the start of the 20th century.

The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, had grown up playing cricket in the Netherlands, where the game still has a reasonable following. By an odd coincidence, just months after Netherland was published, the world of cricket was rocked by the discovery that the game may have originated not (as we always thought) in the sheep fields of Kent and Sussex, but in Flanders – close to van den Broek’s homeland. The theory is that cricket was brought to England by Flemish weavers in the early 16th century, and the evidence for this is linguistic: the word cricket is now thought to be related to the Middle Flemish word krick, a staff or stick for leaning on – this being the object with which the ball was hit in an early version of the game. (Krick is also related to English words like crook – sense 3 in the Macmillan Dictionary – and crutch.) As in general English, a high percentage of cricket’s vocabulary has Germanic roots, and this is especially true of some of the game’s oldest terms.

It’s probably worth explaining the rudiments of the game at this stage. The two principal contenders are a bowler and batsman: the bowler hurls a ball towards the batsman, who is holding a bat (an implement for hitting the ball) and standing in front of a target called a wicket. The bowler’s aim is either to hit the wicket with the ball, or to get the batsman to hit the ball in the air – if the wicket is hit, or if the bowler or one of his teammates catches the airborne ball, that’s the end of the batsman: he is then said to be out (and until he is out, he is in). The batsman’s aim, on the other hand, is to stay in (by successfully guarding his wicket), and if possible to score points (called runs) by hitting the ball far enough to enable him to run from one end of the pitch to the other before anyone retrieves the ball. Simple!

The names of the basic actors and implements in cricket tell us a lot about its origins. The word wicket originally meant a small gate, for example on a sheep pen, and in the early days of cricket these gates would have been a good target for throwing the ball at. The modern wicket consists of three upright poles placed close together: these are called stumps – a vestige of an even earlier stage in which the target to aim at was a tree stump. We also talk about bowling the ball – even though it is thrown with an overarm action: again, this harks back to a time when the cricket ball was literally ‘bowled’ along the ground (as in tenpin bowling). And in many sports we refer to players scoring points, because in the early days of cricket, the batsman’s runs were counted by cutting (or ‘scoring’) marks into a piece of wood (see sense 3 of the verb score in the Macmillan Dictionary).

As in cricket, so in the language as a whole, the vocabulary we use today often started out meaning something else but has left traces of its earlier uses. The word meat, for example, is over a thousand years old, but it originally meant food of any kind. Though that meaning has disappeared from modern English, traces of it survive in phrases we still use: we say that something is meat and drink to someone or that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Or think of a word like loophole, which started life as the name for one of those narrow slits in a castle wall which arrows are fired through. When we ‘exploit a loophole’ (in a law or contract, for example), we find a ‘narrow opening’ that offers a means of avoiding a problem.

These are all aspects of language change, and are a good introduction to the notion of ‘polysemy’ – the fact that one word can develop several meanings – which we will explore in the next blog of this series.

Read part 1 or part 3.