Changing language

It's funny about the show business. The way one drifts into it and sticks, I mean.

P.G. Wodehouse, A Damsel in Distress

P.G. Wodehouse

Reading P.G. Wodehouse's 1919 novel A Damsel in Distress recently I noticed two things: how the story itself does not seem dated yet how some of the language Wodehouse uses does seem dated.

It has been more than a century since the novel was published, and culture and technology have changed quite a bit in that time. Some of this is noticeable in this novel, but not much, simply because Wodehouse rarely lets technology or culture creep into his fiction. The story could have been published a hundred years ago or it could be a novel published last week. It just doesn't feel old. Wodehouse always seemed to create his own timeless, unchanging world in his stories. Once you step into that world, it doesn't matter what year it is.

Meanwhile I was struck by changes in language usage. Did you catch the phrase "the show business" in the quotation above? Today we would say simply "show business," yet in1919 Wodehouse wrote "the show business." He does this twice on the same page.

Meanwhile, on the same page we find business man, not businessman.

Some words have hyphens that have since disappeared: to-day and wall-paper, for example.

Some of the language differences that seem odd to American readers may simply be because the novel was originally published in England, and British usage and spellings are often different from what Americans are used to even now. Consider that in this novel Wodehouse uses despatch and irruption, rather than dispatch and eruption. 

To read Shakespeare or, even to a greater extreme, Chaucer is to realize instantly that language, like culture and technology, changes radically with time. Yet that is apparent even when reading P.G. Wodehouse.