July 2007

Talking about words: Cloth words

By Richard W. Bailey

Lots of the cloth in our clothing is synthetic, and one sign of the foundation of the fabric in chemistry is the suffix –on.  In 1924, rayon first appeared as a word, and in 1938 DuPont chemists came up with nylon.  There were plenty of fabric names with –on, some still familiar like banlon, orlon and dacron, and others forgotten like everlon, pellon, skylon, and velon. Scientific as it looks, this –on merely imitates the final syllable of cotton.

These are words rooted in the mid-twentieth century, and no one would market a fabric ending in –on today.  Our cloth is called Gore-Tex and thermofill, both blend words that have a modern feel to them.

One could write a history of the English-speaking people by looking closely at the names of fabrics.  Historically, Britain has been an economy based on cloth, first with wool (the great source of foreign trade in medieval times) and then cotton.  The British were sympathetic to the American Confederacy, partly because the cotton exported from southern ports went to the mills of Lancashire and other centers of weaving in the midlands of England.  Americans had already stolen the designs for English looms, and the proprietors in Britain feared that a victorious north would consume all the cotton the south could produce.

In the House of Lords in London, the Lord Chancellor presides while seated on the woolsack, a substantial cushion stuffed with wool.  This eccentric place to sit has been in use since medieval times.  At first it was stuffed with tufts from flocks all over England; nowadays, there is wool from all the countries of the Commonwealth.  (One suspects that the wool from Vanuatu was grown at the zoo.)

Americans tend to make up cloth names from imagination:  Lycra, Naugahyde, and Spandex.  The British brought home fabrics from foreign parts to weave at home, and they kept the foreign names in doing so.  Here, in historical order, are some specimens of such words with the sources and dates as given in the  Oxford English Dictionary:  arras (<Arras ‘a town in northern France, 1397), holland (< Holland, 1427), calico (< Calicut in India, 1505),  brocade (< Spanish, 1556), mohair (< Arabic, 1570), jersey (< jersey worsted, 1583, from the Channel Island), muslin (< Mosul, Iraq, 1609), vicuna (< Spanish, 1622), seersucker (< Persian, 1622), denim (< serge d’Nîmes < Nîmes, a town in southern France, 1695), chenille (< French, 1738), astrakhan (< Russian, 1766), cashmere (< Kashmir, 1822), chine ( < China < French, 1852), khaki (< Urdu, 1879).

Predicting what new words will arise is always perilous, but we can readily assume that some of the innovations in cloth will involve manipulating spelling (along the lines of E-Bay and iPhone) in which hyphens and capital letters will figure prominently and in innovative ways...  In fact this process has already begun for fabrics:  eVENT, Nano-Dry, Slip-Not.

Words reflect their times, and smart people know how to use the times and the trends in English to create them.

Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/