Keith Waterhouse Again. Words Again.

I've written previously about Keith Waterhouse, the English newspaper columnist, screenwriter, novelist, and general man of letters, whose writing career stretched more than fifty years until his death in 2009. He's not exactly forgotten today. But he's not exactly remembered, either. I've actually toyed with the idea of creating a Keith Waterhouse website as none seems to exist at the moment.

(In terms of politics and cultural politics, Keith Waterhouse very much fulfils the recent stereotype of a "centrist Dad. He was a Labour supporter, but something of a cultural conservative and nostalgist, while also being dismissive of Euroscepticism and concerns about immigration.)

In the last couple of days, I've been reading a collection of his newspaper columns that I'd never encountered before, Rhubarb Rhubarb. They're hit-and-miss in quality, but one thing that makes the book interesting are the period and ephemeral allusions-- the view from 1979, as it were. Newspaper columns are similar to sitcoms in that they give a particularly vivid window onto the time they were created (much more so, I think, than films or novels or almost anything else).

In one column, "Words for the Weary", Waterhouse writes about words: specifically, "hundreds of new words that we have had to familiarise ourselves with as our lives have been mucked about with over the last few years. Or, if not exactly new words, words that have taken on a different or sharper meaning."

The rest of the column is mostly a list of these words. Many of them greatly surprised me, and made me think: can that really have been a new word (or even a new usage) in 1979? I won't reproduce the whole list, but here are some of them-- not just the ones that surprised me, but a fairly representative sprinkling.

Aggro

Additive

Audio

Backlash

Bionic

Computer

Gay

Graffiti

Hostage

Immigrant

Inflation

Junkie

Mugger

Motorway

Multi-storey

No-go

Security

Topless

Unisex

Vandal

Whizz-kid

Zone

Can all these words really have been unfamiliar in 1979? In many cases, it's hard for me to believe. But Keith Waterhouse's whole career was focused on words and the use of words, so presumably he's a trustworthy commentator.

Things that are newer than one might think are fascinating. At least, they fascinate me. There's a whole TV Tropes page called Newer Than They Think which lists all sorts of surprising examples across different categories. I've spent hours reading and re-reading it and I wish it was ten times longer than it is.

One example that particularly intrigues me is abortion and the religious right in America. I'd picked up the notion that Christianity has been on a path of continual liberalization from about the late nineteenth century. So it seemed only natural to assume that, the further back in time you go, the more solidly pro-life you'll find Christians to be.

So I was very surprised to learn that this isn't the case, at least not in America. Conservative evangelical Christians were not nearly as anti-abortion in the seventies as they are now. (The rise of IVF has complicated the whole issue, though.)

A more trivial example is the white smoke in Papal elections. It seems like the kind of thing that might go back a thousand years, or even further. But, even though the cardinals burned their ballots for many centuries, the smoke only became a signal to the public in the eighteenth century-- and that was accidental, when a chimney was installed in St. Peter's to protect the frescoes from it. And white smoke was first used in 1914!