While reading a new scholarly book by a 73-year-old gentleman who is an academic librarian and an expert on medieval manuscripts, I was delighted to find the following phrase:
glitzy fairground bling
The writer uses this phrase to describe how a certain decorative jewel-encrusted book-binding, made 900 years ago, might seem to someone in the twenty-first century. What he means is that the object seems shiny and bright, but not precious or elegant.
What did I like so much about this little phrase?
Well, partly the poetry of it: the phrase itself seems to shine like a toy diamond-and-gold bracelet – I’ll talk about this effect later.
But what really tickled me was an over-70-year-old academic describing a twelfth-century manuscript using two words which he could never have read in any academic book when he was at university, for the simple reason that one of them (“glitzy”) didn’t exist even when the writer first went to school in the 1950s and the other one (bling) had not been seen, heard, written or spoken before about 1995.
The adjective “glitzy”, derived from the noun “glitz”, the Yiddish for “glitter”, makes us think of something decorative and “showy” but not tasteful, “classy” or beautiful. It comes from the German glitzern, meaning “sparkle”.
As we have seen, the English language never stops changing, developing and growing, and new words have to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary every year. And my very favourite of all the new words that have come into common use during the last 30 years or so is “bling”.
“Bling” (originally also “bling-bling” ) is a word that originated in the slang of hip-hop/rap culture in the mid-90s, to describe shiny gold jewellery worn in an ostentatious display of wealth. “Bling” is usually used as an uncountable noun.
He was wearing a lot of bling.
You should leave all that bling at home!
But where does it come from, and how did it end up in the head of an 73-year-old academic medievalist?
In my pieces on laptop and spam I showed two ways in which English allows us to create new words by combining old ones; with woke and ain’t we saw how new words can be born from non-standard grammar systems; and long showed us an ordinary word being given a new meaning by a new generation of users. But bling is a different kind of animal – it is entirely new, and the meaning is in the sound.
The study of how meanings are created and understood is called semiotics, and in semiotics the things that we see and hear that contain and communicate meanings are known as signs. The big M outside a famous hamburger resaurant is a sign, and so is a smiley-face emoji, or an arrow, or a yawn, or a knock on your door. A language is complex system of signs, and most of those signs are the collections of sounds that we call words. Each of these signs is then connected to another, corresponding, sign – a collection of letters that represents those sounds.
The reason why we find it so difficult to learn a new language is that most of the time the look or sound of the words is not connected in any obvious way to what the word means. There’s nothing about the shape of the word “cake” that makes you think of cakes, and nothing about the sound of the word that sounds recognizably like baking, eating or birthday parties. In terms of semiotics, it’s an “arbitrary” sign: the connection between the “signifier” – the word – and the “signified” – the big thing made of chocolate with candles sticking out of it – is a connection that no-one who hasn’t learnt the language could ever guess.
The same is not true of, for example, the word “zigzag”. As a written sign, the word (“signifier”) contains clear clues to the meaning – the shape of the two Zs is the same shape that the word describes (“the signified”). In semiotic terms, this word, as a written/visual sign, has iconicity, like a smiley face emoji, or a wordless “Beware falling rocks” road sign.
Most languages have words that are ideophones – words that have “iconicity” in their sounds when spoken: the sound you make when you say the word relates to the thing it describes. The most straightforward type of of ideophone is an onomatopeia, a phenomenon that we looked at when in our article about bless.
An onomatopeia is a word that sounds like the thing it describes: waves "crash" on the shore, bacon "sizzles" in a frying pan, and people "whisper" in libraries. This is a game that all languages play: "whisper" is फुसफुसाना ("phusaphusaana") in Hindi, በሹክሹክታ ("beshukishukita") in Amharic, and "pispisî" in Kurdish. The way different languages describe similar sounds can incidentally tell us a lot about their spelling and pronunciation systems.
But the “signified” of bling isn’t a sound. So what is it in this word that somehow manages to make us imagine the things that it does describe? Well, sounds in words can often somehow become associated with more general impressions. For instance, our “z” as both a letter and a corresponding phoneme (/z/) often gives a sense of dynamism, energy and fun, in English words like “zip” , “zing” and “pizzazz”. So how does bling seem like shiny gold chains and rings?
When we need to write about sounds, we need the IPA, that sound-alphabet that I told you about in my article about A. The sound of bling is:
/blɪŋ/
That last sound is one of the three nasal consonant sounds in English – sounds that come out of your nose, because you have blocked the sound from coming out of your mouth, either by closing your lips (/m/), by closing off the front bit of your mouth with your tongue (/n/), or – as in this case (/ŋ/) – by closing off the whole of your mouth with the back of your tongue.
In English onomatopiea, we tend to use a final /ŋ/ to represent resonant sounds: A big explosion is a “bang” (/bæŋ/), and a discordant metallic sound a “clang” (/klæŋ/), while a big bell with a deep sound might go “bong”, (/bɒŋ/), a tiny bell “ting” /tɪŋ/ and a doorbell “ding-dong” (/dɪŋdɒŋ/). (A marvellous colloquial term in the Welsh language for a microwave oven is “popty ping”!)
The ideophone bling (originally also “bling-bling” ), calling to mind all of these metal- and bell-sounds, is in some way a description in sound of an visual impression – the silent sound of bright, expensive metal that wants to be noticed: its four voiced phonemes combine to suggest sunlight reflected off a shiny surface.
I've talked a lot about word histories in these articles. The word bling was born with no history other than that of ingenious linguistic invention, and it comes from a world – the world of rap – that, quite apart from the jewellery and materialism, understands the music, magic and magnetic power of words. Words that might even have the zip and zing to begin around the neck of a hip hop star in LA and end up on the manuscript of a 70-something professor in Oxford.
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