Monica Baldwin spent 27 years in a enclosed convent; she entered aged 19 and did not leave the premises until 1941. In her 1949 memoir I Leap over the Wall, she describes how she could not understand much of the English being spoken around her when she finally rejoined the outside world. It was, she says, like a foreign language. There were new words and phrases that had only entered English since she entered the convent, such as housecoat, jazz, robot, cocktail, Hollywood, the Unknown Soldier. What particularly startled her were her old school friends (women) using words and phrases that men would not have dreamt of using in mixed company only 30 years previously -- like lousy, mucky, blasted, bloody and what the hell.
Baldwin describes feeling like an idiot when reading a newspaper or talking to people because so much of what they said was incomprehensible. That shows just how quickly language changes -- the rest of us just don't notice it quite so much because we gradually assimilate new words, new inventions etc. She says how she gradually came to use the popular expressions of the day herself, strange though they initially seemed to her -- 'believe it or not', 'it's your funeral', 'I have a hunch', 'well and truly', and 'too too dreary-making, my dear'. She could never, however, bring herself to use two of the most widely used words of the day - lousy and mucky.
Comments