Hyphenation Continued.

Hyphens, quite intriguing little symbols, don’t you think?

For those familiar with Pride and Prejudice or the relatively ‘older’ way of speaking English, know that at a certain point certain numbers were said the other way around: one-and-twenty instead of twenty-one.

I went into research mode (obviously) and asked myself when Jane Austen used which way of writing numbers or whether she actually used our modern day way at all. Similar to the other Austen posts, I used the amazing tool, WordSmith Tools (to which I am very much addicted). Since there are a lot of numbers, I decided to go about this in what I would like to call a relatively time-saving way.

Using the lovely Concord tool and typing one-*/two-*/three-*/four-*/five-*/six-*/seven-*/eight-*/nine-*/*ty-* .

Just for clarity’s sake, I’ll explain the syntax quickly.
/ = search for multiple items at the same time
* = search within a word

NOTE: Be sure to put your settings so that a hyphen is included in a word and not taken as a word separator (which is the standard setting).The reason why I used *ty-* is to search in a more time-saving way for twenty, thirty, forty etc. instances.

Check the data (105 hits). Not only numbers can have *ty-* in it nor does three-* only give three-and-twenty etc. results, for example.

Examples that don’t match the written numbers that I have mentioned before going on this quest are:

1. two-penny : “…the two-penny post…” (Sense and Sensibility, 2x)
2. three-shilling : “…as large as a three-shilling piece.” (Persuasion)
3. empty-headed : “…but as empty-headed as himself…” (Pride and Prejudice)

(total of irrelevant hits: 12 (2x two-penny; three-shilling; three-deckers; 3x three-quarters; vanity-baits; pretty-behaved; pretty-spoken; empty-headed; and nine-hundredth)
This leaves you with 93 relevant hits in total!

41 of these instances are *ty-* ones and 39 begin with a number under 10.

So Jane Austen does use both! But, does she use them in the same novel or context? Or is it that, for example, one publisher preferred one of the hyphenations over the other?

Sense and Sensibility (6), for example, only writes it the twenty-one way: thirty-five (4), twenty-four, thirty-six.

Persuasion (24), on the other hand, uses both styles:

fifty-four, twenty-nine, nine-and-twenty, sixty-two, two-and-twenty, twenty-two, seven-and-twenty, eight-and-thirty, four-and-twenty (3), twenty-four (3), twenty-three, five-and-thirty, eighty-seven, seven-and-twenty, one-and-thirty, ninety-nine, three-and-twenty, five-and-twenty, eight-and-twentieth, five-and-twenty.

Both styles also occur quite near one another as well:

“He had frequently observed, as he walked, that one handsome face would be followed by thirty, or five-and-thirty frights; and once, as he had stood in a shop on Bond Street, he had counted eighty-seven women go by, one after another, without there being a tolerable face among them.”

Northanger Abbey (4) and The Watsons (1) are like Sense and Sensibility since it only uses the twenty-one variety as well. Pride and Prejudice (10), Mansfield Park (20) and Emma (28), however, are like Persuasion in that they use both styles.

Does this mean that the form of one-and-twenty does not exist in Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey?

Since twenty is used the most, I used Concord to search for instances of and twenty. And Lo’ and behold!

Sense and Sensibility (9) does have instances of the one-and-twenty variety, but without the hyphens!

“…not more than six or seven and twenty…”
“…any young man of five and twenty…”

Northanger Abbey (8) also has instances of this variety:

“…four or five and twenty…”
“…only three and twenty miles!”

The Watsons does not have any occurrences of and twenty, but and thirty does occur:

“…only five and thirty minutes…”
“…of five or six and thirty…”

The Watsons is actually an unpublished novel… Could this indicate that Jane Austen preferred to write the one-and-twenty instances without the hyphen?

I took a quick peek at the manuscripts and the first quotation she actually wrote: five & thirty, and for the second one: 5 or 6 & 30.

Did Jane Austen only use the & sign instead of writing it in full? Or did she prefer to write numbers as numbers and not written out in full?

A peek at her manuscript does show that she did use instances such as one and twenty, but only (as far as I looked) without hyphens!

But this is all for now! If you wonder about certain usages of Jane Austen, please let me know so I can research some more (if I can’t think of anything else to search myself ;-)).

(De)Hyphenation in Jane Austen

In Jane Austen’s time (1775-1817), spelling was still variable as can be seen by her idiosyncratic spellings such as freind, adeiu, beautifull, and wellcome. Whether to hyphen or not to hyphen was not fixed as it is (to a certain extent) today. So I figured, why not look at Jane Austen’s hyphens. Is she regular in terms of when she uses it or does she vary as people do still today? Or do certain words get hyphenated later on or whether certain words undergo dehyphenation?

Let’s find out!

For the purpose of this small research, I looked at the prefixes (or they could also be seen as compound part 1, but I will refer to them as prefixes) well-, ill-, and good-.

I went about this in the following way: I used the Concordance function in WordSmith Tools using the word search syntax well-*/well^*/ill-*/ill^*/good-*/good^*. For explanation’s sake, / allows you to search for multiple words at the same time, * allows you to search for everything that is within the word (i.e. good* will find goodbye, goodness, goody), ^ allows you to search of a specific character of the alphabet and whichever symbols you allow inside a word (a hyphen and an apostrophe, for example). The corpus existed of the works of Jane Austen written by her (accessed through http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html and Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works by Bree et al.), i.e. not the published novels.

Well

Almost all of the instances (13 out of 19) of well are written with a hyphen: for example,

“It is well-known…” in Lady Susan,

“a well-bred Man.” in Evelyn,

“well-penned Note.” in Love and Freindship.

The instances of well without a hyphen are wellcome (3 times), wellfare, wells, and wellbehaved.

The only instance that, considering her earlier instances of well-, would be expected to be written with a hyphen is wellbehaved. This instance occurs in Jack and Alice. This is one of her early stories which she wrote when she was fifteen (1790). It could be that afterwards. she learned about the hyphenation process which could indicate that she wrote Jack and Alice before Love and Freindship as in this text, well only occurs with a hyphen.

Ill

Most of the hits of ill occurred without a hyphen (20 out of 34): for example,

“the long illness..” in Lady Susan,

“which she illustrated with…” in Catharine, or the Bower,

“what an illiterate villain..” in Love and Freindship.

In the case if ill-, you find the following instances:

“accuse her of ill-nature and…” in Lady Susan,

“They were really ill-used.” in Sanditon,

“naturally ill-tempered and Cunnin” in Lesley Castle.

This time around, we found instances of both ill-nature and illnature (even in the same text! Lady Susan), ill-suited and illsuited (in Sanditon and Evelyn,respectively). The ill‘s that would have been expected to be written with a hyphen are illdisposed (The Watsons), illsuited (Evelyn), illhumour (Catharine, or the Bower), and illnature (Lady Susan). It seems that in this case, there does not seem to be a certain pattern as The Watsons was written at the latest date of the texts exemplified (sans Sanditon). It does seem that by the time that Sanditon was written (she started writing this near the end of her life), there are no more ‘mistakes’ in terms of hyphenation.

Good

Most of the instances are, again, written without a hyphen (24 out of 32): for example,

“…nice little goodhumoured Woman…” in The Watsons,

“…speech, was too goodtemper’d…” in Frederic and Elfrida,

“…of propriety and Goodbreeding…” in Catharine, or the Bower.

Hyphens occur in instances such as,

“…a good-looking young Man…” in Lesley Castle,

“…a mere good-tempered…” in Love and Freindship,

“…a good-natured lively Girl…” in Catharine, or the Bower.

What is interesting is that in Sanditon, you only find goodnatured or goodnature and not good-natured, and goodbreeding but not good-breeding. In the Watsons, there are no hyphenations with good either, this may indicate that by the time that Jane Austen wrote the Watsons she already deleted the hyphen when good was attached to either a noun or a past participle (-tempered, -natured).

It might be that she already put a space in between good and the following word and a quick peek into goodnature(d) and good nature(d) shows that they both occur. Not in the same place though! Good-natured occurs in Catharine, or the Bower and Lesley Castle, good nature in Catharine, or the Bower, and goodnature(d) in The Watsons and Sanditon.

It all seems a bit irregular, but later on she does appear to be somewhat more consistent. This sure would be interesting to research some further but as I do not have the time for this as of yet, I might consider another time.

Swearing and Taboo in Jane Austen’s Works

Ever since September 2013, I have delved into the world of Jane Austen and her language. Both in her published novels and her manuscripts available through the amazing website: http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html.

During class last week, we talked about swearing and taboo words in Jane Austen and that there is this idea that there is no such thing as these concepts in Jane Austen. However, in my search of interjections throughout Jane Austen’s works, I came across instances where intercourse was the topic of the conversation. Intercourse as a word appears as well but back in Jane Austen’s time this referred to conversations and the act that we can denote by it nowadays.

While looking through the interjections, I came across La. Since I had never seen this interjection before, I looked it up in the OED and found that it meant the following: “An exclamation formerly used to introduce or accompany a conventional phrase or an address, or to call attention to an emphatic statement. In recent use, a mere expression of surprise.”

I stumbled upon this interesting conversation between Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor and Anne Steele:

“I do not understand what you mean by interrupting them,” said Elinor;
“you were all in the same room together, were not you?”

“No, indeed, not us. La! Miss Dashwood, do you think people make love
when any body else is by? Oh, for shame! – To be sure you must know
better than that. (Laughing affectedly.) – No, no; they were shut up in
the drawing-room together, and all I heard was only by listening at the
door.”

Aha! Jane Austen refers to intercourse as making love! Using a program such as WordSmith Tools you can look through a huge amount of data in a simple way. By running a Concordance search (where you can see the words in their context), I found a total of 8 instances (3 in Pride and Prejudice, 2 in Sense and Sensibility, 1 in Persuasion, Mansfield Park and Lady Susan).

So what about cursing?

When looking through the exclamation marks to find interjections (by using *! in Concondance), I came across Oh! D – in Northanger Abbey. Lo and behold! Swear words! Swear words in Jane Austen!:

‘Ah! Thorpe,’ said he, ‘do you happen to want such a little thing as
this? It is a capital one of the kind, but I am cursed tired of it.’
‘Oh! D – ,‘ said I; ‘I am your man; what do you ask?’
And how much do you think he did, Miss Morland?”

~~

“Thank ye,” cried Thorpe, “but I did not come to Bath to drive my
sisters about, and look like a fool. No, if you do not go, d — me if I
do. I only go for the sake of driving you.”

John Thorpe seems to be the only person to curse in Northanger Abbey and a friend of Thorpe’s described by him as a “Christchurch man, a friend of mine, a very good sort of fellow“. In Mansfield Park, Mr. Price is the only one to ‘curse’ as well. He, as so eloquently can be formulated, takes the Lord’s name in vain:

The Thrush went out of harbour this morning. Sharp is the
word, you see! By G – , you are just in time!

~~

But, by G – ! if she belonged to _me_, I’d give her the rope’s end as long as
I could stand over her.

This use of God is not necessarily meant as a curse but it carries a negative undertone which is why, in this case, God is written as G – (originally G–, i.e. G followed by a dash). Compare this with Mansfield Park’s Edmund use of God:

“Thank God,” said he. “We were all disposed to wonder, but it seems to
have been the merciful appointment of Providence that the heart which
knew no guile should not suffer.

Here using God is clearly not meant in a negative way but in a positive way and is therefore written in full and not censored just as G– and D– had been as is demonstrated above.

Are there any more taboo words in Jane Austen? Which taboo words or swear words were there back in the late 18th and beginning of the 19th century? How about taboo and swear words in other works around that time? Were it predominantly men that used it as well? Or gossiping women talking about making love? 

It might be an interesting subject well worth looking into!

Much love!

References:

Bree, L., Sabor, P, and Todd, J. (2013). Jane Austen’s Manuscript Works. Claremont: Broadview Editions.

Jane Austen’s works were accessed through Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

OED Entry: La, int.