Rhododendron.
‘Fly in the
ointment’? Assessing the influence of the King James Bible (1611)
By Professor David Crystal, University of Wales, Bangor
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to the OED Online.
What is the influence
of the King James Bible (1611) on the English language?
The claims have
sometimes been quite extraordinary,
and with the
400th anniversary of publication falling in 2011, the exaggerations have been
growing. In an article in The Tablet (3 April 2010) entitled ‘England’s
gift to the world’, the MP Frank Field
(the director of
the trust established to coordinate the anniversary celebrations)
quoted Melvyn
Bragg to describe the King James Bible (KJB) as
‘quite simply
the DNA of the English language’. A striking metaphor, but a misleading one.
DNA is in every
cell we possess; but the KJB is by no means in every word we write.
On the contrary.
There are actually many features of KJB style that are no longer used
or liked in
English. Not used? Consider a sentence such as ‘In the day that thou eatest
thereof
thou shalt
surely die’, where much of the grammar is obsolete.
Not liked? I
suspect many of you were taught that it was ‘bad grammar’ to begin a sentence
with And. But what do we find in the
opening chapter of Genesis?—thirty-one
verses,
all but two of
them beginning with And—’And God said…
And God made…’.
Only the opening
verse (‘In the beginning God created the heaven and earth’)
and verse 27
(‘So God created…’) do otherwise.
Counting idioms
When people talk
about the influence of the King James Bible they are usually thinking about the
idioms it contains, or rather more vaguely about its thematic content, imagery,
and rhythmical style. Though now widely known as the Authorized Version, the
1611 translation,
while favourably
received, was adopted only gradually in the decades after publication
as churches
replaced their existing copies of the Geneva (1560) and Bishops’ (1568) bibles.
Only after the
Restoration of Charles II (1660) did the KJB gain its dominant status
in Anglican
worship, revered as both a religious and a literary text.
One of the first
writers to draw on the 1611 version as a source of inspiration
at times to the
point of exact phrasing, as in ‘She gave me of the tree, and I did eat’
(Paradise Lost, Book
X). The King James version also entered auditory consciousness too,
for it was
frequently read aloud—a practice aided by the punctuation,
which is more an
aid to speech than a guide to grammar.
For my book, Begat. The King James Bible and the English Language (2010),
I tried to put a
precise figure on the question of idioms. Estimates here have varied
enormously. Everyone who writes about the KJB in relation to the history of
English quotes a few examples,
such as out of the mouths of babes and fly in the ointment,
but nobody has established
just how many
such items there are in the work as a whole. When I ask people for a figure,
I receive
answers ranging from a hundred to a thousand. To resolve the question once and
for all,
I went through
the whole work looking out for any expression that I felt had come to be
a part of modern
English, whether people were aware of the biblical connection or not.
And I made two
discoveries. First, there aren’t as many of them as people suggest: I found
only 257. (Other readers with different mindsets might increase this total a
little, but not by much.)
Second, most of
these expressions don’t originate in the King James translation at all.
or in the
Bishops’ Bible of 1568, or one of the other major sixteenth-century
translations.
By my count,
only 18 expressions are unique to the 1611 version.
They include how are the mighty fallen, the root of the matter, and a thorn in the flesh.
I looked at only
five other translations to arrive at this figure.
Examining others
might make this total fall further.
The small figure
shouldn’t be a surprise. We need to remember that the aim of the translators,
as they made
clear in their preface, was not to make a new translation,
‘but to make a
good one better, or out of many good ones, one principall good one’.
They had little
choice in the matter, as the guidelines for their work, which had been approved
by King James I,
required them to use the Bishops’ Bible (in the 1602 edition) as their first
model, making as few alterations as possible; and, when this was found wanting,
they could refer
to earlier versions. Unlike Shakespeare, they were not great innovators.
The King James Bible and the OED
A similar small
figure emerges when we look at the first recorded instances
from the King
James Bible in the OED.
reveals it as
the first source for 43 new headwords:
abased (adj.), accurately, afflicting (n.), almug,
anywhither, armour-bearer,backsliding (adj.), battering-ram,
Benjamite, catholicon, confessing (n.), crowning (adj.), dissolver, epitomist, escaper, espoused
(adj.), exactress, expansion, Galilean (n.), gopher, Gothic (adj.),
grand-daughter, Hamathite,ingenuously,
Laodicean (n.), light-minded, maneh, miscarrying (adj.), Naziriteship,
needleworker, night-hawk, nose-jewel, palmchrist, panary,peaceable kingdom,
phrasing (n.), pruning-hook, Sauromatian, shittah, skewed, way-mark,
whosesoever, withdrawing (adj.)
Compare this with
other translations through which we can trace earlier, and greater,
contributions to
the development of English: for example, the 1400 OED entries
derived from Tyndale’s version.
If we expand the terms of reference to include first recorded senses (i.e. new
meanings of existing words), the contribution of the KJB, as recorded in the OED Online, increases to over 300, including bushy (of hair), to cut short(a
speaker), muddy (of thought),
this falls short
of first recorded senses citing earlier translations—nearly 4000
for the
fourteenth-century Wycliffite, close to 1000 for the Coverdale,
and more than
400 for Tyndale’s Bible. (Figures for the KJB would, of course, be still lower
if ongoing
revision were to discover earlier citations.)
These small
totals mean that we should not exaggerate the influence of the KJB on English.
It’s true to
say, as several commentators do, that no other literary source has matched the
1611 edition for the number of influential idioms that it contains; but it
isn’t true to say that
the King James
originated all of them. Rather, what it did was popularize them.
It gave the
idioms a widespread public presence through the work being ‘appointed to be
read
in Churches’.
The work was never ‘authorized’ (despite its popular name) in any legal sense,
but no other
translation reached so many people over so long a period as the King James
version.
The result was
that an unprecedented number of biblical idioms captured the public
imagination,
so much so that
it’s now impossible to find an area of contemporary expression
that doesn’t
from time to time use them, either literally or playfully. We find them
appearing
in such
disparate worlds as nuclear physics, court cases, TV sitcoms, recipe books,
punk rock lyrics, and video games, and being adapted in all kinds of
imaginative ways to suit their new settings.
The banking
crisis produced Am I my Lehman Brothers’ keeper?
A political confrontation produced Bush is the fly in Blair’s
ointment. No other work has generated so many variations.
The adaptations
are legion. It is in this sense that the influence of the King James is without
parallel.
Further reading
David Crystal, Begat. The King James Bible and the English Language (2010)
I can Turbo Charge Read a novel 6-7
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