ANGLO-SAXON

ANGLO-SAXON. Originally a name for the Saxons who with the Angles invaded and settled in Britain (5–7c), to contrast them with the Old Saxons of Germany. The name was later given both to the Angles and Saxons, also known as the Old English (Anglo-Saxon law) and to their language, also known as Old English (Anglo-Saxon grammar). More broadly and recently, it has served to identify a culture, spirit, style, heritage, or ethnic type associated with England, Britain, the British Empire, and/or the US: Anglo-Saxon civilization. It is also used to label vernacular English, especially when considered plain, monosyllabic, crude, and vulgar: Anglo-Saxon words.

History

For many centuries there was no agreed collective name for the Germanic peoples who settled in Britain. By the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), English had emerged for the peoples and their language, but when the Normans began to call themselves English the older sense of the word was obscured and the identification of English with post-Conquest England was strengthened. The mass of the people were classed by their overlords as SAXON. Medieval Latin chroniclers used Anglo-Saxones and Angli Saxones to refer to both Angles and Saxons, a practice that became universal after 1600 for anything before the Conquest. In 1884, James Murray noted in the OED entry Anglo-Saxon that this practice had led ‘to an erroneous analysis of the word, which has been taken as = Angle + Saxon, a union of Angle and Saxon; and in accordance with this mistaken view, modern combinations have been profusely formed in which Anglo- is meant to express “English and …”, “English in connexion with …”, as “the Anglo-Russian war”; whence, on the same analogy, Franco-German, Turko-Russian, etc.’

Culture

An extension of the term to mean the people of England and (loosely) Britain developed in the 19c, for example when the journalist Walter Bagehot referred in a speech to wealth as ‘the obvious and national idol of the Anglo-Saxon’. In 1956, the novelist Angus Wilson revived a phrase of Lewis Carroll's as the title of his satirical novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes. The term Anglo-Saxon now refers to anyone in any way linked with England, the English language, and their traditions: in France, anglo-saxon has been used, often negatively, for shared ‘Anglo-American’ attitudes and culture, while in 1975 the Tanzanian writer Ali Mazrui coined Afro-Saxon to describe Black Africans who adopt English as the language of the home and with it cultural attitudes and values which in effect make them Black Englishmen.

Plain usage

In Victorian times, the term was associated with the Germanic element in English vocabulary, especially by such purists as William Barnes. Its use as a label for direct and often coarse language marks a perception of OLD ENGLISH 1 as a medium that called a spade a spade. This view contrasts a simple, vigorous vernacular with an effete Latinate style little understood and seldom used by the people at large. For those who hold this view, smell and sweat are plainer, briefer, and better than odour and perspiration. More pointedly still, the term is used for vulgar expressions. Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1966) gives Anglo-Saxon word as a synonym of four-letter word, and Charles Berlitz has observed: ‘In general, almost all the polysyllabic words in English are of French-Latin origin while the one-syllable words come from Anglo-Saxon’ (Native Tongues, 1982). There are, however, many Anglo-Saxon polysyllables, such as bloodthirstily and righthandedness. See PLAIN, RUNE.