In 1593, Thomas Nashe spent a stint in prison for his apocalyptic pamphlet, Christs Teares Over Jerusalem. The arrest appears to be for certain passages which angered London’s civic authorities. In the second edition of Christs Teares, published in 1594, the offending pages are removed, but Nashe adds a new preface responding to another aspect of his work that had drawn ire: his neologisms. After attacking those, including his rival Gabriel Harvey, who critique his ‘puffed-up style’, Nashe turns to ‘the second rank of reprehenders, that complain of my boisterous compound words, and ending my Italianate coined verbs all in -ize’. To them he replies,
For the compounding of my words, therein I imitate rich men who, having gathered store of white single money together, convert a number of those small little scutes into great pieces of gold, such as double pistoles and Portagues. Our English tongue of all languages most swarmeth with the single money of monosyllables, which are the only scandal of it. Books written in them and no other seem like shopkeepers' boxes, that contain nothing else save halfpence, three-farthings and twopences. Therefore what did me I, but having a huge heap of those worthless shreds of small English in my pia mater’s [brain’s] purse, to make the royaller show with them to men's eyes, had them to the compounder's immediately, and exchanged them four into one, and others into more, according to the Greek, French, Spanish and Italian?
As a linguistic compounder - one who joins two words together to make a new one - Nashe figures his neologising as monetary exchange. The words he compounds together are akin to small coins, which once joined are converted into polysyllabic ‘great pieces of gold’. But all of Nashe’s coins are foreign - ‘scutes’, an English word for a French silver coin, are converted into ‘double pistoles’, Spanish gold coins (double escudos), and ‘Portagues’, Portuguese gold coins (cruzados, such as the one pictured above). English, in comparison, is described as a monosyllabic language and therefore akin to its smallest denominations of coin - ‘halfpence, three-farthings and twopences’.
Nashe is trying to legitimise his linguistic practice. But coining metaphors are an odd choice if you’re hoping to establish your authority over language. Minting your own coins was, after all, a treasonable offence. And the influx of foreign coins, goods, and people into England was a cause of anxiety too. This material culture of coins fed into linguistic debates of the period. ‘Coining’ new words out of foreign or classical languages, a practice that added thousands of words to the English lexicon in the late sixteenth century, was a source of complaint for purist or elitist linguistic commentators. As John Davies writes in 1603, ‘Wee must vse words as wee vse Coyne, that is, those that be common and currant; It is dangerous to coine without priviledg’. And in a letter to Thomas Hoby, published in Hoby’s 1561 translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier, John Cheke wrote, ‘I am of this opinion that our own tung shold be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangeled with borowing of other tunges wherin if we take not heed bi time, euer borowing and neuer payeng, she shall be fain to keep her house as bankrupt’. Just as coins conjured anxieties over their purity, their nationality, and who did and who did not have authority to mint them, concerns over purity, nationality, and authority were ingrained in the coinage metaphors of linguistic debates too.
But Nashe felt this mixing and mangling of native and foreign coins was necessary. English was a box of pennies in need of conversion. Two literary bookends to this period of ‘heightened lexical activity’, as Terrtu Nevalainen puts it, suggest that the metallic conversion Nashe envisions for English was successful. In 1545, John Skelton writes, ‘Our language is so rusty / So cankered…and so dull’. But less than a century later, John Day contributes a dedicatory poem to Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie (1623). Thanking Cockerham for his efforts compiling the new words that had appeared in English, Day writes, ‘a rude pile / Of barbarous sillables into a stile / Gentle and smooth thou hast reduc't: pure gold / Thou hast extracted out of worthlesse mould’. From rusty and cankered to ‘pure gold’, the borrowing, exchanging, and converting of linguistic coins in early modern England eventually built an improved and legitimate mint.
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Sources
Portuguese cruzado, British Museum, no. 1971,0606.8.
English penny, British Museum, no. 1896,1202.17.
Thomas Nashe, Christs teares ouer Ierusalem, 2nd edn (London: [James Roberts and R. Field] for Andrew Wise, 1594), STC (2nd ed.) / 18367.
John Davies, Microcosmos (Oxford: Joseph Barnes for John Barnes, 1603), STC (2nd ed.) / 6333.
Cheke’s letter to Hoby in Baldassarre Castiglione, The courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London: William Seres, 1561), STC (2nd ed.) / 4778.
Terttu Nevalainen, ‘Early Modern English Lexis and Semantics’, in The Cambridge History of the English Language: Volume 3: 1476–1776, ed. Roger Lass (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
John Skelton, The boke of Phyllyp Sparowe (London: By [R. Copland for] Rychard Kele, 1545), [STC (2nd ed.) / 22594].
John Day, ‘To my very good friend, Master Cokeram’, in Henry Cockeram, The English dictionarie: (London: [Eliot's Court Press] for Edmund Weauer, 1623), [STC (2nd ed.) / 5461.2]
Nashe's use of Spanish and Portuguese gold coins is interesting too...I wonder if it is a reference to the common anxiety in England about the quantities of gold that Spain was bringing back from the New World?