In the 1950s and 1960s I went to a secondary school where all the pupils – or “students” as the current usage has it – were boys, something which I very much regretted at the time, and have continued to regret ever since.
Understandably, I suppose, we spent lots of time talking about girls. One of the words we sometimes employed to mean “girl” was bint. The Oxford English Dictionary says that this is a colloquial (and chiefly British) word for a girl or young woman, and is now “only depreciative or derogatory”. In our day, although we understood that it was not perhaps the most respectful of words, we felt it to be humorous rather than derogatory.
A while back, I wrote about the role which words from the Hindustani language played in the formation of British army slang, and how a number of these words, such as Blighty for Britain, later made their way into general colloquial British and Irish English.
The same sort of pattern can also be noted in the case of the Arabic language. Bint is the Arabic word for girl or daughter. It is the feminine form corresponding to bin or ibn “son”, a form we are familiar with from names such as Osama bin Laden.
The king of Saudi Arabia until 2015 was Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. He was the son of King Abdulaziz and Queen Fahda bint Asi Al Shuraim.
Much of the Arabic vocabulary in our slang comes from the fact that, in the 19th and 20th centuries, the British army was stationed in many different Arabic-speaking areas, and often for lengthy periods at a time.
During the first world war, TE Lawrence – known as Lawrence of Arabia – fought alongside irregular Arab forces against the Ottoman Empire all over the Middle East and Arabia.
In the second world war, fighting between the Allies and the Axis powers took place over much of north Africa, especially Libya. The Allied headquarters were located in Alexandria, Egypt, and for many months large numbers of British troops came into rather close contact with Arabic speakers there and elsewhere in the region.
One certainly Arabic-origin word which made its way into colloquial English in this way was shufti “look or glance”, as in the phrase “have a shufti”, where the word is more or less a synonym of Hindi-Urdu dekko. It first appeared in English in the 1940s. Shufti is in origin the Arabic word šufti, meaning “have you seen?”, and comes from the verb šāf “to see”.
Another Arabic word introduced by soldiers who had been serving in the Middle East and north Africa was imshi, signifying “be off, go away!”, first used in print in 1916. I remember hearing this used by older men in the 1950s, though it would not be a surprise if no younger reader of this newspaper had ever come across it. Imshi is the singular imperative form of Arabic yamshi “to walk”, meaning “go away!”, “get a move on!”, or simply “walk!”.
As with Hindustani, very many Arabic words not known by British soldiers have also been borrowed into English, via the “high road”, and have become part of our learned scientific and philosophical vocabulary rather than slang. A number of these words begin with the syllable -al, which was the Arabic definite article: algebra, alcohol, alkali, and alchemy.
Colloquial
With reference to language, the word colloquial generally means “conversational”, and hence “informal” because it is in contrast to formal written language. It comes from colloquy “a conversation” which is from Latin colloquium “conversation,” literally “a speaking together,” which derives from com- “together” plus -loquium “speaking”, from loqui “to speak”, which we also know from English loquacious.
