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A: You’d love to know that, would you? I’d love to know that too. We don’t really know it. The book involves me wanting to tell a story about this mass of data and inexplicable stuff that is a language. Part of the humour in the book to me is in trying to make a story from something that isn’t actually a story. Because I start off with how many gaps there are, how many things we don’t know, and then I picked something that I’m trying to hold onto and know — the first name that comes up in the story of English, Hengest — I thought ‘Well, that part of the story as told to me is not very satisfying. Can I do any better?’

Q: Tell me more about Hengest. What does he tell us about English’s rude origins?

A: Hengest is a figure you get taught in junior school history classes in England, maybe not so much here. He and Horsa were the two legendary founding figures of the Angles/Anglo-Saxons. No serious historian really would bother exploring them that much because they probably didn’t exist. There maybe are people who claim they literally existed, but everyone I’ve heard or read sort of mentions them, smirks and says ‘This story is probably just an oral, made-up campfire tale.’ The tale was ‘Hengest and Horsa came over in boats and started English culture.’

[np_storybar title=”Watch your language!” link=””]

Back in 449 AD, the year the first English word is believed to have been spoken, Anglo-Saxons were in the throes of a warrior culture in which breaking an oath or shying from battle was a major taboo. While these utterances don’t seem to have the bite of today’s cuss-words, they were bad, bad words back then. Here’s a list of the language’s first “swear words” (left column) and their modern English translations (right column):