I thrill at the sudden change of perspective when we are forced to see ourselves as others see us. A few years ago, for example, I was reading an article in Newsweek about the work of the Serious Fraud Office, which, as you will know, is (or perhaps was, until recently) an agency of Britain’s noble enforcers of the law. The job of the Serious Fraud Office was to investigate … er … Serious Fraud.

I had had no problem with the name of this redoubtable bastion against fiscal chaos until I read the Newsweek journalist’s next line. With a name like the Serious Fraud Office, it said, you’d expect to see a door down the hall marked ‘Slightly Silly Fraud Office’. Now cast into this unexpectedly Pythonesque dimension, I have never since been able to think of the SFO without imagining John Cleese in the Ministry of Silly Walks.

I came across a similar jolt in perspective last week, when I was called upon by the brave soul who is translating my book Jacob’s Ladder: A History of the Human Genome into Italian, to answer a question.

Why is it, he asked, that in one place I had used the phrase ‘the shape and form’, when one would either use ‘shape’ or ‘form’, and which would I prefer? In the end we decided on ‘form’ (forma), but it left me thinking. Why did I use two words when one would have sufficed? It turned out that answering that question forced me to adopt an entirely new perspective on the way we use the English language, and made me think, in particular, about the peculiarities of English usage which we take for granted.

According to The Cambridge Concise History of English Literature, the use of two words together, words which mean the same (or similar) things, is called a ‘doublet’ and is very common in English. To find the reason why, I had to delve down to the very origins of English.

English started with the Anglo-Saxon conquerors of Britain, who invaded in the fifth century, after the Romans left. The invaders wrote and spoke a language we now call ‘Old English’, which is a Teutonic language related to German.

Even though most scholars wrote formal documents in Latin, Old English was the language of everyday speech. Over the course of five hundred years, Old English became a language of literature, too, and, in the later Anglo-Saxon period (the tenth and eleventh centuries) many Latin works were translated into Old English.

Everything changed after the Norman Conquest of 1066. After that, all formal discourse not written in Latin was in Norman French, and Old English was relegated to the common language of a subject people, all of whom were illiterate peasants. The King and the nobility all spoke in Norman French up until the mid-fourteenth century, and Norman French was also the language of law and politics.

What I hadn’t appreciated until I read The Concise Etcetera that all children (all those of wealthy and literate families, at any rate) were raised to speak and write in Norman French, too, and knew no (Old) English.

As a result, Old English died almost completely as a medium of discourse. So completely, in fact, that almost no documents written in English are known from between 1066 and around 1150, almost a century.

When English re-emerged as a written language in the twelfth century, it was a fusion of Old English and Norman French. This fused language is known today as Middle English, and it is very different from Old English.

Whereas Old English is almost unintelligible today except to an expert, some Middle English (such as the later Middle English of Chaucer, who wrote in the latter half of the fourteenth century) can be read and understood, with effort, by people who aren’t academics. One can, at least, get the Gist of the Geste, to coin a phrase.

However, Middle English was a rather fluid language which varied strongly from place to place. For example, the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in a Midlands dialect in contrast to the London Middle English of Chaucer, is as unintelligible to the modern reader as is anything in Old English, for all that the (unknown) author was a contemporary of Chaucer. Sampson, author of the Cambridge Concise, says that even Chaucer would have found Sir Gawain a puzzle.

All these regional variations disappeared, at least in written English, after the invention of printing. This was also the spur to the formation of Modern English. Shakespeare, for example, wrote in early Modern English, and his English is reasonably close to the English written today.

Although Old English contributed its grammar to Middle English (with simplifications), Norman French contributed much of the vocabulary. But the fusion wasn’t total. Even today, the piebald history of English is evident in our vocabulary and the way we use it. In general, words which have a formal, precise, polite and ‘urban’ meaning derive from Norman French (and, ultimately, Latin), whereas rougher, more rural and less polite words tend to derive from Old English (many English swear-words are, at root, perfectly polite Old English words).

From this imperfect fusion came the ‘doublet’ habit of using two similar words, one from each root language, where one word would be sufficient.

This habit became formalized in Middle English documents which were widely disseminated, such as as the early translations of the Bible into English, and in particular the old Book of Common Prayer, until recently the standard church book, known and loved by millions. Many phrases from these sources, viewed as proverbial, and with affection, contain doublets (‘we [sinners] have erred and strayed’, for example) so that the use, today, of such phrases exerts a profound resonance for English-speakers.

Doublets persist because each word in a doublet, while it has a similar meaning to its mate, differs in what one might call ‘nuance’. My phrase ‘form and shape’, used almost unconsciously (‘in any shape or form’ is a very common English phrase), is a good example.

‘Form’ derives from the Old French word fourme, which in turn derives from the Latin forma, exactly the same word as in modern Italian we decided to use in Jacob’s Ladder. The first use of the word ‘form’ appears in Middle English, in 1297. ‘Shape’, on the other hand, is Old English sceap , deriving from the Teutonic root skap-, and first appears in 1050, before the Norman Conquest.

‘Form’, having a Latin root, suggests the precision and crystalline perfection of an archetype. Old-English ‘shape’, on the other hand, suggests an earthy reality, as if it represents the fleshly instantiation of an incorporeal form. Which is very much what Jacob’s Ladder is all about.

The sudden realization that the language we use every day bears the scars of history that extend back more than a thousand years is somewhat like the feeling one might experience when walking along a mountain path, entirely happy until one notices the immense chasms opening up on either side. Or perhaps, the feeling of the first Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain who, on coming on the cyclopean architecture of the vanished Romans, imagined them to be the works of an elder race of giants: eald enta geweorc idlu stodon. Couldn’t have put it better myself.