When is living in a bubble a good thing? Why, when it’s a “support bubble”, or – since it lifted the prior ban on people from different households having sex – a shagbubble. There has also been talk of “social bubbles”, but what is behind all the froth?
The word “bubble” is onomatopoeic, imitating the sound of bubbling liquid. (William Caxton, in his translation of a medieval French encyclopedia, describes the existence of wells that “spryng up with grete bobles” if you play a harp over them.)
Metaphorically, though, bubbles have historically not been good. A bubble could be anything insubstantial or worthless (Shakespeare: “the bubble Reputation”), a fraudulent enterprise, or a ruinous financial inflation, as in the notorious South Sea Bubble, which led to the Bubble Act of 1720.
In ordinary society, to live in a bubble is to be unhelpfully insulated from reality, like those unfortunate residents of the “Westminster bubble”, who now expect the rest of us to love our gilded bubble cage. Coincidentally, it is thought that “burble”, in the sense of reassuring but empty speech, is a close lexical relation.
• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.
