My husband made a noise which he thinks is like a klaxon but sounds as if he is choking on his whisky. Even though I was in the middle of making a roux, I had to hurry from the kitchen to make sure he wasn’t.
The klaxon was to signal that he had found in the paper a cliché that had led to complete nonsense. ‘Sir Tony’s position on the board was marred in uncertainty because of his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,’ someone said in the Telegraph.
The cliché he was aiming at was mired. But, as clichés are empty of meaning, he hadn’t noticed that marred made no sense. It is a common error. In an article on electrical charging, someone on the Times had written that ‘the process of getting approval is marred in red tape’. In the Sun, the BBC was ‘marred in scandal’.
A champion of marring is Jack Figg, a sports reporter at the Sun. He has managed to get ‘marred in controversy’ into his pieces a dozen times. I don’t blame him but I do wonder why no sub-editor noticed the weird phrase.
The figurative use of mired comes from the literal sense of being bespattered with mud or mire. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado, Hero is ‘Smirched thus, and mired with infamy’. People are mired in a mirepit or mire, a bog or swampy ground.
Mire is etymologically related to moss, ‘bog’, as in Chat Moss – and such places are where moss grows. But mire is derived from Norse, and goes with parts of the country settled by Vikings. I think Arthur Conan Doyle made a mistake with the name of the bog in The Hound of the Baskervilles: the Grimpen Mire. The Vikings did not settle on Dartmoor. Although Grimpen might have been influenced by Grimspound, a prehistoric settlement overlooking marshy land on Dartmoor, it sounds as though it comes from an unknown noun grimp, like leaden from lead.
Oddly, T.S. Eliot took grimpen from Conan Doyle, using it in ‘East Coker’ (1940) as a common noun: ‘In a dark wood, in a bramble,/ On the edge of a grimpen.’ There he was not on solid ground.
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