Mind your language

‘Think yourself lucky,’ said my husband when I told him about poor John Stuart Mill’s mother, who had nine children by a man strongly in favour of birth control and who brought up his children ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear’. Parenthetically, I have only just discovered that the Mill family name had been Milne, changed to sound less Scottish. Gladstone’s name in his youth was Gladstones. Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Wellington, only changed his name from Wesley at the age of 29. Why are so many great men pseudonymous?

‘This is the book that horses wish every equestrian would read,’ says the blurb for Sacred Spaces: Communion with the horse through science and spirit by Dr Susan Fay. It might sound like putting the cart before the horse to have equines deciding our reading list, but everyone wants a bit of space at the moment. ‘Thank you for giving us the space,’ said the Duchess of Sussex to Oprah Winfrey at the end of their ample airtime. This is not Star Trek’s ‘space, the final frontier’, nor yet the spatium verae paenitentiae, the time for repentance, that the Christian asks before death. Yet space is the prime thing now seen as sacred.

If I ever again accompany my husband to a medical conference in Spain, and want to tell my hosts that I am embarrassed (as he often makes me), I should not say embarazada, for that word means ‘pregnant’, which at my age would be unusual. Such false friends can add to the gaiety of foreign travel. Among false friends, I must confess to assuming, all my adult life, that Formica, the kitchen laminate, had something to do with the ant, formica in Latin. It came as a shock last week to discover that the inventors in 1913 simply meant Formica as a substitute ‘for mica’. Mica was an electrical insulator — the original purpose of Formica. In my defence, it is true that Formica, fabric coated with resin, did use bakelite as a resin.

‘Blame Kingsley Amis,’ said my husband, with the carelessness of one defying a man out of earshot. The blame, such as it was, lay in the title of the novel Take a Girl Like You (1960). The ambiguity in the title, he maintained, was between like meaning ‘such as’ and like meaning ‘resembling’. There is something in what he says. Like has been in crisis for a generation on several fronts. The most hated is probably like as an oral filler, along with you know or sort of. A second annoying usage is stranger: like introducing a made-up quotation serving as an adjective. An example would be to replace ‘He was angry’ with the construction: ‘He was, like: “Just leave me alone”.

What do people think espouse means? It looks fairly plain, since spouses are to have and to hold, or indeed embrace. That applies to opinions, metaphorically. But King’s College, London, mounted a survey in 2019 and found that 26 per cent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘If someone is using hate speech or making racially charged comments, physical violence can be justified to prevent the person from espousing their hateful views.’ I read that in a letter to the Daily Telegraph from Professor Jonathan Grant. He said that 20 per cent of the general population agreed. But here espousing is used as though it meant ‘expounding’ or ‘preaching’.

‘I’ll stick to being Brazilian,’ said my husband. It was a family joke. Every time a politician on the radio says resilient, the first to shout out Brazilian wins. I haven’t yet discovered what the prize is, though we have been playing the game since 2014, when I wrote about resilience here. My husband may be resilient, even robust (another political watchword), but the newest favourite is nimble, and I don’t think he’s up to that. Ursula von der Leyen called Britain ‘a nimble speedboat’ in its vaccine provision. Actually, though she did say speedboat, I think nimble was supplied by the Sun.

I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator, 6 February) that it is a shame the Times is dropping its use of titles of courtesy — Mrs, Mr, Lord — at the second mention of anyone in a report. Now it’s Charles Moore first mention, and Moore after that. Even when I see Jane Austen referred to as ‘Austen’ I feel it a little rude. It makes her sound like a convict, or at best the cook below stairs in some historical drama. ‘Austen, there will be 14 to dinner and please ensure the duck is thoroughly done.’ This is partly a question of sex. I wouldn’t like to be called Wordsworth, noble name though it be, without the Mrs. My husband, even if stripped of Dr, is old enough to remember surnames used alone as a mark of friendship between men.

‘Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley,’ said my husband, multitasking by kicking the stone and slightly misquoting Samuel Johnson at the same time. It was his (my husband’s) notion of a little joke. Dr Johnson had demonstrated with his own kick the falsehood of thinking that all things are merely ideal, not material. The stone my husband kicked was a milestone outside the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore. It said ‘To Hounslow 9 miles’ and ‘To London (Hyde Park Corner) 1 mile’. Helpfully, a manicule pointed out which way was which. I’m still unsure where Bishop Berkeley comes into this, but milestones have been everywhere recently, all of them grim.

Suzanne Moore, the Telegraph columnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at the ends of emails. Her real gripe was with false claims to kindness. So what should you put at the end of an email? Yours sincerely is conventional in letters to people whom one knows. Sincerely in this context is first recorded by the beloved Oxford English Dictionary from the year 1702, in a letter to Samuel Pepys, in the last year of his life, from Arthur Charlett, the gossipy self-promoting Master of University College, Oxford, who had designed a bookplate for the diarist. He signed himself as ‘your most sincerely obedient Servant’.

In discussing the German low-life cant called Rotwelsch, Mark Glanville (Books, 9 January) referred in passing to Polari, ‘the language of gay English subculture’, being used ‘by members of a marginalised group to converse without being understood by outsiders’. I’ve never been convinced by this description of Polari. Undercover policemen in Soho before 1967 may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they did share the speech of those among whom they moved. Polari, or Parlyare, was a loosely coherent slang drawing on Italian, Yiddish, back slang, rhyming slang and perhaps Romany. This slang vocabulary was familiar to fairground people, publicans, criminals, theatre folk and the homosexuals among them.

Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles. The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers used it in a sense that I thought wrong. Of the 100 newspaper articles mentioning it, not one used performative correctly (to my mind). I must be the only person marching in step. Performative was invented by an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, who used it in lectures in 1952, then in the William James lectures at Harvard in 1955. We make performative utterances, he said, as a kind of action.

In the aisle of Tesco I stood like one thunderstruck. It was not the print of a man’s naked foot that took me aback, as it did Crusoe, but a tin of ‘Mandarin segments in juice’. These days we get our entertainment where we can, and I had toyed with buying tinned goods against the next disruption of trade, as Margaret Thatcher had stocked up with 20 tins of fruit in 1974 against inflation. But I had wondered that very morning what to call the shape made by cutting the top off a boiled egg. That is a spherical cap, I learnt. One thing led to another, and the next thing I knew was that a slice taken out of a spherical Christmas pudding (such that the straight sharp edge is the pud’s diameter) is called a spherical wedge. The flat sides of the slice are semidisks.

In 2015 smombie became the Youth Word of the Year in Germany. In January 2016 a survey found that 92 per cent of the young people asked did not know the meaning of smombie. Smombie is a portmanteau word composed from smartphone and zombie, used for those people who stumble about the street looking at their phones. Like many nonce formations it did not catch on. What, you may ask, was a putatively English word doing as the German youth choice? Certainly there is quite a bit of English vocabulary thrown lightly about by young people in Germany. The word of the year for 2020 is lost, but it was very nearly bastard, for which a humorous campaign was mounted till it was stamped on.

‘Try the sports pages,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair. I was looking for examples of fortuitous used as though it meant ‘fortunate’. You and I know that it means ‘produced by chance’, and it seems a pity to lose the distinction. The sports pages were indeed thronged with fortuitous. Football, it seems, is a game of chance. It didn’t take long to get a writer in the Daily Mail bang to rights. ‘Only occasionally will you get lucky. Arsenal did ride their luck to down Klopp’s team in London towards the end of last season but may have to wait a while to be so fortuitous again.’ There it must have been intended to mean ‘fortunate’.

‘Forget coronavirus,’ said my husband, ‘the word of the year is strange.’ The strange thing is he’s right. This wasn’t determined by online polls or fixed by dictionaries. It emerged spontaneously and distinctly when the lockdowns got going. About lockdown I am still not quite happy. The word seems a little extreme for the episodes so far. But friends kept mentioning these strange times. The word fitted in more than one sense. When politicians’ repetition of unprecedented had become tiresome, strange still applied in the sense of ‘unfamiliar; not known or experienced before’. It also described the feeling of life as ‘abnormal’. Both meanings have been present in English since Chaucer’s time.

‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of Radio 4 and whisky. ‘No, darling,’ I tried to explain, ‘not Brazilians. Resilience.’ They had been talking about civil servants sworn at by politicians, or at least being in the same room as swearing. Resilience seems the counterpart to robustness. Sir Alex Allan (who resigned after his report into the conduct of Priti Patel was not taken up wholeheartedly by Boris Johnson) had said that ‘senior civil servants should be expected to handle robust criticism but should not have to face behaviour that goes beyond that’.

At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been in the Strada Nuova that morning. ‘What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?’ replied Madame de Ventadour. ‘Our life is a lounge from the cradle to the grave.’ How true. The observation comes in Bulwer Lytton’s novel Ernest Maltravers (1837). I was put in mind of lounging by remarks that Anne McElvoy made on the wireless about the use of video-conferencing and broadcasting allowing people to attend to their visible top half while wearing lounge pants below. I wasn’t too sure what lounge pants were. I don’t wear them and my husband certainly doesn’t.

Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it seemed like an Americanism. Fourthly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage said that gift as a verb was ‘best avoided’, as it had fallen out of favour with speakers of standard English.

Boris Johnson looked unhappy, as well he might, standing at his indoor lectern last Saturday to announce the new lockdown: ‘In this country, alas, as across much of Europe, the virus is spreading.’ He said alas a couple more times during the conference. Normally such a word belongs to the sprinkling of slightly absurd phrases that garnish his speech like particularly curly parsley. But, Ichabod, the fun has departed. Alas, there is less and less irony in saying alas. The Prime Minister is doubtless aware of the classical origin of alas in lassitudo, Latin for weariness. Lassitude came into English in the 16th century. Francis Bacon, the Jacobean Lord Chancellor, not the masochistic painter, wrote: ‘Lassitude is remedied by bathing or anointing with oil and warm water.