Mind your language

Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It was because Washington Post columnist George Will had used it in a piece about the US senator Lindsey Graham. ‘During the government shutdown,’ he had written, ‘Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word — have amazed’. It might have been the precise word, but it has two meanings: one is ‘desertion or abandonment of a cause, apostasy’; the other is ‘shifting, shuffling, equivocation, prevarication’. Both are pejorative, taking the idea of turning one’s back on a principle, since the Latin for ‘back’ is tergum. From the context, Mr Wills meant the latter.

‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response did not chime with the spirit of the Cambridge Dictionary in naming it: ‘We think that our fans resonated with upcycling not as a word in itself but with the positive idea behind it.’ I prefer words in themselves. But what was the dictionary to do? It posts a Word of the Day on Instagram, and upcycling received more ‘likes’ than any other Word of the Day. Over at Collins Dictionary, they noticed a hundredfold increase in the use of climate strike in 2019, and made it the Collins word of the year. Last year, it had been single-use, an adjective qualifying plastic. One notices a trend towards environmental terms.

‘What,’ asked my husband teasingly, by way of an early Christmas game, ‘connects wolf’s-bane with Woolwich Arsenal?’ It took me a little time, but I got there via aconite. Ovid put its origins most vividly. When Cerberus was dragged by Heracles from Hades, triply barking as the steel chain was twisted round his necks and averting his eyes from the glare of day as he came up through a cave on the shore of the Black Sea, the monstrous dog dropped slobber on the ground, from which grew the poisonous flower aconite. We now call this kind of aconite wolf’s-bane, for its lethal properties. Keats wrote: ‘Go not to Lethe, neither twist/ Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.

A point that many people mentioned amid the horror and heroism of the attack at London Bridge was the enterprising use of a narwhal tusk taken from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall to belabour the murderous knifeman. I am surprised to find that the first person known to use narwhal in English was good old Sir Thomas Browne, in the discussion of unicorns’ horns in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica or Vulgar Erroures, where he correctly declares that ‘those long Horns preserved as pretious rarities in many places, are but the teeth of Narhwales’. Narwhal tusks are spirally grooved, and Browne observed that the long horn preserved in his day at St Denis in Paris ‘hath wreathy spires, and chocleary turnings about it’. That was in the edition of 1650.

‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James Russell Lowell where he found decuman, meaning ‘big wave’. The line ‘Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman’ came in Lowell’s ‘The Cathedral’ (1870) about Chartres. Lowell was Longfellow’s big-beardy successor as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard. Though fellow members of the Fireside Poets, both fearlessly translated Dante and Homer. Lowell had no idea where decuman had come from. Ovid and Lucan used decumanus, he found, of a wave, but not absolutely, as a noun. Finally he unearthed it as a noun in Du Cange’s dictionary, citing ‘one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which’.

‘I know the difference between ictal and icteric,’ said my husband proudly, reminding me of Tweedledum in Through the Looking-Glass. He explained, accurately enough, that ictal was to do with strokes and icteric with jaundice. But he hadn’t heard about the bird. Pliny in his Natural History says that there is a bird called ikteros (icterus) from its colour of yellowish green, like jaundice. If someone with jaundice looks at it, the patient will recover and the bird die. Pliny thinks it the bird called in Latin galgulus, and this has been identified as the wodewale, woodwall, witwall or golden oriole. On the unjaundiced side of things, ictal derives from the Latin ictus, a stroke, and here there is something that the dictionaries omit, for no good reason.

People in different regions like to think their dialects incomprehensible to outsiders, yet they can usually come up with quite a short list of words that differ from the norm. In Norfolk a favourite is bishy barnabee for ‘ladybird’. Ladybird, as I have mentioned before, refers to Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. But there have been attempts recently to derive bishy barnabee from Bishop Bonner (1500-69). Professor Peter Trudgill, who, as a sociolinguist born in Norwich, should have known better, wrote in an OED blog that bishybarnybee ‘comes from Bishop Bonner’s bee.

‘Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five,’ ran a headline in the Times in June. When it was tweeted by the journalist Adam Macqueen, people pointed out that there really is a Mayo Clinic (in Minnesota), though egg or tuna is not specified, and there had been a BLT group of hospitals (Barts and the London Trust). Such artlessly ambiguous headlines have, since 2009, been called crash blossoms, at the suggestion of an editor called Dan Bloom, suitably enough. The name derives from a headline in Japan Today: ‘Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms’. The article below it concerned the success of Diana Yukawa, whose father had died in a Japan Airlines crash.

Lewis Carroll, in his Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems (1869), constructed a poem that yielded a double acrostic, with the first and last letters of 13 words that were suggested by the 13 stanzas spelling out ‘quasi-insanity commemoration’, a reference to an Oxford commemoration ball. The first stanza, which yields the word quadratic, goes: ‘Yet what are all such gaieties to me/ Whose thoughts are full of indices and surds? x2 + 7x + 53 = 11 / 3.’ What, though, is the solution to the equation? I have seen it said that there is none, unless a minus sign is placed before the 53. But then it wouldn’t scan, and Lewis Carroll liked regular scansion: 11 / 3 is to be pronounced ‘eleven thirds’, not ‘eleven over three’.

In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said that the Scottish government should ‘face up to the situation they are in and double down on recruitment efforts’. I think she just meant double. Double down is a phrase from blackjack, an American casino card game resembling pontoon. It entails a player doubling his stake in return for only one more card from the dealer. It is not just the behaviour of degenerate gamblers.

On my way to a party in Ealing I saw a shop called Pan Rings. A mental image popped up of a saucepan with marks from milk round the sides. It is, in fact, a jewellery shop. Fashion outlets happily attract attention with negative names. Nasty Gal was founded in 2012 and has I think been taken over by Boohoo. Nasty is a word that Swift used in poems of scatological curiosity. In one, Celia’s ‘basin takes whatever comes: / The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews’. One of Swift’s resolutions for becoming old was: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.’ Swift’s Celia might like the sportswear shop Sweaty Betty.

I asked my husband if I should spend £59 on 20 millilitres of Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Intense Reset Concentrate. He laughed and said: ‘Try chicken soup.’ This did not quite answer my question. An ingredient of the concentrate is hyaluronic acid. It is not, as far as I can tell, an acid. It is named after the vitreous humour of the eye (hualoeides being the Greek for ‘glassy’). It is not derived from animals’ eyes, but from cocks’ combs. It can also be produced by Streptococci and genetically modified Escherichia coli, alarming-sounding sources not, I think, used by cosmetics firms.

Fotherington-Thomas was introduced by Nigel Molesworth, the narrator of Down with Skool!, in 1953: ‘As you see he is skipping like a girlie he is uterly wet and a sissy.’ Geoffrey Willans featured the school sissy again in How to be Topp (also illustrated by Ronald Searle, who had spent time in a Japanese prison camp): ‘It is only fotherington-tomas you kno he sa Hullo clouds hullo sky he is a girlie and love the scents and sounds of nature.’ Last week, Sky News revealed what Boris Johnson said about David Cameron in private cabinet papers, after it had obtained an ‘unredacted’ copy of documents disclosed to court. The Prime Minister referred to him as ‘girlie swot Cameron’. This is nothing new.

It was most unlooked-for that a king should ally with Whig politicians to seek parliamentary reform, but that was what William IV did when Earl Grey was trying to carry the Great Reform Bill in 1831. When Grey apologised for putting him in a hurry, the Sailor King exclaimed: ‘Never mind that. I am always at single anchor.’ Parliament was bedlam, Peel seemed ‘about to fall into a fit’, the Speaker had ‘a face equally red and quivering with rage’. The Lords had tabled a motion to stop the King dissolving parliament. To head them off from infringing his prerogative, William decided to prorogue  it in person. When told by the Master of the Horse that the state coachman was absent, William cried: ‘Then I will go in a hackney coach.

I’ve noticed a tendency among townies like me to call all cattle cows (which they feel they must mention in discussing Brexit). You’d think that a cow was an obviously female creature. (Didn’t Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, shown from 1965, call his wife Else a ‘silly old moo’?) But that doesn’t stop them. Indeed the main character in an American cartoon film called Barnyard (2006) was a cow by the name of Otis with a milk-giving udder. He was reckoned male and wooed a (female) cow called Daisy. This was not presented as any daring exercise in gender fluidity. One critic recommended that parents should take their children to it if they wanted to ‘depress them while making sure they fail biology’.