Mind your language

In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were covered with Dutch tiles, like his own fireplaces, he was worrying about Navy pay. People who were owed money by the Navy had to apply for it at a goldsmith’s shop, where they would have to forgo 15 or 20 per cent to secure it. Pepys called this ‘a most horrid shame’. Pepys also used the phrase horrid shame about a case of mistreatment of a watchman by the Lord Chief Justice, and of the King climbing over the garden wall of Somerset House to visit the Duchess of Richmond. It was what we might call a scandal.

‘Does a dark lantern give out black light?’ asked my husband as if in delirium. He was reading a book I would have been enjoying if he hadn’t grabbed it. It is called 1776, being about London in that year, when Britain was losing its Empire of America. It’s by Justin Lovill, who ten years ago gave us an entertaining miscellany called Ringing Church Bells to Ward off Thunderstorms. Anyway, my husband’s question concerned an incidental reference to a dark lantern, spelled lanthorn in the newspaper source quoted. It made me realise that I have never understood this apparatus. The spelling lanthorn is a piece of popular etymologising, based on lanterns almost always, before the 19th century I think, glazed with horn.

‘The term coloured, is an outdated, offensive and revealing choice of words,’ tweeted Diane Abbott last week in response to Amber Rudd having remarked on the radio with regard to verbal abuse: ‘And it’s worst of all if you’re a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse, and I think that’s something we need to continue to call out.’ Rudd rapidly apologised: ‘Mortified at my clumsy language and sorry to Diane Abbott.’ It is funny to think that if Rudd had said woman of colour she’d have been immune to criticism. But she tripped over a shibboleth. The Oxford English Dictionary abides by strict neutrality over the use of language.

My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In 20 years’ time that sentence may seem normal. To me it seems at best whimsical, perhaps arch. There’s a lot of interrogating at the moment, quite apart from the traditional kind by unpleasant policemen. Jay Rayner, in the Observer, said that he saw some people in a restaurant interrogate their plates. In the Guardian someone suggested we should ‘interrogate the things that make us want to drink too much’. In the Guardian again someone else declared: ‘It’s important to challenge and interrogate sexist beauty ideals, of course.’ Of course.

Jan Morris in her book Oxford enjoyed the Greek lettering on the floor of the rotunda entrance to Rhodes House, Oxford. It seems to complement the Greek inscription on the roof and pious memorials on the walls. But literally translated, it means: ‘Let no smoke-bearing person enter.’ In other words: ‘No smoking.’ Could it have been the work of Alan Bell, the agreeable librarian there, and later at the London Library? I forget. But there’s an older joke lost on most who stare at it (if that is amusing) on the facade of the Rhodes building of Oriel College in the High. Under the statue of the college benefactor, big letters read: e Larga MVnIfICentIa CaeCILII rhoDes The bigger letters sticking up look outlandish, but this is a chronogram.

‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a review of ‘a gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on the River Humber’. The name of the drama was Jack Lear. A true drama that gripped the popular tabloids is that of Jack Shepherd, convicted in absentia for the manslaughter of a young woman he took out in a speedboat on the Thames, and now in jail in Georgia (on the Black Sea) facing extradition. Shepherd’s namesake Jack Sheppard (1702-24) was celebrated as a jailbreaker after his conviction for burglary. His exploits remained famous enough for an unsuccessful film Where’s Jack?, starring Tommy Steele, to be made in 1969.

The government (if it hasn’t fallen yet) has found difficulty moving people onto Universal Credit from the benefits that they were receiving before. The process is called managed migration and the government refers to acts of migrating claimants. This jargon sounds the more grotesque for the associations it provokes in the imagination: of migrants or asylum-seekers being herded into boats or cast into the Channel aboard inflatable craft. Migrate had never been a transitive verb, as something that you do to people, except in the rarest cases. The Oxford English Dictionary found an example from 1768, from the pen of Abraham Tucker, a country gentleman who took to philosophy.

The parliamentary press gallery has in the past given a pair of silver shoe buckles to the Speaker as a token of respect, since his shoes were all they could see of him from their perch above his chair. They won’t be giving buckles to John Bercow, for he has done away with most of his official attire. He wears a gown like a teacher in the Beano and sports a variety of what might be categorised as snazzy ties. I was struck recently by hearing him refer to MPs collectively as ‘colleagues’. I can’t remember previous Speakers doing so. ‘I will come to other colleagues, if that is what colleagues wish,’ he said during a long series of points of order on 9 January after his ruling that let in one of Dominic Grieve’s amendments on Brexit procedure.

Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as ‘the Sajid’ or ‘the Saj’. This habit has a long history. Xenophon entered his own Anabasis 2,400 years ago with the words: ‘There was in that host a certain man, an Athenian, Xenophon.’ Caesar played the same game, as Shakespeare must have noticed at grammar school, later making him die with his own name on his lips: ‘Then fall, Caesar.’ In The Lord of the Rings, Tom Bombadil (who, like Henry James, but in rather a different way, is the Master) does it: ‘Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop.

‘Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads,’ said my husband, tossing an imaginary coin. The same improbability was amusing when Rosencrantz won the toss 92 times in a row in Tom Stoppard’s play (1966). We know the odds for the next toss are 50-50, but we can’t help thinking it morally impossible for the lucky streak to go on. This term morally impossible is not the same as something being immoral. The thickets here are tangled. As the Oxford English Dictionary points out with rare loquacity, Aristotle declared that moral philosophy cannot expect proofs that are mathematically certain.

‘Remind me what incel means again,’ said my husband. There was no point, since he’d forgotten twice already. I suspected a psychological barrier to learning. Incel (a label for people unhappy at being involuntarily celibate) was a runner-up for Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year, won by toxic. But to me the word that captures the flavour of Britain this year is shouty. It identifies a trait that people dislike yet are given to. It belongs to an informal register (like not wearing a tie). Protesters are literally shouty, and metaphorically so are capital letters, some films and even aromatic food. There was sympathy, I read in the Guardian, for Theresa May being ‘surrounded by shouty men’.