Mind your language

Radio 3 tries to distract listeners from music by posing little quizzes and hearing quirky details of history from a ‘time traveller’. Last Wednesday we were assured that on the wagon, meaning ‘abstaining from alcohol’, derived somehow from condemned prisoners being taken from Newgate to Tyburn and having a last drink at St Giles’s. This is definitely not the origin of the phrase. That reliable philologist Michael Quinion gave the true version in his blog World Wide Words in 1998. The journey to Tyburn was a staple of popular miscellanies such as Hone’s Year Book and Chambers Book of Days, and earlier of fictionalised histories like Jonathan Wild (1725) and The Beggar’s Opera (1728).

My husband, who fancies himself as something of a classicist, was delighted to see the Turkish investigators of the Khashoggi horror in Istanbul with ‘Polis’ on their T-shirts. Against the odds of Ottoman rule and the Turkish cultural initiatives of Ataturk, this Greek word for a city society, polis, still designates the guardians of civic peace. The borrowed word was all the more striking as the police were acting in Istanbul, the name of which derived from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, to the city. Where are you going? Eis ten polin, which by the 16th century had become Istanbul. A Turkish folk etymology derives the name from Islam bol, ‘plenty of Islam’, but this has no more basis than the popular version of asparagus in English being sparrow-grass.

When I say that it has given comfort to my husband, you can judge how foolish the Wellcome Institute was in using the word womxn and then apologising for it. It had wanted to be more inclusive with a workshop on ‘how womxn can challenge existing archives’. There, womxn serves as a plural, but it can be a singular too. Wellcome did not invent the word. The BBC quoted Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance, of King’s College London, saying that it ‘stems from a longstanding objection to the word woman as it comes from man’. Dr Bradbury-Rance is not a philologist, preferring the ‘intersectional study of sexuality and gender in film and popular culture’. Some people assume that woman is derived from womb-man. This is not the case.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked of Sergei Skripal, whom his agents tried to kill, ‘He’s simply a scumbag.’ Scumbag at least is how the press translated his words. I’m afraid that from my sheltered life I did not know the literal meaning of scumbag. Look away now if you’d rather not know and I’ll join you at the next paragraph. Literally it is ‘a condom’, an Americanism first recorded in 1967, which is also the first year in which scum meaning ‘semen’ is recorded. An equivalent derogatory term also of American origin, used in the television cartoon Family Guy, is douchebag.

My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert Island Discs last week. Having confronted the terrible consequences of human error in this alarming speciality, the author mentions the bathetic absurdity of an NHS training presentation by ‘a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm’. Empathy is the great thing, it seems. Without it you’re a psychopath; with it you’re the carer we all want. Yet the word has only been in use in English since 1909. Was everybody a pitiless solipsist before that? Empathy translates the German Einfühlung (‘in-feeling’), a term used by Robert Vischer in 1873 with regard to aesthetics.

Embolden is a word in a million. In other words it is quite common. Using data from Google Books, the Oxford English Dictionary has put it in a band of words that are used with a frequency of between 0.1 and 0.99 per million. About 11 per cent of words fall in this band. The most frequent words, in Band 8, occurring more than 1,000 times per million, are exemplified by the, he, and, from and some. The only noun among these most common words is time. Embolden falls in Band 4, among words generally recognised by newspaper readers such as candlestick, rodeo and embouchure. A larger proportion, 20 per cent of words in the OED, come in the more difficult Band 3: words such as amortizable, prelapsarian and contumacious.

A detective superintendent has been placed on ‘restricted duties’ while the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigates a complaint that he used the phrase whiter than white at a briefing. An ‘insider’ told the Evening Standard: ‘It may have been a poor use of language but this is not what the misconduct process is for.’ What nonsense. It is isn’t ‘a poor use of language’ at all. We may take it that the phrase was used figuratively. Literally, whiter than white has been used of necks, teeth and faces for three or four hundred years. In the figurative sense, I cannot find anything definite before 1962, about the time when lily-white in the same sense may be found. Tottenham Hotspur are nicknamed the Lilywhites from their shirts.

If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, published in 1704, there’s one on AbeBooks for £131,245.03, plus £12 P&P. Do people just click on such items, I wonder, and wait for the book to plop through the letterbox a few days later? Anyway, there is a meaning of optics now being heavily used that Newton wouldn’t have understood. It is not the first time this has happened, because, for pub-going folk, optics are the measures attached to upside-down bottle of spirits to dispense reliably mean doses. Optic in this sense began as a trade name and has been in use only since 1926. Newton did not invent the term optics for the science of visible light.

‘I want my money back,’ said my husband. ‘This is from the 1880s, not the 1980s.’ He looked up from my copy of Soho in the Eighties by my neighbour at the other end of the mag, Christopher Howse (CSH of Portrait of the Week, who also recalls his drinking days in the Coach and Horses).  My husband had not, of course, paid a penny for it. What caught his interest surprised me too. It was a canting song by W.E. Henley (author of ‘Invictus’: ‘I am the captain of my soul’), published in 1887 under the title (which Mr Howse doesn’t mention) ‘Villon’s Straight Tip to All Cross Coves’, it being a sort of translation of his ballade with the refrain Tout aux tavernes et aux filles.

The Sun gave a sad picture of British loneliness recently in a report about the national yearning to play a board game like Monopoly, which could only be fulfilled about five times a year when someone could be found to play it with. In passing, the paper remarked: ‘Two-thirds of Brits would also relish the opportunity to play a life-size version of their favourite board game.’ Whether or not this unlikely claim is true, there’s an awful lot of relishing going on these days, and opportunity is usually the thing relished. What, according to the Telegraph gardening pages, will you do with the opportunity for a relaxed afternoon in such a blissful spot as Longwitton Hall, Northumberland?

I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. Some things about it are awkward. Two Australians, Richard Thomas and Joy Bear, had been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation on the chemistry behind the smell. They found it comes from the ‘blue haze’ of hot summer days, part of the 450 million tons of volatile compounds released by plants into the atmosphere each year. But in the air the compounds do not smell attractive, as they do after being catalysed on the surfaces of rocks and soil. Rain washes them out of the rocky pores and gives us the welcome whiff.

My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to ‘follow the signage’. When do signs, he wondered, become signage? At the same level, I suspect, that rooms become roomage. Hardy wrote in his beguiling way: ‘When moiling seems at cease/ In the vague void of night-time, /And heaven’s wide roomage stormless/ Between the dusk and light-time,/And fear at last is formless,/ We call the allurement Peace.’ Suffixes function in a subconscious way. We use them without explicit intent. Signage, roomage or cellarage belong to Type 1 of four types of nouns ending in -age. Signage is the whole caboodle made up of individual signs.

We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in rural Britain. There is, I think, a confusion built into the term, though language is capable of accommodating such inconsistencies. Most of the stuff in the papers and on television on the subject derives from County Lines, Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply, a report published last year by the National Crime Agency. It says that the phrase county lines refers to the supply of Class A drugs ‘from an urban hub into rural towns or county locations’. It adds: ‘A key feature of county lines drug supply is the use of a branded mobile phone line.’ Just tap the number stored on your phone and the drugs come along like a pizza or Uber.

I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease, HIV or psoriasis. Perhaps I should describe myself as a person living with my husband. The formula is recommended by many Aids organisations that follow the ‘terminology guidelines’ of the UN Programme on HIV/Aids. Instead of saying that someone is infected with HIV, we should call them a person living with HIV. It is meant to be less patronising and avoids suggesting someone is ‘powerless, with no control over his or her life’. No one should even be called a patient, but must be called a client, which is ‘more empowering’. Tell that to clients of Southern railways.

‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked him what ideation suggested to him. Unknown to him, ideation has, since my husband’s day, made an unlikely leap from psychiatry to management theory. ‘Management gurus,’ wrote Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian, ‘seem inordinately obsessed with free office pizza and open-plan offices where people can bump into each other for out-of-the-box ideation opportunities.’ Ideation only means coming up with ideas. While that is essential to any business, this technical-sounding term has been recruited to the task of making it seem that coming up with ideas is scientific and susceptible to being harnessed for profit.

A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She said it reminded her of delft ware. That word has its own historical peculiarity. We used to call it delf, as you can find in Dickens and his contemporaries. That is because the town of Delf was spelt in the same way, taking its name from its chief canal. The Dutch shared with the English (though we have largely forgotten it) a word delf meaning ‘ditch’ — something delved or dug. But then the town added a t to its name to make it Delft, and the English followed suit in the spelling of the earthenware. Anyway, the blue of Portuguese tiles is caught in an even less likely knot of language. Tiles in Portuguese are azulejos (the same word as in Spanish).

‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and the promise of ‘a new iteration of softer suiting’. Suiting in itself is a comical word when found outside the technical pages of Tailor and Cutter. In that respect it belongs to the same family as trouserings, which P.G. Wodehouse (already convinced that trousers are inherently absurd) liked to deploy. Bertie Wooster often referred to evening-wear trouserings. Similarly, the determinedly humorous Owen Seaman, born over an artificial-flower shop, and editor of Punch from 1906 to 1932, cheered up a parody of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with lines like ‘We sit in sable Trouserings and Boots.