Mind your language

‘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.

Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that I remember Macmillan using in the 1970s. But it was in 1908, a year after Kipling, that Eucken won the Nobel prize for literature. (Anyone read a book by him?) His belief was that truth is arrived at through active striving after the spiritual life, and he called this principle activism. Within a decade, Eucken’s fellow Germans were concentrating on quite a different meaning of activism. It was the name of a movement, in neutral Sweden and among Flemish nationalists in Belgium in particular, in favour of the Axis Powers. Neither of these ideas of activism are invoked today by people who call themselves activists. Implicit in the word today is that activism is by its nature a good thing.

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only man on a five-person shortlist for a place on the Bank of England monetary policy committee. Mrs Miller herself chairs the Commons Women and Equalities committee, which has two men among its 11 members, but that’s fine.

To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked. Poor Jones had been so upset that he wrote no more poetry until the eve of his death aged 40 in 1860. It was all the worse because he’d hoped to escape through poetry the City counting house where, since he was 17 and his father died, he had slaved for 12 hours a day. Already a victim of unrequited love, he married unhappily. He suffered dyspepsia and pulmonary consumption.

I’m often annoyed by like being misused in different ways. (In place of as, for example: ‘Like I expected, he was late.’) But I’m now surprised by baffling uses of similar to. The Sun provided three examples in discussing the little internet craze for listening to an audio clip that either says ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’. (If this has passed you by, don’t trouble.) ‘The Yanny v Laurel debate,’ said the Sun, ‘has taken the internet by storm — similar to The Dress in 2015.’ There I’d probably say like, or more formally as did. In a different edition, the Sun hazarded: ‘Similar to the dress colour debate way back in 2014, there is a scientific reason.’ That should be as with.

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was asked if the Marine Corps forces he led might be defeated by the strong Iraqi army defending Baghdad. ‘Hell these are Marines,’ he said. ‘Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.’ Now he must cope with Donald Trump. At the end of last month it was reported, from an anonymous source, that he had remarked that the President was ‘becoming unhinged’. Before midnight that day, Mr Trump tweeted that ‘the Fake News is going crazy’ and ‘are totally unhinged’. Eleven minutes later, another tweet from him said: ‘Fake News is going “bonkers”!

I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when a character wondered aloud if he was paranoid. Paranoid? How could he be? The novel was finished by 1860 and paranoid was not invented till 1902 (in a translation of a book by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin) Kraepelin applied paranoid to delusions in what he called dementia praecox. From 1912 dementia praecox began to be supplanted by schizophrenia. None of this was dreamt of by Wilkie Collins. The TV adaptor, Fiona Seres, would never have introduced references to Tesla cars. On the other hand, she no doubt used invisibly anachronistic turns of phrase. It’s the in-between anachronisms that catch me in the ribs.

Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited her. She was passionate and outspoken. My husband was of course terrified of her. She did not mind mentioning that she was a hermaphrodite. ‘If God made me hermaphrodite, that is how I stay,’ she said. I mention Fiore because if she were alive today she would come in for public obloquy. Sex and gender are a battleground, and words are made shibboleths. Take terf. Terf is an unlikely acronym, deriving from trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It is a label given by their enemies to feminists who reject alliances in their struggle with people who used to be men.

In the warm weather, I had an al fresco hit with my mad-apple bruschette. Mad-apple shows the tangle to which ‘a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology’. It is a name for the aubergine, or egg-plant as it was earlier known in England, as it still is in America. Why mad-apple? Because the Renaissance Latin name was malum insanum, from the lost Italian form mela insana. This was a rationalisation of the earlier melanzana, attested in Sicilian use by the Arab geographer Idrisi in the 12th century. There it was a straight borrowing from the Greek melintzana, earlier matizanion, adapted from the Arabic badinjan.

Scarcely a sober breath has been drawn in my house all week for celebrating the 90th anniversary of the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary. This stupendous achievement, in 15,490 pages by 1928, drew on more than five million quotations from old books sent in by volunteers. In 1879, when the heroic James Murray became editor, the Philological Society appealed to Americans to read 18th-century books — any, except for about 100 already combed. One, I was intrigued to see, was A Travestie of Homer written in 1762 by Thomas Bridges, under the name Caustic Barebones. The Philological Society spelt his name Brydgys, but I can’t find that he did likewise. Bridges’ Travestie went into revised editions until 1797.

Crooning is I think the word to describe what my husband was doing to the lyrics of a Beach Boys number. ‘Round, round, get around, I get around,’ he crooned ludicrously, for no one less like a Beach Boy than he, with his frayed tweed jacket cuffs, could be imagined. He was, however, right if he was implying that the boys from Hawthorne, California, were having their cake and eating it. Generally, where a choice is possible, Americans prefer around and the British prefer round. I can’t get used to references to All-Around Gymnastics. What next, cricketing all-arounders? Anyway, British English is suffering from prepositionitis, unable to come out with the correct preposition when it’s needed.

Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today and was pleasantly surprised by its poetic quality. My husband was harrumphing a bit because the poet began by saying, ‘Soo… basically,’ and in his opinion went downhill from there, by talking about the poem being an ‘intersectional exploration’ seen ‘through a queer lens’. ‘You used to be she and her,’ Sarah Montague said. ‘Now you’re they and them.’ On Twitter, Jay Bernard told off The Bookseller, for having ‘misgendered me. The press release says “they”, as does my profile. Why do you use “he”?’ The Bookseller changed its copy.

With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon product: the Echo Dot. I shan’t launch a billion-dollar lawsuit to retake control of my name. It’s more likely that Amazon would send the men in the horsehair wigs after me, though I declare that I, or my parents, got there first with Dot. I’m surprised, though, that Dot is regarded as a cheering name for a tech gadget 17 or 18 years after the dotcom bubble went pop. Companies that failed then were called, by way of a little joke, dot-bombs. But it was strange in the first place to give the name dot to the point before com (a ‘top-level domain’). The Oxford English Dictionary is vague about the history of dot meaning ‘full stop’.

A 72-year-old Australian called Stelarc, the BBC reported, has an ear growing from one arm. He hopes to connect a microphone to it so that people can hear on the internet the sounds it picks up. Mr Stelarc is a body-hacker. They tend to have names like Stelarc. Hacker itself was first used as a surname, but not for a body-hacker or a computer-hacker. Adam le Hacker’s name was recorded in 1224. He was probably either a hedger or a maker of hacks; tools for chopping. I had assumed without thinking about it that life hacks and computer hackers shared a verbal origin with journalistic hacks like myself. It is not so.

In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College School, after 32 years’ service, for discussing matters avoided by other masters when they appeared in Greek and Latin passages, ‘in direct opposition to the feeling of the age’. No improper acts had occurred. Cockayne was a clergyman and a pioneer philologist whose pupils included the great W.W. Skeat and Henry Sweet. His father’s name was Cockin. Perhaps he had changed the spelling to avoid offending the ‘feeling of the age’. The word cocaine was not invented until 1874. But the Land of Cockayne was a medieval fantasy world of pleasure.

I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger on examples in his oeuvre. In any case, I wrongly presumed that trahison des clercs dated from the Middle Ages, when clerks in orders were the learned ones, like Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, responsible for faithfulness to the knowledge they had. The old proverb went: Les bons livres font les bons clercs — ‘Good books make good scholars.’ But I now discover that the phrase goes back no further than 1927, when Julien Benda used it as the title of a book, translated into English as The Great Betrayal a year later by Richard Aldington, who turned more than 30 books into English in the 1920s, years before he got his teeth into T.E. Lawrence.

In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Bertie is moved to reward his inestimable valet for solving the unsolvable. Before requesting the sacrifice of the Alpine hat that Bertie had recently been sporting, ‘he coughed that sheep-like cough of his’. And there it was in the Foreign Secretary’s speech last week. EU integration deepened, he said, ‘in spite of sheeplike coughs of protest from the UK’. I enjoyed the social side of squeezing myself into a chair beside my husband for Boris Johnson’s historic peroration, within sight of the strangely scaffolded tower of Big Ben. I waved to Miriam Gross and swapped a cheery word with Lord Trimble in the lift.

My heart leapt up on Newport station, an unusual place for that to happen, when I heard a recorded announcement: ‘Wedi sylwi. Wedi sôn. Wedi setlo.’ It was a pleasure to hear it in an ancient language after so often having been annoyed by the English equivalent from the British Transport Police: ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ To make matters worse, one of the accompanying posters, the Jewish Chronicle reported, showed ‘a suspicious-looking man with dark hair, long beard and a hooked nose’. Even when the Nazi reminders had been sorted out, the word sorted remained unpopular. It is a verb used by threatening figures in EastEnders: ‘Sort it.’ It belongs to the same world as ‘Shut it’.

A range of book reviewers’ clichés was held up to mockery 60 years ago, in a letter by Jocelyn Brooke to The Spectator. Brooke (1908-66) was a strange man who thought he had found his vocation in the venereal disease branch of the Royal Army Medical Corps until he burst into authorship, publishing two books a year from 1949 to 1958. One reviewers’ cliché he singled out was the use of the adjective jejune. Today it survives as a shy visitor to the journalistic bird table, of uncertain identity. In other words, many who use it don’t know what it means. In the 1950s, jejune was generally used to mean ‘thin’ or ‘unsatisfying’ in some way.

Grooming is a horrible phenomenon of modern life when it happens to abused children. Yet a magazine such as GQ can announce the ‘Eight best grooming products in the world this week’. The GQ grooming is not of children, nor yet of horses, but of men at their own hands. Identical words can thrive in silos with quite different meanings. A groom was originally a boy, it seems, though the word popped up from nowhere in the 13th century. Some think it related to the Old French gromet, which gave us the English grummet or gromet, ‘ship’s boy’. In French, in the form gourmet, it came to mean ‘wine-merchant’s assistant’, and was borrowed by English again in the 19th century to mean ‘connoisseur of eating’.