Mind your language

In Polite Conversation, Jonathan Swift presents dialogues made up of clichés, banalities and catchphrases. When Miss Notable makes a remark seen as witty, Mr Neverout exclaims: ‘Why, Miss, you shine this Morning like a shitten Barn-Door.’ Perhaps we might not admit such an adjective, even in this archaic form, to polite company — except that among the chattering classes no word is entirely ostracised. In 2001, Barbara Amiel, Lady Black of Crossharbour, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘the ambassador of a major EU country politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel”.

Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as bad as any. I saw two books about English in the 18th century reviewed in the TLS and thought I might buy them, until I read quotations from them that the reviewer had chosen, not by way of mockery, but to explain their arguments. In Multilingual Subjects, Daniel DeWispelare argues that ‘anglophone translation theorists gravitated towards one specific set of metaphors in order to advocate for protocols of linguistic inclusion and exclusion that would improve anglophone literary aesthetics within the space of global linguistic multiplicity’.

Writing about Meghan Markle and the Duchess of Cambridge in the Sunday Times, India Knight wrote: ‘I can’t help but be reminded of the relationship between Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sarah, Duchess of York.’ Reporting on the Ashes for the Guardian, Geoff Lemon wrote: ‘I still can’t help but think that England are going to completely implode within the first hour.’ Reviewing A Christmas Carol in the Times, Dominic Maxwell wrote: ‘You can’t help but grin as a new Scrooge springs to life.’ To me this seems wrong. When a little string of syntactic instructions becomes opaque it can be almost universally misused. You may say I can’t love you or the opposite: I can’t help loving you.

A book that changed my way of looking at the world was The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. It showed how playground rhymes and games were handed down to new generations without direct involvement of grown-ups. Iona Opie, one half with her husband, Peter, of the team that brought out the book in 1959, died this year, aged 94. In their research, they built up the world’s biggest private collection of children’s books, now in the Bodleian Library. I remember the thrill of finding duplicates, with their bookplate, in the Charing Cross Road 30 years ago. Children, with their independent culture, can parody things from the adult world.

‘You must have Tired Old Woman Syndrome,’ said my husband as I fell back into an armchair with a sigh after a morning clearing out the kitchen cabinets. It had to be done. He of course had just been sitting in the drawing-room waiting for a plausibly respectable hour to have a drink. His abuse was not utterly random, for we had been discussing Tired Mountain Syndrome. It is being blamed for small earthquakes near Mount Mantap in North Korea, where they have been testing nuclear weapons underground. The rocks become many times more permeable along lines of weakness. The name Tired Mountain Syndrome was popularised by a paper in 2001 by Vitaly V. Adushkin and William Leith on Soviet underground nuclear explosions.

In Amsterdam the courts have given leave to ban the bierfiets. Fiets is the Dutch for ‘bike’. (The plural is fietsen.) A bierfiets is a float on which a dozen people sit on high seats facing each other across a narrow bar running fore and aft, enjoying their beer and pedalling away to power the vehicle. Someone sits at the front to steer and brake. Some suggest that bierfiets has entered the English language as the name of this newish thing. I’m not sure it really has, any more than many another name in a foreign language for foreign things (churros or currywürste). If the bierfiets itself survives it is as likey to be called a beer-bike in English.

‘It’s up there on the shelf you can’t reach,’ said my husband in an unhelpfully helpful tone. The ‘it’ was a copy of The King’s English, Kingsley Amis’s book on usage. I quoted it the other week on the deployment of the. On the same page is a Kingsleyish word I wanted to follow up — pissily. ‘Until quite recently,’ Amis wrote, ‘it looked as if you could write of Greene’s Confidential Agent and Burgess’s Clockwork Orange and Kafka’s Castle, but indexers unnecessarily and pissily put a stop to that by throwing The and A and so on back in front of the main body of the title.’ Pissily figures nowhere in the Oxford English Dictionary. That is not out of prissiness.

The inventor of the verse form known as the clerihew, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, had a way with this seemingly simple vehicle. Take this example: ‘Sir Christopher Wren / Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men. / If anybody calls / Say I am designing St Paul’s.’ My interest just now is with call. Bentley meant ‘call at a house’. The default meaning now, I think, is ‘to telephone’, a usage that has largely displaced ring or phone. But call is also very productive of phrasal verbs: call off, call for, call in, call on, call upon or call out.

‘When is physical contact “unacceptable”?’ asked Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph. He may well ask. Sir Michael Fallon said after his resignation that some things were acceptable ten or 15 years ago that weren’t today. But the panel of Any Questions? last week were invited to say whether inappropriate behaviour wasn’t always unacceptable. It’s not just Westminster. Marseille football fans’ subjection of Patrice Evra to ‘hateful attacks’ was ‘unacceptable behaviour’, the club said, but his response in aiming a kick at a fan’s head was ‘inappropriate’.

John Farquhar of Salisbury writes to say he is irritated. He is not just irritated, he has long been long irritated, which is either a virtue or a vice, depending on the irritant. In his case, the grain of sand in the oyster is the pronunciation ‘by those in the medical fraternity’ of medicine as ‘medcin’. He’d like to know whether this is an affectation — French perhaps — or whether it has some justification. Mr Farquhar’s name may not be irrelevant here. It’s a good Scottish name, pronounced ‘farkar’, deriving from Celtic elements meaning ‘man’ and ‘dear’. Now in Scotland, even 100 years ago, the predominant pronunciation of medicine was as three syllables.

Veronica, who looks at Twitter, told me of an exchange she thought would interest me, about the use of the. She was right. The is one of my favourite words. The exchange concerned Sam Leith’s splendid new book, Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page. He begins one chapter thus: ‘In his The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Joseph Conrad…’. Should he have written that yoking of ‘his The’? A friend of Veronica’s recommended Kingsley Amis on the subject. In (his) The King’s English, Amis is characteristically forthright. ‘Kafka’s The Castle,’ he writes, ‘is the sort of thing that people never say but make no bones about writing.

Before I forget, I was cheered by the letter from Keith Aitken in last week’s issue noting another sense for tube (Mind your language, 7 October). ‘What are ye on about, ya tube?’ people shout as an insult in western Scotland, he says. He derives the term from the idea of their digestive functions dominating their lives, like tube-worms: just one big alimentary canal. I fear, though, that the origin lies in another bodily part. As Joyce wrote in Ulysses: ‘I suppose the people gave him that nickname [Mr de Kock] going about with his tube from one woman to another.’ Yes, tube in this slang sense means nothing other than ‘cock’, ‘prick’ or ‘wiener’.

‘Kiss me mucho,’ sang my husband with a revolting leer, ‘and we’ll soar. And we’ll dance the dance of love forevermore.’ I poured myself a whisky in a vain attempt to catch up, and returned to my task. Not so much was the subject of my researches, and I soon wondered why it had only recently begun to annoy me. It qualifies as a catchphrase, I think, though some dictionaries of slang list it too. Much has been very productive of slang. Ben Jonson had characters exclaiming ‘Much!’ and meaning ‘not much’, 400 years ago. Contrariwise, since the second world war, Not much! has been used to contradict a statement such as ‘I seldom drink’.

When George Eliot wrote ‘The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative,’ she was not making an observant remark about commuting on the Underground. She was developing a thought she’d had of travellers of the future being ‘shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle’. She was writing in 1861, and the world’s first Underground, the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863. Two years before her musings (in her introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical), the London Pneumatic Despatch Company was founded to send packages and mailbags from Holborn to Gresham Street. The Central London Railway, from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush opened in 1900.

In 1872, the 27-stone figure of the Tichborne Claimant was insisting he was Sir Roger Tichborne Bt, an heir thought lost at sea as a slim young man. To raise funds he undertook a series of public meetings, and at one in the East End, the cry ‘Three groans for the Attorney-General’ was repeated every five minutes. Dickens describes the classic 19th-century groan in The Pickwick Papers (1836) at the Eatanswill election hustings. When Horatio Fitzkin is proposed, ‘the Fizkinites applauded, and the Slumkeyites groaned, so long, and so loudly, that both he and the seconder might have sung comic songs in lieu of speaking, without anybody’s being a bit the wiser’.

My husband complains that the disposition of teenagers in London is one of mocking hostility. I seem to suffer less from such encounters, and console him by saying it was ever thus. In the 1790s ostlers’ boys would shout ‘Quoz!’ to disconcert an uncertain-looking passer-by. It was a word of doubtful meaning, perhaps connected with quiz. A generation later, young loafers would call out ‘Oh, what a shocking bad hat!’ — enough to instil doubt in the most carefully dressed shopman or clerk. Neither men nor women were seen out in public without a hat.

Piles of black plastic rubbish sacks lie in the streets of Birmingham because, since the end of June, the dustmen have been on strike. That is not quite what the BBC tells us. On its website the corporation says that ‘refuse workers have resumed strike action’. I complained here a year ago that dustcarts were disappearing in favour of bin lorries, and now the very dustmen are returning to the dust — dust and ashes. ‘Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,’ the priest says, ‘Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return,’ as he marks a cross of ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. The BBC prefers sex workers to prostitutes and refuse workers to dustmen.

I had always thought that to go ballistic was the same as to go nuclear, metaphorically. But the ballistic figure of speech had a rather different origin. I was glad to learn this before Mr Kim sends the balloon up. I did know, despite being a girl without the advantage of a proper classical education like the males in my family, that the Greek for ‘throw’ is ballein. Ballistic missiles take their name from a Latin derivative, the Roman ballista, an engine like a giant crossbow stretched with cords and thongs, and used to propel heavy bolts and other missiles.

It’s like whipping cream. All of a sudden it goes stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without it falling out. In the same way, a common mistake in speech solidifies and becomes firmly attached to the language. I don’t think bacteria has quite been whipped into a singular shape yet, even though one is always reading thing like ‘bacteria’s ability to evolve its way around antibiotics’. Such mistakes often occur in newspapers, where rush preserves erroneous forms that in oral speech bubble up and burst, to be lost to any record. A word just on the turn is media. The first example of it found by the Oxford English Dictionary, in the sense of ‘means of communication’, was used, or misused, as a singular entity.

I was puzzled by the caption to a picture in the Times Literary Supplement. The picture showed a model of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The caption said that it had been made in the ‘late 1600s’, but it was clear from other evidence that it dated from the later 17th century. I had supposed that the use of 1600s to mean the whole century was an unlearned usage embraced by people easily confused by being presented with the term 17th century for years beginning with 16, or, on their behalf, by those who talk down to them. In Italy, they manage these things differently, quattrocento referring to the century beginning with 14. In a paper like the TLS I’d expect readers to be able to cope with the 17th century or the quattrocento unaided by explanation.