Mind your language

No, hang on, don’t turn to Dear Mary yet. This is not as dull as it sounds. It’s just that I was mystified by not having heard of the term mechanistic insight when, to my husband, it was a common as an August blackberry on a Sussex hedgerow. ‘Look,’ he said, shaking some printouts from medical journals. ‘Mechanistic insights are two a penny.’ At first I thought it was simply a silly scientistic way of saying ‘How it works’. For example, one paper had the title: ‘Mechanistic insight into how multidrug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii response regulator AdeR recognises an intercistronic region.’ There is no need to know what any of this is about (except Acinetobacter baumannii is a bacterium that does nasty things in hospitals).

Haworth is in a constant simmer of Brontë anniversary fever. It is looking forward to Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday next year. (This year is poor old Branwell’s.) I can’t think of a book title more widely mispronounced than Wuthering Heights. Soft, effete southerners pronounce it with a short u. But the wuthering in the title is a good Yorkshire word and its first vowel must be pronounced like the vowel in good. Yet if you look up wuthering in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find it under whither, the main English form deriving from the Old English hwitha.

‘Remember what the fellow said — it’s not a bally bit of use every prospect pleasing if man is vile,’ Bertie Wooster remarked. (In this case, the man was Aunt Agatha’s second husband.) Now Bertram was quite widely, if not exactly, versed in the gems of English literature, and older readers will, like Wodehouse’s, recognise the most quotable line from Bishop Heber’s celebrated hymn, ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’. Language is not only vocabulary and syntax, but also shared references. Wodehouse’s joke works only if we share Bertie’s acquaintance with Heber’s lines. Heber had written them barely a century earlier, in a few minutes one night in 1819, as a hymn for his parson father to use the next morning.

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported the architectural listing of the Isle of Dogs storm water pumping station. ‘I’d been looking for that,’ I said patiently (I thought). ‘The listing is not the point.’ A reader had sent the paper to me because of the strange language used by John Outram, the architect of the Grade II* building, put up between 1986 and 1988: ‘Decoration is the origin and essence of architecture. It can mediate, in the theatre of a built room or a big city, the epiphany of a meaning. I aimed to invent that “meaning” and confirm those epiphanic techniques.

The Foreword didn’t bode well. This was on the first page of The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. It was a ‘Foreword by Mathew’ as though he were some promising infant. In the second sentence he gave thanks ‘for the support and the respect for my independence which has been shown by her [Theresa May’s] team’. Two things — support and respect — should have a plural verb: have. As for support, we would hear it more than 100 further times. Support came thick and fast, more than once per page. Sometimes it meant ‘agree with’: ‘We support the basic principle of a more dynamic, responsive welfare system.

‘Are they all gay too?’ asked my husband, waving the Sunday Telegraph with its headline ‘Pride of Lions’. He had been delayed ​ in traffic in the sun during the Pride in London rally the day before and was still showing signs of confusion. The headline was referring, through a play on words, to the British and Irish Lions’ unexpected draw against the All Blacks. But I was then surprised to discover that pride for a group of lions is ​the resurrection, accomplished in the late 19th century, of a medieval term (deriving from lions as symbols of the sin of pride). It disappeared from English for 400 years, after being listed in the Book of St Albans, a sort of sporting gentlemen’s handbook printed in 1486.

The most tired cliché in English, suggests ​​Orin Hargraves, the American philologist, is at the end of the day. I’ve just read a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his book on ​​clichés, It’s Been Said Before, published not this year, or in 2016, or 2015, but in 2014. This seems an admirable attitude to noticing books. Why not leave a book a generation? Let time separate wheat from chaff, and save the effort of threshing and winnowing. Mr Hargraves m​ay well frighten readers into guiltily examining their worn, off-the-peg language, but he sees the glory of cliché. It provides ‘a stock of dependable formulas for conveying the ordinary’, which sounds as poetic as Homer.

‘Ha, ha!’ said my husband, waving the Spectator letters page in the air. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ He was overcome by the news that I had mistakenly said MCC stood for Middlesex Cricket Club instead of Marylebone Cricket Club. I did not point out that he had read the column before it was sent in and said nothing at the time. Instead I began to shell some peas at the kitchen table, always a soothing occupation. No tear rolled down the side of my nose. Before I relate my secret consolation, I’d like to mention the chant ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ that has become so popular of late. It derives, via football chants, from a riff dominating ‘Seven Nation Army’ by the White Stripes (2003).

Laura Kuenssberg was right. Even my husband agreed, and he often throws soiled beermats from an unknown source (which he uses to stop his whisky glass making rings on the furniture) at her — at least, when she is on television. She had just used the word narrative and then felt obliged to say ‘if you want to use that terrible phrase’. I don’t, but a lot of people do. I’m afraid the word has escaped from the jungle of structuralism, post-structuralism and Marxist theory. It is one of those notions that are often employed, in France particularly, as an alternative to cobblestones in the class struggle.

Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip in Great Expectations, while noting how coarse his hands were. Words like the and of are also useful shibboleths to show someone doesn’t belong to our club. ‘No denim’ says the advice for entry to today’s Queen’s Birthday Parade, on pain of entry being refused. It is the occasion of Trooping the Colour. Of course my husband, especially, and I too call it, Trooping the Colour, never interpolating the fatal of. The ceremony is said to go back to Marlborough, but one of the earliest references cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1816, calls it the trooping of the colours.

In My Fair Lady, which came out as a film in 1964, 50 years after Shaw’s Pygmalion, they decided to update Eliza’s exclamation of ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi’, which, on the first night in 1914, had ‘brought the house down’ on the lips of Mrs Patrick Campbell, according to the Daily Telegraph review. So at Ascot, Eliza in the film shouts at her favoured horse: ‘Move yer bloomin’ arse.’ In the Pygmalion version, half the joke is saying bloody in a duchess’s accent, but Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza falls out of her trained accent in excitement and shouts in Cockney.

When Dickens wanted to buy a house in 1837, he wrote to Richard Bentley, who had started the magazine in which Oliver Twist was to be serialised, saying he had mentioned his name ‘among those of other references, to testify to my being “sober and honest”.’ Some people seem to think it was this kind of reference that was meant by the remarkable president of Magdalen College, Martin Routh, who stayed in office until his death aged 99 in 1854, shortly before which, on being asked what advice he would give to a young don, said: ‘You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!’ But he didn’t mean the kind given by a maid — or Dickens — but the references given in footnotes of learned books.

Susie Dent has been trying to make us love Americanisms on Radio 4. Now Miss Dent knows far more about language than she has had much chance to express during her 25 years in Dictionary Corner on Countdown. She is quite aware that there is no such thing as an Americanism tout court (or perhaps one should say ‘an Americanism period’). It is true that British speakers of English are annoyed by hearing their compatriots use an American word for something already covered by a perfectly good British word. A Briton would have to be cracked to use hood for bonnet; sidewalk for pavement; mad for angry; diaper for nappy. But American words for American things are welcome: big business (1905); jazz (1909); commercials (on the radio or television, 1935).

‘It’s like Pin number,’ said my husband, drifting into lucidity. So it is, in a way. The construction under discussion was one-year anniversary. Just as Pin embraces personal identification number (making the addition of number pleonastic), so the concept of a year is plain in anniversary, rendering the cobbling on of year redundant. I am sorry to say there is bad news for all of us who think one-year anniversary and its family repugnant. The construction is so rampant and widespread that we are stuck with it. It’s worse than ground elder. No one can dig up all the language and remove the virulent white roots that spread the usage. We’re lumbered with this new hybrid. It is everywhere in the newspapers.

I laughed, in a sympathetic way I hope, when I read a letter in the Daily Telegraph pointing out that Steve Hewlett, the media commentator who died this year, had admitted ruefully that when he had heard that his cancer was progressive he had thought for a moment this was a good thing. The progressive alliance is this election’s equivalent to the old ‘broad left’, which once inserted foaming revolutionaries into respectable politics. I complained about this label progressive before the 2015 election. Progressive politicians tend to favour progressive taxation, even though the term is merely technical, indicating that the higher the sum taxed (above £80,000 income, say), the greater the rate of tax on it.

Ralph Bathurst was accused shortly after his death in 1704 of being ‘suspected of Hypocrisy and of mean Complyance’. I am not quite sure what particular hypocrisy was meant, but the accuser was Thomas Hearne, a cranky but principled antiquary in the mould of Anthony Wood. Hearne resented not being able to accept appointments such as librarian of the Bodleian because he would not take the oath to King William after he took the throne in 1689.

‘What are you laughing at?’ asked my husband in an accusing tone on Monday morning last week as he unloaded supermarket bottles from a carrier bag into the drinks cabinet near his armchair. The answer was, to my surprise, Woman’s Hour, on which Jane Garvey had entertainingly been discussing names – ‘first names’, mostly, which we used to call Christian names, just as we used to talk of Red Indians. No longer. Jane Garvey doesn’t, it transpired, much care for Jane, which is popularly associated with plain.

One can push many things — a pen, one’s luck or (up) daisies. But the MP Dominic Raab told the Daily Telegraph last week that Theresa May and Boris Johnson ‘are demonstrating courage in pushing the diplomatic envelope’. Since the most famous envelope recently enclosed Mrs May’s letter to Donald Tusk, this figure of speech might have obscured rather than illuminated his meaning. I don’t mean to write about pushing the envelope, on which I’ve remarked before. The metaphor is from aeronautics, where it refers to parameters (often confused with perimeters) or limits. The late Gerald Kaufman complained of this Eurojargon 37 years ago, explaining in a book that ‘an envelope is a limit within which budgetary dispositions can be juggled’.

‘It has become something of a King Charles’ head, or should that be a King Charles’s head?’ said my husband, laughing, as though he had made a joke. By ‘it’ he meant the apostrophe, which forces its way into any discussion of grammar, just as the head of the King and Martyr forced itself into the memorandum that Mr Dick, the amiable lunatic, was attempting to write to the Lord Chancellor in David Copperfield (1850). Looking through the book, I found the exact phrase once, when Mr Dick mentions to David that ‘the mistake was made of putting some of the trouble out of King Charles’s head into my head’.

Everybody’s saying it, even though the latest research declares that only 6 per cent of the population is given to the habit. I mean saying an historic. Sir John Major, though a Knight of the Garter, is proud of his origins in Brixton and Worcester Park, but started the present vogue at Chatham House in February by saying in a speech that the referendum vote to leave the EU was ‘an historic mistake’. On 29 March, when Donald Tusk received Theresa May’s letter triggering, not Article 50 (which itself was the trigger), but the process of leaving, the Prime Minister said: ‘This is an historic moment from which there is no turning back.