Mind your language

‘Like eating in the street,’ said my husband. Astonishing! He’d said something not only coherent in itself but also connected to a remark I’d been addressing to him. I had just said that at school I had been taught that the use of the exclamation mark was vulgar or rude. Observant readers will have noted that I have already used one exclamation mark in this column. My defence is that I exclaimed. I agree that exclamation alone does not constitute conversation. On Twitter, a new and annoying cliché, often appended to a photograph, is the bare exclamation: ‘Wow! Just wow!’ It usually belongs to the genre ‘clickbait’, disappointing the reader once it is clicked on and studied.

The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever seen’. It sounds lovely, especially if the Underground is cheap too. Mr Khan’s are a very 21st-century triad of virtues, though honest might sound old-fashioned. It would once have appeared on a housemaid’s reference: ‘Diligent, sober and honest’, i.e. not lazy, drunken and thieving. We now grow sceptical of politicians who begin replies by saying ‘To be honest’ (as if this was a rare departure). Honesty once measured outward respectability, as reflected in a Tudor description of Eton as ‘an honest Colege of sad Priestes, with a greate nombre of children’.

Sir John Harington told a story in 1596 about a lady at court asking her gentlewoman to inquire which Mr Wingfield was asking to see her. On being told that it was Mr Jaques Wingfield, the gentlewoman blushed and came back with the genteel answer that it was Mr Privie Wingfield. The story depended on Jaques being pronounced in those days like jakes, meaning ‘lavatory’ or ‘privy’. Harington took the joke to extremes, writing a whole book on lavatories called the Metamorphosis of Ajax, a punning title. Shakespeare might have been making the same joke as Harington’s when, in As You Like It, he had Touchstone referring in front of Audrey to Jaques as ‘Master What-ye-call-it’.

The language that President Barack Obama used was evidence of skulduggery, Nigel Farage declared. ‘The UK is gonna be in the back of the queue’ if it leaves the European Union, Mr Obama said, standing next to David Cameron in front of a gilt and stencilled Victorian wall in the Foreign Office. There! Americans say stand in line, Mr Farage suggested, so Mr Obama must be delivering words fed to him by the snake Cameron. Some reports had Mr Obama saying at the back of the queue, unconsciously adjusting his words to the British English idiom, rather than in the back of it, as though it were an estate car (station wagon). When did the British learn to queue?

‘Of course,’ said my husband in his worst smirky way, as though waiting for an appreciative chuckle, ‘as soon as she found out he was a politician, she broke off the affair.’ That was not the only unoriginal remark about poor old John Whittingdale, who last week admitted to going out with a woman for six months without realising that she was a prostitute. Hearing about the thing on Sky News, I thought its use of sex worker for the woman was an eccentric example of political euphemism. But then I found the BBC using sex worker, and even reputable newspapers. The Times too called her a sex worker. In one report, the BBC referred to ‘a relationship that John Whittingdale had with a woman who turned out to be an escort’.

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore told us last weekend. As a bonus in this Trollopean tale we learnt that, by Church of England canon law, ‘men born illegitimately were for centuries barred from becoming archbishops’, or indeed bishops.

‘Still I’m called Buttercup —poor little Buttercup,’ sang my husband in an inappropriate and displeasing baritone. Not wishing to encourage him, I simply said: ‘Darling, it’s butterbump.’ A furniture company called Loaf has been advertising ‘butterbump sofas’, supposedly named for their bringing out customers in a cross between goosebumps and butterflies. It doesn’t sound a very agreeable sensation. The sofas in question have buttons deeply indenting the upholstery in a quincunx pattern. I suspect the sofa--marketing department hopes to charm shoppers with the word butterbump, just as some people take pleasure in serendipity and hagrid. But butterbump is no neologism. It exists as an old name for a bittern.

On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The cocks, it said, were annoying people with their crowing. The news at noon called them not roosters and cocks, but cockerels and fowls. I wrote here in 2005 about the advent of the ‘Year of the Cockerel’ and suggested that cock would soon be unusable because it put everyone in mind of a rude word for penis. Things have got worse since then. Mealy-mouthed folk who say cockerel simply ignore its meaning, which is ‘a young cock’. It’s like calling all cats kittens. Oddly enough, the Oxford English Dictionary says that cockerel is ‘archaic or dialect’.

‘Special status?’ said my husband. ‘You mean like executioners, butchers and undertakers in Japan?’ I hadn’t suggested that, but had been thinking aloud about the phrase which, according to David Cameron, now describes Britain’s position in Europe: special status. My husband once went to Japan, which, he thinks, makes him an expert. He learnt about the ancient monkey performances given by people called Burakumin, a sort of untouchable. Apart from performing with monkeys, which was banned in the 20th century, they have been associated with unclean trades such as those he mentioned. Special, as I have remarked before, is slippery. The special relationship between Britain and America has at times been highly valued.

My husband, not surprisingly, finds it extremely annoying. It, in this instance, is the use by women of creaky voice. If you don’t recognise the trend immediately imagine a youngish woman (not me) finishing a sentence with the phrase ‘really shiny leather’ and creaking, like a door, as she says the vowels. The trait is also known as vocal fry, as if it were produced by a chip-fryer. It is a feminine characteristic by a proportion of two to one. Reese Witherspoon was heard doing it to the phrase ‘truly heinous angora sweater’ in the film Legally Blonde as long ago as 2001. Recently I’ve heard Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour doing it. Why do we women do it? If it’s a fashion, is it smart or downmarket?

My husband pointed with his stick, which he carries not to steady himself but to cudgel pedestrians out of his way, and said: ‘What am I supposed to do about that?’ His question was in response to a notice posted up on the wall by a platform at Vauxhall Underground station: ‘Due to our works. Beware of noise. Beware of smell.’ It is part of the current conflation of the meanings of be aware and beware. The confusion runs both ways. That Underground notice was intended to make passengers aware that there would be noise and smell (of burning perhaps), so that they would not flee in alarm. A flight response would have been the appropriate one if instead the notice had said: ‘Beware, Minotaur loose.

Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble Mont Blanc. After a few floors, it was finished, and the top of the façade projected like the peak of a baseball cap. I felt cheated. Peak is a vogue word that itself has gone through peak usage. Earlier this month, Steve Howard, Ikea’s chief sustainability officer (yes, the chief one), said in a seminar: ‘In the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff, peak home furnishings.’ It was an engaging observation, but poor Mr Howard was mocked as though he were Gerald Ratner.