Mind your language

I’ve been having a lovely time splashing about in the new Fowler. It has been revised by Jeremy Butterfield, an OUP lexicographer. There’s a new usage in it that I want to talk about, but first a word about the title. The title page says Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. In 1996, the previous edition, the third, edited by good old Robert Burchfield, was The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In 1926 H.W. Fowler’s celebrated book had been published as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. We called it Modern English Usage both before and after 1996, and more often Fowler — a metonym and more, as Jeremy Butterfield points out. So why doesn’t it now say Fowler on the cover, not Fowler’s?

Maureen Finucane of Richmond, Surrey, wonders whether there is any branch of public service not infected by Orwellian Newspeak. In a letter to the editor (Spectator, 28 February), she explained that a museum owed her a refund and that after a fortnight she was told on the telephone: ‘The situation is being reviewed by several managers and once it has been approved will be actioned.’ She asks if I might take this up. I’m not sure I have the strength. I can only suggest that in response Mrs Finucane might assert that she has been impacted negatively by this issue and demand that the situation be escalated as a priority.

‘You must promise to be with us for our silver wedding D.V. which will be in four years,’ wrote Queen Victoria in February 1861 to her daughter Vicky in Prussia, where her husband had just become Crown Prince. But D was not V, and dear Albert was dead before the year was out. I think the German connection is relevant here to the use of silver wedding, for mother and daughter would both have been familiar with the notion of a silberhochzeit. Silver wedding had not long been in English usage, although, in the late 18th century, some people aware of German customs used the phrase silver feast. I was thinking of silver weddings because of something odd that I heard on the wireless. Paddy O’Connell referred to a ‘25-year anniversary’.

‘Heart of Oak are our ships, Jolly Tars are our men,’ shouted my husband unconvincingly. He has taken to doing this every time someone on air says robust, and that is pretty often. On this occasion it was someone from the Arts Council rambling on about business plans and governance being robust enough to ensure that organisations are sustainable. Anything else might have been adjudged robust: Mrs Merkel, examination procedures, animal welfare rules, IT systems. It’s an all-purpose word of approval and thus often on the lips of politicians. The overuse of robust robs their speech of all conviction and drives listeners to distraction, even if few are provoked into singing to William Boyce’s stirring tune, like my husband.

‘I hate Jammie Dodgers,’ said my husband staring disdainfully at a biscuit kindly tucked into his coffee saucer at an after-church gathering. I’m glad only I heard. But the fact is that we British generally admire dodgers. Dickens came up with a fine sobriquet when he gave John Dawkins the nickname the Artful Dodger. As in real life, he was often referred to simply as the Artful. Artful of course meant ‘cunning’ or ‘deceitful’ — high praise. Earlier in the story, Mr Bumble had called Oliver Twist ‘artful and designing’, admittedly not in praise. And in The Pickwick Papers, the novel before Oliver Twist, Sam Weller calls a trick played on them by Job Trotter an ‘artful dodge’.

What, asks Christian Major of Bromley, Kent, do I think of ‘this new, I assume American, fad for using the word likely as an adverb’, as in the great Taki’s remark that Alan Turing ‘likely won the war’ (Spectator, Letters, 31 January)? Well, I would most likely not use it in exactly that way, although you’ll have noticed that I have just done so slightly differently. The adverbial usage to which the Kentish Mr Major refers is now more likely to be heard on the lips of Americans and Scots, but it is hardly a fad, since it dates from at least as far back as the 14th century. In the 18th century, English speakers of English were quite happy to say ‘You’re likely in the right.

I don’t know if you tweet — No! Don’t turn over, I’m not going to get all techie. I do not tweet, but my husband does, voluminously. I won’t betray his rather strange handle and avatar. Those are technical terms, but they are not the main point I want to make now. The handle is the username, such as @DotWordsworth. That example is not me, but one of the four Twitter accounts apparently written by Dorothy Wordsworth. The one using my name declares in her online profile ‘My bowels very bad.’ Have I ever written that here? No. The avatar is the little picture of the user that appears at the top of each account and with every tweet. Everyone knows an avatar derives from Hindu mythology.

In the endless game of word association that governs vocabulary, the current favourite as a partner of existential is threat. They make an odd couple. Max Hastings managed to get them into the Daily Mail the other day, writing that ‘although Islamic fanatics can cause us pain and grief, they pose no existential threat as did Hitler’s Germany’. A letter to the Times said that the Charlie terrorists’ ‘wicked ideology is an existential threat to Islam itself’. In those examples, the threat is to our existence or to the existence of Islam. But in this phrase from an article by Irwin Stelzer in the Sunday Times, ‘sincere believers in the existential threat of global warming’, whose existence is threatened?

I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was bred? Prolific is hardly ever used in the literal sense of ‘producing many offspring’. I had thought it was most often employed metaphorically of authors, but then my husband surprised me by saying something both true and relevant: that prolific is most often paired with goalscorer. He’s right. It is used dozens of times a week in the sports pages. ‘Adam Rooney,’ the Times notes, ‘is undoubtedly the most prolific of Aberdeen’s strikers.

‘Not still War and Peace!’ exclaimed my husband on 1 January during the all-day Tolstoy splurge on Radio 4. In reality he was glad to complain, as if it made him superior to the broadcasters. I quietly tuned the radio in the kitchen to long-wave and was able, while peeling the potatoes, to listen, through the atmospherics, to Home Front, the drama serial on Radio 4, set in Folkestone during the first world war. It is not Downton Abbey. One does not listen to spot the anachronisms. But any historical drama is bound to include language impossible to have used at the time. The episode was written by Katie Hims and directed by Jessica Dromgoole but I don’t know if either introduced the word parenting into the script.

Someone on Radio 4 said she had heard about the sexism of Grand Theft Auto on ‘Women’s Hour’. It is called Woman’s Hour, though the other is possible, on the model of Children’s Hour. But I was struck in 2014 by a slide in certainty about singulars and plurals. The three shakiest plurals are data, criteria and bacteria. Data has become not so much a singular noun as an uncountable one, like butter. So speakers can say ‘all the data collected is reliable’. Datum and criterion are almost extinct. A daily paper used a bacteria on its front page to mean a kind of bacterium. This shakiness is made worse by a change in the way that nouns are used attributively, qualifying other nouns.

In his speech on immigration last week, David Cameron said a couple of funny things. I’m not talking about the politics. Heaven forbid. I mean the language. Why did he call the City of London ‘the financial epicentre of the world’? Epicentre means ‘the point over the centre’, and in seismology it is the place on the Earth’s surface above the subterranean seat of an earthquake. So, unless he believes in an army of immigrant Morlocks slaving away beneath the City, I’d imagine Mr Cameron just meant centre. Epicentre sounds classier. Then he spoke of worries about ‘the scale of people coming into the country’. I doubt that he thinks them too tall or too short or badly proportioned.

‘Respect!’ cried my husband, drop-kicking a cushion with a picture of the Queen Mother holding a pint of beer on it (a present from Veronica) across the drawing-room. I might as well be married to Russell Brand and be done with it. His little satire was set off by Ed Miliband’s remarks about Emily Thornberry’s notorious Cross of St George tweet. ‘What is going through my mind is respect,’ the Labour leader said. ‘Respect is the basic rule of politics and I’m afraid her tweet conveyed a sense of disrespect.’ This seems to me deranged. If Mr Miliband knew about life ‘down in the street’ he’d realise that ‘respect’ is the gangland correlative of honour.