Mind your language

My husband heard me in the kitchen exclaim: ‘What would I do without you?’ He curiously imagined I was referring to him. But it was of you, dear readers, that I spoke, and in particular Elizabeth Maynard from Oxford, who wrote explaining the use of the Italian word basta by Danes. Well, how was I to know? I’d supposed that Queen Alexandra, who used the word in 1901 (Mind your language, 24 May), had picked it up from the Italian opera. Not at all, Mrs Maynard tells me, since her own Danish mother’s elder sister — born in 1893 — used it too. She would rap the table, to end arguments among the youngsters, and say sternly: ‘Og dermed basta’ (‘And with that basta’). Professor M.J.

My chickens do not usually come home to roost so rapidly. Only a fortnight ago I wrote that ‘some people use basta in English, but to my ears it sounds like saying ciao — inauthentic’. Then I went back to reading Jane Ridley’s Bertie, the life of Edward VII (and how much I enjoyed it too). What should I find on page 357? I found Queen Alexandra writing about what she would wear at the coronation in 1901. ‘I know better than all the milliners and antiquaries,’ she wrote. ‘I shall wear exactly what I like, and so shall all my ladies — Basta!’ I can hardly accuse a queen of England of speaking the King’s English inauthentically. But I wonder where she picked up basta.

‘Take a trip to Marylebone station,’ chanted my husband. ‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.’ I had been to the station to take the rather nice Chiltern Railways train to Stratford-upon-Avon. En route I had developed doubts, not about my destination, but about the pronunciation of Marylebone. I’ve always said marry-bun, with the vowel of bun indeterminate. But a taxi driver and a ticket collector had said marly-bun. So, back at home, I turned to How to Pronounce It by Alan S.C. Ross, the man who invented U and non-U, but a proper linguistician for all that, and a man guaranteed to take into account traditional tendencies. He counsels against introducing an ‘l’ into Marylebone. Good.

Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler, according to Sam Leith, writing in the books pages on 19 April. Shouty is not a word Churchill would have used in exactly this sense, for which no example is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 2001. It falls in the category of –y suffixes that connote condemnation, ridicule, or contempt, like catty, churchy or beery. There are plenty of entries for a rather different sense, ‘like a shout’, as Henry Coward noted in his Choral Technique and Interpretation (1914) of untrained voices that may be ‘shouty, throaty, cavernous, hooty, scoopy, and nondescript’.

Dear old Ian Hislop was pottering around North Petherton, Somerset, on television, to talk about the Alfred Jewel, found nearby (where the king burnt the cakes) in 1693 by a labourer digging for peat. Since then, learned men have made foolish pronouncements on the jewel — as in a game of charades when the guesser says ‘pot’ and ‘a toe’, but can’t get potato. The ninth-century Alfred Jewel, a favourite exhibit in the Ashmolean, is a tear-shaped piece of rock crystal, two and half inches long, covering an enamel figure holding two scepters. Round the edge, gold letters spell out: Aelfred mec heht gewyrcan — ‘Alfred had me made’. Alfred the Great had actually mentioned the thing as an aestel, or astel as we’d spell it now.

In the search for the remains of flight MH370, a pulse signal was detected beneath the ocean. The BBC called it a ‘ping’, in inverted commas on its website and with the spoken equivalent in broadcasts, as if ping were too demotic to be used with due respect. Ping seems joky only because its origin is imitative. In naval slang, the operator of an Asdic echo-sounder in the second world war was known as a ping-man or ping-jockey (by analogy with disc-jockey, first heard in 1941). Asdic is an acronym coined in 1939 from ‘Allied submarine detection investigation committee’.

What kind of scientists do school inspectors not need to be? ‘Inspectors don’t need to be rocket scientists.’ For what must we make sure that the school inspection regime is fit? ‘We make sure that the school inspection regime is fit for purpose.’ In what manner do we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely.’ Apart from freely, is there another manner in which we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely and fairly.

‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly know anything if we are deprived of the help of Mr Google and his friends. Last week I was standing outside St Fin Barre’s cathedral (in Cork) and someone was pointing out the angel on the central gable of the west facade, which the architect William Burges had wanted to be a figure of Christ in Judgment, until the good Protestants of the city vetoed it. The angel stands in a pointed oval frame of stone.

My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he has a Nelson Mandela Memorial Freedom Pass, he seldom chooses to join us Morlocks down below. ‘Is this the work of a Chinaman?’ he asked, nodding towards a poster. ‘You mustn’t say “Chinaman”, dear,’ I said firmly. The poster showed people with vertical slits for eyes and no noses. They stood hunched in an Underground carriage, dressed in T-shirts, as if in a scene from some dystopian film like Idiocracy. Above the image, words were arranged in lines: ‘We really don’t mean to chide / But try to move along inside, / So fellow travellers won’t have to face / An invasion of their personal space.

They were talking on the wireless about Brazilians in the flooded areas, or so I thought. Once the kettle had finished boiling, it turned out that they wanted resilience in new houses in floody places. That meant fitting electrical sockets above waist height and not using plasterboard downstairs — things they have been doing in Venice for years. Schoolchildren should have resilience too, according to the MP Tristram Hunt, who, I always have to remind myself, sits on the Labour benches. ‘The teaching of resilience and self-control and character is more and more important,’ he said a couple of weeks ago. You can’t have too much of it these days.

Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question that Charles Moore raised last week about the name of the country if Scotland leaves. My husband, naturally, is all for calling it England. Even the Oxford English Dictionary defines England as ‘The inhabitants of England (sometimes also Britain) regarded collectively.’ The Welsh would certainly be aggrieved, and the Northern Irish up in arms. But we can’t include everyone in the national name. Even now, some of the Cornish are cutting up rough.

I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was using the whining intonation that some seem to think the proper voice in which to recite verse. So I was glad that Bernard O’Donoghue came on, with an accent formed by a childhood in Co. Cork. His poem ‘Gerund’ was about an only child who ‘grew up in a county council cottage by the roadside’ but was allowed to go on to secondary education (as many in Ireland then did not) because of his intelligence. At school, the poem says: ‘When Joe Garvey asked/ “What part of speech is desperandum?”,/ trembling, he volunteered “a gerund”,/ and then translated “what must be despaired of”./ How did he know?

A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen? Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS of a biography of Jack London, commenting on an example of detail in The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘a deceptively lumpen old man who gently tucks a rogue strand of hair behind his wife’s ear’. The English word lumpen derives from Karl Marx’s use of Lumpenproletariat. He first used it in 1850 of the ‘down and outs’ who make no contribution to the workers’ cause.