Mind your language

On an article in the Times about eating oak moss I saw the headline: ‘I’m lichen it!’ Since I pronounce lichen to rhyme with kitchen, this meant little to me. You may think that I have no business pronouncing lichen in this way. That is the strong opinion of my husband. But to him lichen is Latin (lichen planus, lichen simplex, denoting skin diseases). The Oxford English Dictionary says that the kitchen pronunciation is ‘now rare in educated use’. But by ‘now’ it means 1902. I suspect that readers who would otherwise understand the play on words in the Times headline are given to my ‘uneducated’ version. It is in any case not so simple.

Disease, we hear, will decimate ash trees, as the elms were obliterated, and we will see the spoliation of the landscape. I don’t want to be a schoolma’am about decimate. It has, as R.W. Burchfield pointed out in his edition of Fowler, been used for ‘destroy a large proportion’ for as long as it has meant strictly ‘destroy one in ten’. By chance, Burchfield’s chosen illustration of the disputed meaning was: ‘The forest has largely gone, decimated by a forest industry that is just now assaulting the final remains.’ Ash, by the way, is a suitably ancient word, found in about the year 700 to render the Latin fraxinus.

When I heard on the BBC that an organisation in St Petersburg named after St Basil the Great taught teenagers on probation the art of parkour I didn’t understand what was meant. Parkour is, I learn, a variant of free-running — moving rapidly and freely over or around the obstacles presented by an urban environment by running, jumping and climbing. The word is French, though it doesn’t look it, being a respelling of parcours, ‘course’, here in the sense of ‘obstacle course’. In Romance languages, where k is alien, it has a trendy flavour. Spanish squatters call themselves okupistas instead of ocupistas. Parcours has an amusing history not apparent in current usage.

‘Look at all this bumf,’ said my husband, shaking some ‘guidance’ on how to fill in his tax return and sounding like someone out of Much Binding in the Marsh. I mentioned last week the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, &c (1699), an anonymous work, attributed only to B.E., Gent. The Bodleian Library has republished it in a nice little edition under the title The First English Dictionary of Slang, but you can read it free online. Among its modern-sounding expressions is bumfodder.

The kick-start and the first world war arrived in the same year. Despite talk of a ‘big bazooka’, the former is still currently favoured as the model for stimulating the economy. (A bazooka, by the way, was a second world war anti-tank rocket launcher, the name deriving from a sort of homemade trombone of the 1930s, itself dependent on the bazoo or mouth. In Tennessee in the 1870s, the phrase blowin’ his bazoo meant ‘braggadocchio or gasconade’). The mechanical kick-start got a motorcycle engine going. Yet the metaphor now often sounds as though it meant ‘push-start’, or ‘start a motor-vehicle by sending it downhill’. Kick-start just sounds more dynamic than push-start. Everyone is at it.

‘Old people’, as anyone under 30 calls anyone over 40, apparently suffer from textlexia. The word may be more painful than the condition. The wrong element in dyslexia has been taken to mean something like ‘inability’, and this, Greek in form, has been jammed on to text, which derives from Latin. Let us not be too pious. This is one end of a chain of blunders. The online Urban Dictionary gives an amusing exemplification of textlexia, as from a girl texting her boyfriend: ‘I so sorry 2 txt dump U but if I call U i will cry and start cutting myself again :)’ A little later she sends a correction: ‘I mean :( not :). Stupid textlexia.

My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister. The dilemma matches the two-edged meaning of rhetoric these days. President Obama was said to have got to the White House thanks to his rhetoric, but now his rhetoric is being compared unfavourably with his achievement. Similarly, Iran’s suggestion that Israel should be obliterated is called rhetoric, while Haaretz says: ‘Netanyahu has escalated his rhetoric on Iran.

So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a homogenous group of people all acting for the same reasons.’ There is such a word as homogenous, but it is not the one called for here. Homogenous is a synonym for homogenetic, meaning ‘having a common ancestor’. The riot panel did not intend to discuss whether the rioters had a common ancestry.

I feel flattered to think that Ed Miliband was inspired by my column of 31 March to invent a word for his speech at the Stock Exchange earlier this month. I had written, after Theresa May denounced preloading, that it was ‘easy to tack pre- on to words’. I forgot to advise that some meaning should be predetermined for the word. But to use a word that no one knows the meaning of is quite in the spirit of the radical 17th century. Owen Felltham (1602-68), for example, a man who kept on writing the same book, which he called Resolves, invented, for the edition of 1628, the word disdeify, which is plain enough.

‘It’s just a fudge-a-rama,’ exclaimed Boris Johnson of the government stance on Heathrow. ‘And it’s just an excuse for a delay,’ he added by way of gloss. I was surprised to find that a fudge-a-rama, or Fudgeorama, already existed: Salerno Fudgeorama Fudge Covered Graham Cookies. They are American, or were till production stopped in 2008 on the death of some members of the Salerno family. A Graham cookie is a biscuit invented in 1829 by a New Jersey clergyman, Sylvester Graham, who thought their consumption helped ward off carnal urges. I don’t suppose adding fudge helps. The -rama suffix has been around for longer than you might think. ‘Visited the Cosmorama,’ wrote Ellen Weeton, a Lancashire governess, in 1824.

In 1911, bakers and dustmen were more likely than most to be called Bill, or at least William, according to one of those family genealogy companies, Ancestry.co.uk, which has been rummaging in the census for that year. My impression 101 years later is that Bills are rarer than Williams, Wills or even Willses. Prince William is certainly not a Bill. Not all Bills were of the burgling classes even a century ago. Bill in P.G. Wodehouse’s song (written in 1917 and reused in Showboat) may be an ‘ordinary man’, but the author also used the name for at least two peers of the realm and a millionaire. He seemed oddly fond of the name. In the fairly early school novel Mike (1909), Wodehouse names the school fast bowler Billy Burgess.

‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New Oxford Style Manual to find out what it is, but whether to use capital letters, perhaps. But even so... The odd thing about this mistake in one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’ is that it has languished there since 2005, when it was last revised. You’d think someone would have told them. Perhaps someone did and they lost the message.

That was all right,’ said my husband after listening to Paul Scofield read the whole of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ on Poetry Please. I hope they are not going to axe Poetry Please as part of Radio 4’s improvements. It’s the sort of thing that happens after 33 years of success. We have grown so used to the verbal innovations of Gerard Manley Hopkins that the surely derivative language of Dylan Thomas sounds merely playful. In Under Milk Wood, Thomas nods in one place to two phrases from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Hopkins’s ‘the sea flint-flake, black-backed’ and ‘lush-kept plush-capped sloe’ together help to produce Thomas’s ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.

The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic or Paralympic Games family member visitor’. Since the world is addicted to gangster films, everyone knows that Mafia gangs call themselves ‘the family’. In The Luciano Story (1954), ‘The inside facts on the greatest criminal conspiracy in history and the mastermind behind it – Lucky Luciano’, Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten explained that ‘to Mafiosi, it was never the club or our mob or anything but the family.

Collins dictionaries have invited people to send in a word for inclusion in its English dictionary. ‘If it’s accepted,’ the publishers say, ‘your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded forever.’ Forever (usually written as two words in British English, except in the sense ‘incessantly’) is pitching it a bit strong. Eternity is an over-confident prediction of the internet’s durability, let alone that of Collins dictionaries. It’s all nonsense of course. They just want publicity. The people at Collins do evaluate each word submitted, considering whether it is widespread and ‘how long it is likely to stay around for’.

On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to say: ‘It was given to my husband and I’. Not all adverbs end in –ly. Loud and clear is a well known phrase, made more popular in the 20th century by the wireless response to the enquiry ‘Do you read me?’ But loud as an adverb has a history of more than 1,000 years, fortunately for Keats, who would otherwise have had to write of hearing Chapman ‘speak out loudly and boldy’.

‘I hope you’re not having a go at P.D. James,’ said my husband, looking up from Devices and Desires (1989), which I had just finished. I am certainly not, for I admire and enjoy the author. My article last year about mistakes in Death Comes to Pemberley was intended to raise the question of the responsibility of the publisher of such a successful author. Does Faber not have a duty to correct literal and verbal errors? Thus, in The Lighthouse (2005), we read of a house with ‘a ponderous central tower, so like a battlement that the absence of turrets seemed an architectural aberration’. Obviously, it should be ‘so like a turret that the absence of battlements’.

For a moment I thought it odd that Sam Leith should use the word ballsy of Lillian Hellman in reviewing her biography here a couple of weeks ago. Then I thought, hang on, one never hears the word used of men. Sarah Crompton, writing in the Telegraph recently, noticed something similar, listing other words used only about women: feisty, bubbly, bolshie, hysterical, emotional, irrational and bitchy. In the same paper Ed Cumming added another woman-only adjective in his description of a character in Prisoners’ Wives: ‘blowsy, ballsy Francesca’. Another paper previewed an episode of Silk in which ‘ballsy new QC Martha (Maxine Peake)’ appeared. So it goes on. Earlier this year, India Knight hinted in the Sunday Times that overt ballsiness had its limit.

My husband woke himself up with a snort that sounded like a crocodile seizing the hind limb of a warthog, reached for his whisky glass and said, as if I had accused him of anything: ‘Just chillaxing.’ If this useless portmanteau word struggles through a few more months of life, it will be thanks to David Cameron — or his enemies. Take these words: bromance, mumpreneur, mankle, frape, emberrorist, foodoir. They were talked up last year as new entries into dictionaries, and are supposed to mean: a sexless friendship; a working mother; a man’s ankle; altering a Facebook profile without permission; someone threatening to reveal embarrassing information; and a memoir incorporating recipes.

The other morning on the wireless (Home Service), Stephen Evans, the BBC’s man in Berlin, mentioned Angela Merkel’s favourite Anglicism: Shitstorm. So I suppose it is quite all right to discuss it here, between adults. The word has been voted Anglicism of the year by a jury headed by Professor Dr Anatol Stefanowitsch. It beat Stresstest into second place. Both may be linked to the euro-crisis, but Shitstorm in German has a specific field of usage, referring to the kerfuffle that people stir up on the internet until it reaches a critical mass (to use another metaphor), and something has to be done. An example was the criticism of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German minister of defence, who was found to have plagiarised part of his doctoral thesis.