Mind your language

Yell, which publishes Yellow Pages, is changing its name to Hibu, after seeking ‘an identity to tell our story’. It prefers to spell hibu with a small h. It admits that hibu means nothing (though to me it looks like a mis-spelled French owl), but it knows how it is pronounced: high-boo. If it were a real word it would certainly be pronounced hee-boo, for reasons too prosaic to find room for here. Yell is a good enough name. In America it is commonly used instead of shout (‘Quit yelling at me’). Its origins are ancient and go back to the same root that gives us the gale in nightingale. Who’d have thought it? Changing trade names in the hope of prosperity is a fool’s errand.

I heard a man say mayor on the radio recently as though it were mayo (of the kind that one goes easy on) followed by ‘r’. I suspect that this weird pronunciation (which could only be adopted by someone who had never heard Larry the Lamb bleat at ‘Mr Mayor’) was influenced by mayoral. Mayoral is almost always yoked with elections, especially with Boris Johnson around. Indeed mayoral and electoral are mispronounced on the same principle, with the stress on the or. That is no doubt an Americanism, but I think it is more often adopted by speakers who do not remember having heard the words pronounced at all. They see it in print often enough and then decide to make up a likely pronunciation.

‘How do you stand on the the?’ asked my husband. ‘The the?’ ‘Yes, the the.’ We could have gone on all morning, but the phone went, a so-called opinion survey. By the time I had sent them (or him) away with a flea in his ear, my husband had drifted off. The the in question was the one before Albany, the Regency sets of rooms off Piccadilly that the rich, impatient Alan Clark characterised as possessing ‘cold and miserable squalor’. Most people call it ‘the Albany’, despite snobby objections. If it had retained the name Albany House, there would have been no problem. Dickens referred to it as ‘Albany’, but that was in Our Mutual Friend, a novel with a solecism for a title.

Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable as though it were spelled fecked, as in the stressed syllable of effect. Perfect has a long and complicated history, and was never pronounced with the ‘c’ at all in the Middle Ages. The old pronunciation is preserved in the surname Parfitt (an occupational name, for an apprentice who was trained or perfect in his trade, as Chaucer’s knight was parfit in chivalry).

A London gallery had a spot of trouble with the police when someone complained about a picture of Leda and the swan. ‘As the exhibition was already over,’ said a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.’ Ravaging? ‘Thou still unravaged bride of quietness,’ as John Keats might have written, on his own Grecian theme. Perhaps the Vikings first suggested the confusion. J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People wrote of the Danes ‘ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames’. But even if rape went with pillage, they were distinguished even then. We all use one word sometimes when we mean another.

‘Roaster — A green linnet, as this bird was most frequently roasted by the boys at the playroom fire.’ That item comes in a glossary at the back of The History of Sedgley Park School by F.C. Husenbeth, published in 1856. I stumbled across it when looking to see if the book had an index. (It didn’t.) Sedgley Park, founded in 1767 and transformed in 1870 into Cotton College, now defunct, was not, I suppose, worse than most schools. Indeed Husenbeth, there from 1803 to 1814, aged seven to 18, looked back on it with affection. As we remember from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, boys enjoyed an enviable freedom to trap birds, light fires and buy supplementary rations.

I want to add a footnote to the obstetric history of last week’s newborn word omnishambles. But before I forget, I noticed an advertisement on the side of a bus recently which asked: ‘Fed up with buffering?’ I did, by chance, know what the bus meant: buffering is the juddering standstill that internet video can come to. The buffer is, I think, a bit of memory dedicated to sucking up data before displaying it for you. The dictionaries have not caught up with this word yet, but it may prove short-lived, if the problem is resolved. Now, omnishambles.

My husband gave me a copy of Plutarch’s Moralia for our wedding anniversary, the romantic old thing. It is in the translation of Philemon Holland, made in 1603 and republished in 1657. At the back is ‘An Explanation of certain obscure words… in favour of the unlearned Reader’. That’s me. Some entries in the glossary make sense. To Pinguifie, we are told, means ‘To make fat’, and Gymnosophists were ‘Philosophers of India who went naked and led beside a more austere and precise life.’ But some entries seem to define simpler terms by harder ones, as with Satyrs: ‘Woodwoses or monsters. Creatures with tails, yet resembling Men and Women, and in part Goats.’ I like the idea of woodwoses being more familiar than satyrs.

I could scarcely believe the feebleness of my husband’s little joke in declaring he would take less water with his whisky ‘to help with the drought’. I think he must have been watching repeats of Mock the Week while I am out. But the new cliché is that we are in drought. Sometimes this is preceded by officially. It’s there in the newspapers, although once at least the Guardian said we are ‘officially in a state of drought’. I can’t remember in drought being used as a set phrase before. It sounds a little technical and in some way like a diagnosis. The obvious parallel as a diagnosis is in shock, or perhaps in denial, but the model, as a technical classification, must be in recession.

Francis Maude was judged to have let the side down by uttering the words ‘kitchen supper’. It was almost as bad, apparently, as having said ‘nursery tea’ — not the language of the people. Yet people do eat supper, and may eat it in the kitchen, not always on their laps in front of the television. If Mr Maude had a proper dinner, it was supposed, he’d have it in the dining-room. In any case, names of meals are notorious social identifiers. Originally, supper was the last of the day’s meals: breakfast, dinner and supper. Hence the Last Supper, not the Last Dinner. Mr Maude would hardly call the meal in the middle of the day dinner.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, wants to stop us preloading — filling up on cheap booze before going to a nightclub. The first time I heard her use the word, I thought she was saying freeloading. But that is a different problem. Perhaps soon we will hear Mrs May talking of getting bladdered or rat-arsed, or whatever the word is on the street. Preloading belongs to that fast-breeding family of words beginning with pre-. Until recently, preload was a term from engineering, physiology or computing. Ball-bearings might be pre-loaded during the manufacture of a machine so that they ran more smoothly in operation under stress.

On 22 August 1662, the day before the new queen arrived at Whitehall in a barge so surrounded by craft that ‘we could see no water’, Samuel Pepys walked over to Mr Creede’s lodging and had ‘a little banquet’ (meaning fruit and sweets and wine) ‘and I had liked to have begged a parrett for my wife, but he hath put me in a way to get a better from Steventon at Portsmouth’. By ‘I had liked to have begged’ Pepys meant ‘I would have liked to have begged’ or ‘I felt inclined to beg’. The Authorised Version, 51 years earlier, expressed Romans 1:28 as: ‘They did not like to retaine God in their knowledge’.

The back-page notebook in the Times Literary Supplement the other week was pondering whether the word obnixely had ever really been used. It means ‘earnestly, strenuously’, but I can see that there is not much point using it if no one knows what it means. The prefix ob- generates a goodly store of seldom used words: obacerate (‘to stop the mouth’); obcaecate (‘blind, uncomprehending’); obganiate (‘to be tediously repetitious’); obstupely (‘dully’) and the splendid obeliscolychny (‘lighthouse’).

Who is to say what marriage should mean? Not dictionaries, for they record what words do mean, not what they should. Lexicographers are like lepidopterists, catching and describing species, not pig-farmers, breeding and improving them. Last week Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister asked: ‘Who owns marriage?’ She answered: ‘It is owned by the people,’ and then declared: ‘If a couple love each other and want to commit to a life together, they should have the option of a civil marriage, irrespective of whether they are gay or straight.’ I suppose she meant ‘irrespective of whether they are men or women’.

Since my husband had retuned the television, importing channels that no person free from troubling neurosis could possibly want to watch, such as one devoted to the sale of steam-cleaning machines, I stumbled over Emeli Sandé singing her song ‘Next to Me’, which was No. 2 in the BBC singles charts last week, and may be No. 1 by now. It is poetic in a traditional sense, employing metre, rhyme and romantic images. ‘I wanna hold your hand by the sea;/ Wanna feel you next to me./ I wanna see the sunrise in your eyes;/ Wanna keep you by my side.’ The orthographic convention wanna could be replaced by want to, but does suggest the words’ realisation in performance. The rhyme eyes and side falls within the scope permissible in rap.

English teachers are often remembered for two reasons. I don’t know which is more damaging. The first is for having made a pupil think she was writing well. The second is for having inculcated a few arbitrary rules, such as not to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition, thus enabling a pupil in future years to say: ‘I was always taught that...’ Someone wrote to me this week saying: ‘I was always taught that get is a word to be avoided. There is always a word you can use instead.’ Perhaps so, just as one could avoid the word lambent or entasis. The frequent use of lambent or entasis would certainly mar prose more than that of get.

Dickens’s coinages ‘Dickens. Makes a change,’ said my husband, flopping a TLS on to the chair next to his whisky-drinking chair and turning to the free Telegraph television guide. The sarcasm was stingless, as we’re only in the second month of Dickens year, with plenty to enjoy. I saw Dickens credited the other day with the invention of 265 new words. If you look at the Oxford English Dictionary it becomes clear that he did no such thing. In 258 cases, Dickens is the source of the earliest quotation illustrating the use of a word. This is often mistaken as evidence that an author invented it.

The fatuousness of remarks on Radio 3, about which Charles Moore complains, is an established aim on Radio 4. Last Sunday, before The Archers, I was invited to ‘Have another cuppa’. The implicit intention was to sound like someone who had just dropped in to the kitchen. But a stranger dropping in to the kitchen and talking as if he were an old friend would be alarming. Indeed, we might suspect him of being a psychopath. It is all to do with register. Register in language is not mentioned in old-fashioned grammars. It entails differences in vocabulary, pronunciation and even tonality, according to circumstances. (Charles Moore mentioned the funny noise that broadcasters make when they speak as though smiling, as they are encouraged to do.

On Start the Week, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty spoke of an arms race in Home Office policy. She wasn’t talking about tasers or automatic weapons for policemen. Her phrase was metaphorical. Now I find that this metaphor is habitual to her. She used it when giving evidence in 2008 to the committee considering the Counter-Terrorism Bill. It quite annoyed Tony McNulty, who had not then resigned as a minister nor yet apologised to Parliament about his expenses claims. In discussing detention without trial, he told her: ‘You made a very negative characterisation of the shift from 14 to 28 days. You described it as an arms race.’ She replied: ‘In an arms race there is plenty of substance that is achieved by the escalation… .

You (my husband) say farther and I say further. Not only that but we are both sure we’re right. How can this be? To the benighted farther brigade it is obvious. Farther is the comparative of far, so, at least in the literal sense of distance, it is the logical form. Such instincts to tidy up language are natural. Indeed a previous comparative was farrer, very logically. This held sway from the 12th to the 17th century, after which it began to be associated with the sort of speech heard on The Archers. (Originally the comparative of far was fyrr, but that was before the Conquest.) The forms farther, further, which came to supplant farrer, were modelled on the noun further, in the meaning of ‘furtherance’. So much for history.