Mind your language

The other day I walked past Patisserie Valerie on the corner of Broadwick Street and Marshall Street, in a shop that used to be a potter’s. ‘This isn’t really Patisserie Valerie,’ I thought to myself. What I had always taken to be a proper name (of a place in Old Compton Street, after its move from Frith Street, where it had been bombed in the war) had now become a common noun (a chain). Luke Johnson, who runs Risk Capital Partners Ltd, the owners of the Patisserie Valerie chain, is not entirely to blame for this, since a few branches had opened before he took it over in 2006. And to tell the truth, I didn’t much mind Valerie becoming a chain, since I’d stopped going to the real one, in favour of Maison Bertaux or sometimes Amato.

Hurrying for the Underground, I thought I saw a poster for a film by Madonna called Wee. It seemed a strange title even for her, and indeed the film turns out to be called W./E., the initials of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. Nevertheless, wee has suddenly become a frequent word in public utterances. On that quite interesting programme on BBC Four about medieval kings’ illuminated manuscripts, one sequence showed calf hides being prepared for making into vellum. The parchmenter, Mr Paul Wright, mentioned that the urine of abbots would once have been used, as their diet produced rich urine. The presenter, Dr Janina Ramirez, who holds degrees from Oxford and elsewhere, referred to it as ‘abbot’s wee’. As a professional populariser perhaps she was right.

Many middle-class parents would (it is said) prefer to hear their little children say fuck than toilet. A similar system of class shibboleths governs the choice of children’s name. The most popular in 2011, it turns out, was Harry. It is unexceptionable, being of ancient royal lineage (‘Cry God for Harry…’), and, like Jack, uniting rich and poor. What is a tragic burden for the middle classes is to find a rarer name of classy pedigree suddenly become the name shouted in supermarkets at toddlers in tantrums: ‘Jason! Shut that row.’ I can’t find anyone called Jason in all 60 volumes of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and it must have been most unusual in 1928 when the future Bishop of Derby was born to Jason and Janet Dawes.

The word of the year is across. Earlier this month someone on the radio spoke of hospital experiences ‘across the patient journey’. The meaning was ‘throughout’. It is universality that across is now felt to express. A widely favoured, seldom understood figure of speech is across the piece. Proof of the obscurity of its application, even for those who use it, is that they often make it across the piste, as if it came from skiing. Across is everywhere. In the Independent, Alexander Lebedev wrote about promoting ‘fair journalism across the globe’. One might think it would be round the globe, or perhaps around the globe. There is a difference between round and around.

A national hobby during the screening of Downton Abbey was to spot supposed anachronisms in behaviour and language. It drove poor Lord Fellowes into a frenzy. When last week I read Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’s whodunnit set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, I soon found myself tempted to play the Downton game. It’s not fair, of course. Lady James did not set out to write the book in the language of Jane Austen. At the same time, nor did she wish to produce any such sentences as: ‘“Whatever,” shrugged Darcy.’ In this she succeeded. Yet some items of speech come pretty close, sticking out as anachronistic sore thumbs. Thus we are told that Mary Bennet ‘was a compulsive reader’.

‘Because I said so’ is the most common phrase mothers find themselves using to their children that their own mothers used to them, according to a deeply unscientific survey undertaken by a baby-outfitters. Other such phrases included: ‘Take your coat off or you won’t feel the benefit’; ‘Wait and see’; and ‘Were you born in a barn?’ (which the survey renders as: ‘You weren’t born in a barn’ — not the version familiar to me). I was delighted by the old-fashioned ‘Who is “she”, the cat’s mother?’ It benefits from logical obscurity. The child, after all, knows that there is such a pronoun as she. But the grammar is not criticised, rather the register of speech.

I feel a jarring sensation to hear business as usual employed in a strange sense. It is frequently used at the moment to suggest that bankers and other wicked people have gone back to their greedy ways. The dog has returned to his vomit. Although I am not old enough to remember the war, I appreciate something of the associations of the phrase in that period. Looking through some old photographs from the Getty collection from the war years, I can see how business as usual became a powerful, often moving, declaration of defiance, when posted up as a notice or chalked on the front of a bombed shop. ‘Business as Usual, In Spite of Hitler’, read a sign on a shop in Watford, as early as October 1939. Before the war it was less of a slogan, more a conventional phrase.

Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it be? The next thing he says sounds truly deranged: ‘The origins of English are not to be found in the idea of it spreading from the centre to the periphery, but in multiple, simultaneous origins.’ Does he believe that in the fifth century some Jutes set sail from Schleswig-Holstein in clinker-built boats for Malaysia and started a little language community there?

Of course I live in the past — where better? But I found out this week exactly how many years in the past. The answer is six, which seems to me indecently like futurism. The occasion for my discovery was hearing in a politics programme that there were a harmful number of spads in government. Ah, I thought semi-consciously, Cameron’s people aren’t seeing the danger signals. I had taken it, you see, that the commentator was using an unhackneyed metaphor taken from railways. There, as anyone knows who has seen David Hare’s play The Permanent Way, a spad is a signal passed at danger. Thus, in the Ladbroke Grove rail crash of 1999, one signal, SN109, had been passed at danger eight times in the six years before the fatal day.

A baffling news report appeared last week in the newspaper that I read while I was waiting for my husband to have his hair cut — long enough considering how little he still has. ‘Traditional British words are dying out, because text speak has become so popular, research has found,’ said the report. Right, texters favour short words. So what are the words that are meant to be dying out? Cad, bogus, swell, smite and bally were among the top 20 given. They do not seem very long. A long word was included in the list: rambunctious. It can never have been very frequent, and is a mere variant of rumbustious, itself a variant of robustious, a word that I have never head anyone use.

To be told that onycha is made of opercula is not always helpful. ‘Take unto thee sweete spices, Stacte, and Onicha, and Galbanum,’ says the Bible (Exodus, xxx 34). The words are poetic, as referring to something oriental that we don’t know from everyday life. Perhaps that is why Edith Sitwell used onycha towards the end of her poem ‘Long Steel Grass’: ‘she/ Heard our voices thin and shrill/ As the steely grasses’ thrill,/ Or the sound of the onycha/ When the phoca has the pica.’ Not much assistance, as far as sense goes, can be expected there, since a phoca is a kind of seal, and the pica is a kind of bulimia, taking its name from the magpie.

‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education. I did know where to find out, though, and it comes straight from the Latin gibbus, ‘hunchbacked’, which hardly gets us much further. (The initial hard g in the English word is anomalous.) The related Greek word is kuphos, but this is not the word Homer used in the description of Thersites in the Iliad where William Cowper in his translation wrote: ‘Gibbous shoulders, o’er his breast contracted, pinch’d it.’ Homer’s word is kurto (kurtos, ‘bulging’).

Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are. Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean what their etymological forebears meant. In the reign of Elizabeth I, someone made a punning reference to Caesar as a tyrant, ‘no pretor but predator’. It was not until 1908 that natural historians began to speak of carnivores as predators.

When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek hupomenei. The Wycliffites meant the same as King James’s committees in 1611: to endure. Yet when David Cameron and his disciples speak of a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ they do not, I hope, mean that we must presume housing is something we must endure, a lasting blot on the landscape. What they do mean is by no means clear. Sustainable development is a hooray term.

Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the names of places or peoples are reputed to be derived’. In writing that definition, the lexicographer no doubt had in mind the dictionary’s earliest illustrative quotation of the word, from 1846: ‘The eponymous personage from whom the community derive their name.’ That was from the immensely influential History of Greece by George Grote (1794-1871).

Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still retains a lively existence. We may be condescending to former centuries for inconsistent spelling, but our spelling of O, which looks simple enough, has slipped in the past 100 years. In 1902, the Oxford English Dictionary commented that, as an interjection, the spelling Oh ‘is now usual only when the exclamation is quite detached from what follows’. So the Edwardians would be expected to exclaim ‘Oh!

‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them. In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to die in 1918) completed the Concise, they did put in fart, cautioning that it was ‘indecent’. My husband’s enquiry, though, had more point than he knew, for the Fowlers’ first joint enterprise, on moving to adjacent cottages in Guernsey in 1903, was a translation of Lucian. As R.W.

Libyan rebels called Colonel Gaddafi a ‘rat’ before he lost power — not because he was in a hole, but just as an all-purpose insult. And he had called them rats too in a similar spirit. Yet the only Arabist I have been able to catch told me that rat is not a usual animal insult in Arabic, dog being the standard strong term, or donkey, which would scarcely occur to an English speaker. English is uneven in its animal insults. Dirtiness seems to be the key. Pigs, which we like to eat, show at Blandings and happily turn into children’s characters, from Pinky and Perky to Peppa, still remain available as a term of abuse. It is just that the strength of the insult depends on the accompanying adjective. ‘You greedy pig’ has often been said affectionately.

I don’t think I pick up tricks of speech from Veronica, but I noticed last week Madonna, who is 53 going on 23, echoing her daughter Lourdes, aged 14. Lourdes was complaining of her mother’s dress sense, as daughters do: ‘Every day, I’ll be like, “Mom, you can’t wear that”.’ Her mother spoke in the same interview (in the Mirror, as it happens) about how busy she was: ‘Every other day, it’s like, “What am I doing? This is insane.” ’ I find this habit annoying, but it can hardly be called ungrammatical. The grammar is clear if of recent origin.

‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as Moriarty. In the past week or so I have been surprised by the widespread strength of feeling against the term criminality. At first I did not see the objection. As soon as he came back from his holidays to the riots, David Cameron spoke of ‘criminality, pure and simple’. He soon afterwards said he had his eye on telephones used for ‘plotting violence, disorder and criminality’.