Mind your language

‘Who,’ I wondered to myself as I folded away my husband’s pyjamas, which he’d left on the hall floor (why the hall floor?), ‘is this woman sprinkling glottal stops like currants into a Welsh pancake mix and between each one inserting a cliché?’ It was Sally Bercow, the cheery wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons. She was on Today only for a minute and a half, so wasted no time in setting the tone by reminding us that Napoleon said the English were a nation of shopkeepers. Then we were told that ‘our high streets are fast approaching their sell-by date’. Do they have sell-by dates?

Most of us have discovered since Anders Behring Breivik killed 78 people on 22 July how well Norwegians speak English. We heard many use the phrase in shock. Two days after the shooting, the Catholic bishop of Olso said: ‘Norway is still in shock.’ The killer’s father some days later said: ‘I am in a state of shock.’ After a week, a woman working near the scene of the crime, said: ‘We are still in a state of shock.’ International Gymnast magazine was told by the veteran gymnast Espen Jansen: ‘We are all in shock.’ To my husband’s generation of medicos, to be in shock was to suffer a serious fall in blood pressure, which can deprive vital organs of oxygen.

‘Ha, ha! Caught you out,’ shouted my husband, holding a copy of The Spectator above his head and twirling beneath the hall light as I came in. He showed me a letter from a man (it is always a man) who suggested I thought noctae was the genitive of nox. In one sense, I was bang to rights, for I had typed the phrase ius primae noctae, which is wrong. But it is interesting what is needed to make a mistake. Fatal to an error is advertence. If someone had asked me, a girl who had not had her brothers’ advantages of a classical education, what the genitive of nox was, I should have answered noctis. It is no excuse, but the termination of primae had acted as a false attraction, like a moving ball of wool to a kitten.

Sorry  ‘She was sorry Doctor Cameron objected to her maternal arrangements,’ wrote Anna Maria Bennett in her seven-volume novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797). It is funny how fame and scandal are soon forgotten, for Mrs Bennett was a smash-hit novelist of her age. The scandal was her living for 17 years with an admiral (by whom she had a daughter, a celebrated actress who herself had a daughter by the Duke of Hamilton and went through a sensational divorce case). All forgotten. By sorry Mrs Bennett meant that Dr Cameron’s objections made her character sad. Her character was not apologising for Dr Cameron. This meaning of sorry is categorised as sense 2b by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Hacking One useful quality of the term phone hacking is its imprecision. Generally it refers to gaining access to voicemail messages, often by guessing the default personal identification. This differs from tapping a telephone conversation. Tapping (a metaphor from tapping drink from a barrel) was already in use in 1869, with reference to electric telegraph wires. Hacking, we think of as breaking into a computer system. But the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that hacker first meant ‘a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself’. The earliest example in print is from 1976. Seven years later, Byte magazine gave this account: ‘Hacker seems to have originated at MIT.

Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial activity,’ declared the revolutionary Tom Mann in 1909, ‘forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.’ It was another 62 years before the national press of Britain announced that newspapers would not be published the next day ‘because of industrial action’.

An American soldier just back from Afghanistan said on television that he thought his fellow combatants should not be withdrawn ‘until the country is stable enough that it can stand on its own feet’. What struck me was not the opinion on strategy but the grammar. Instead of saying ‘stable enough that it can’, I’d have said ‘stable enough to stand’. My preference for the accusative and infinitive (‘I request him to shut up’) over a subordinate clause with a subjunctive (‘I request that he shut up’) does not cover every circumstance where the so-called mandative subjunctive is used. I can wish, ask, prefer, command, beg, love or require him to shut up, but I cannot suggest, demand or insist him to shut up.

Until the rain blew over, I sought refuge in a Pret A Manger and drank some ginger beer. For entertainment I read the label. ‘We do not add any weird chemicals,’ it said. No doubt Pret knows better than to say ‘any chemicals’. Water is a chemical, we are told by the know-alls (of the kind who script QI on the television). Yet social attitudes to pure food are closely charted by the history of chemical as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chemical retains connotations that it possessed on its earliest use, in the 17th century. Then it often meant ‘a medicine’. A chemical was a substance refined from the coarse material of daily life.

Mr Brown’s writing In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility. I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that not very well. But his thick marker-pen marginalia have a rare indecipherability. Like Linear A, some may never be cracked. It is not only that his letters are ill-formed, though they are — so that two scribbled words look like long termum. The U, however, turns out to be I and S, both with much the same shape and joined at the bottom. But Mr Brown’s handwriting also shares something with that of the Revd Dr William Spooner — anticipation.

A labour of love of the strangest kind, published posthumously, came to me this week. It is The English Wordsmith, by David Andrews (£12.99), which is nothing but 8,000 ‘important, relevant, obscure, difficult, unusual words and phrases’. He doesn’t list Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus, but he does include floccinaucinihilipilification, presumably because of its unusual length, defining it as ‘the action of contemptuously dismissing something, or treating it, as worthless’. I wanted to know more.

So … When I asked him the name of the person who had rung while I was out, my husband enunciated the sound aaaaaaaaaahhh at such length that I wondered whether he wanted his tonsils inspected. In reality he was trying to remember, and so used this non-lexical filler. It can be very annoying when people repeatedly resort to space-fillers, always saying um, er, I mean, you know or like. Some of these are words of a sort and so can only loosely be described as non-lexical, but they may be used as if they were not words but prosodic markers (such as tone or stress). We unconsciously realise someone is finishing a sentence because the tone falls. That is why it is uncomfortable to hear Australians and the young finish statements with a rising tone, as if they were questions.

At dinner parties in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, or Southwark, according to Christina Patterson, the writer for the Independent, you hear people saying things about politics like ‘what we need is a clearer narrative’. I was delighted that she added: ‘I’m still not sure what narrative means.’ I do not go to parties in Haringey or Hackney (not invited), but the demand for narrative has reached even my well padded corner. In the Guardian Madeleine Bunting, from her own family supper table, wrote about the Scottish independence horror, remarking: ‘Scroll through comments on blogs, and what emerges is an unattractive narrative of the English being ignored.’ If narrative just meant ‘telling tales’, I wouldn’t mind.

‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. ‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. I had only asked why everyone was suddenly using the phrase hone in on instead of home in on. It was the second time in a week that I had heard a seemingly important person use the phrase on the television.

A rumour ran round Cern the other day, almost as fast as its accelerated particles, that the Higgs boson had been detected. This little creature, named after Peter Higgs (born, 1929) and the Indian physicist S. N. Bose (1894–1974), is tailor-made for a cosmic theory that calls for its interaction with quarks. For my part, I’d be happy if we could even decide how to pronounce quark. Cern says it is pronounced kwork. After all, you might think its inventor, the American Murray Gell-Mann (also born in 1929) would know, and he said in a letter to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978: ‘I employed the sound quork [kwork] for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in Finnegans Wake.’ The passage from Joyce reads: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Someone, so the Times reported, was asked about young people being unemployed. ‘The problem is not the lack of jobs,’ came the reply, ‘but a lack of determination on behalf of young jobseekers.’ What he meant was ‘on the part of young jobseekers’. It was they who lacked determination, not anyone else on their behalf. This strange use of behalf has become so widespread that it is impossible to tell, out of context, what a speaker means. The new sense is ousting the old, just as bad money drives out good, as Gresham’s Law declares. The only difficulty is that perhaps the old money was never quite as good as it seemed. There was a phrase, 100 years ago, in behalf of, meaning ‘in the interest of, for the benefit of’.

In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. But kick off has recently developed a quite different meaning, exemplified in an online discussion that I stumbled across, about community therapy, where one woman mentioned an incident ‘at about the age of 13, when a lot of my mental health problems really began to kick off and become a real problem’.

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things. How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other initialisms in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary. An initialism is more specific than an abbreviation. Abbreviations include pleasantly obsolescent terms like affly for affectionately. If you read affly aloud, you would say ‘affectionately’, unless you were using oral inverted commas, intending to convey its air of archaism. If you read out a true acronym like Nato, you would say ‘Nato’.

‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘Imagination. Imagination is the highest kite that can fly, according to Lauren Bacall. It says so in the new Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations,’ he said, waving at me the book I had intended to look at after doing the washing-up. There may be much in what Miss Bacall says. The words come from her autobiography of 1979. I have never heard anyone quote them.