Mind your language

This year may see the extinction of a word, like the last elephant in the Knysna forests of South Africa. The word is might. ‘If they had been wearing lifejackets,’ the radio reporter says, ‘their lives may have been saved.’ But they weren’t and they weren’t, so in our book it should have been: ‘Their lives might have been saved.’ In trying to explain the reason why, people often get into an awful tangle with ‘succession of tenses’. That is not the only problem, as may be seen in glorious detail from the article on the word may in the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just this month been revised. It now runs to 17,500 words. Objection to the misuse of might and may is not new.

It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead. It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead.

London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin. London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin. It is to contain most of the Olympic Games in 2012. I propose it should be twinned with Lyon in France. At the moment I do not think the Lee Valley is twinned with anywhere, but Lyon is twinned with Birmingham — to what advantage the cities are no doubt aware. But Lyon and the Lee possess what boils down to the same name, just as twins should. The Lee side of things is given in the updated edition of A.D.

There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping. There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping. ‘That’s a very prolific jump,’ said the excited commentator, more than once. I’m not such a stick in the mud, or snow, as to insist that the word prolific should only be used to mean ‘capable of producing offspring’. We have had childless but prolific authors since the middle of the 18th century. I do not even mind it being used to mean ‘abundant’.

I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop. I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop. Since he obviously wanted to be asked what he meant, I asked him what he meant. ‘Do you say Wednesday or Wednesdee?’ he asked. The answer is, I think, that it depends how emphatic I’m being. But it is not the last syllable of Wednesday that has been giving me trouble recently. It is the first. When I heard somebody on the wireless pronouncing it Wed-nz-day I began to doubt my own senses. Surely, I thought, everyone says Wenz-day.

I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. I’ve always found the 19th-century phrasebook English as She is Spoke irresistibly funny, but I had only ever seen the version without the Portuguese original. It was first published in 1855 as The New Guide of the Conversation in Portuguese and English by Jose da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino. The presumption was that they used a Portuguese-French phrasebook and a French-English dictionary. The book I knew until this week was the ‘fourth edition’ published in 1884 by Field and Tuer at the Leadenhall Presse, as an intentionally funny exercise.

On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ Even so, there is no harm in observing something of the master’s technique, which I contemplated as I enjoyed the book on an aeroplane. In ‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’, Bertie goes to lunch with Bingo Little’s uncle, a very fat man.

‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband. ‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband. ‘What do you mean, Kriek?’ He was only shouting because he was in the next room and couldn’t be bothered to get up. His question was a good one, for Kriek is one of the latest entries added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a far more interesting word than SMS, another new entry, but should it be there at all? It is never easy to know which words should be in an English dictionary. When James Murray, first editor of the OED, was working on the letter A in the 1880s he decided not to include the word African, since it merely derived from a geographical proper name. But when the lexicographers got to Americanise, they realised it must be included, and with it American.

In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. Christians in Borneo have used Allah for ‘God’ for hundreds of years, but the idea has got around among Malaysian Muslims that no non-Muslim should use the word to refer to God.    Linguistically it is hard to think the High Court was wrong. I don’t know Arabic but it is easy enough to discover that Allah derives from al-ilah, ‘the god’.

I haven’t been to see Avatar and I don’t suppose I shall, but I have just learnt how to say ‘Hello’ to a Na’vi in his own language. It is Kaltxì. The difficult bit is the consonant spelled tx, which is an ejective. I don’t want to go on about phonetics, because it is fearfully confusing without hearing the sounds. The much-derided Wikipedia has useful little recordings of the sound made by an ejective p, t, k, q and s. Anyway, ejective consonants, pronounced with a closed glottis, are not to be confused with clicks or indeed implosives.

A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular. A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular. It appeals to those who adopt the languages of public policy and business management. An article in the Daily Telegraph about the FSA (the Financial Services Authority, not the Food Standards Agency) said: ‘The regulator would like to see reporting that is sufficiently granular to allow exposures on high-risk instruments.’ As this example suggests, granular often means ‘detailed’. Sometimes it seems not to mean anything.

A triply annoying poster at Victoria Station shouts at passengers: ‘Need the toilet?’ A triply annoying poster at Victoria Station shouts at passengers: ‘Need the toilet?’ It then taunts them with the information that without a 20p piece and a 10p piece (an unlikely combination to find in one’s purse) they will not be able to get into the public lavatory. Annoyance number one. The other two annoyances are socio-linguistic in character. Toilet is bad enough. To hear it upon the lips of their children is worse, for many a mother struggling to educate their daughters, than to find nits in the hair. The collocation of need is the killer. To need the lavatory instead of wanting to go there is as bad as being asked if you need a cup of coffee.

For once, my husband has backed me up, if on dubious grounds. A friend, of previously good character, astonished us both by insisting that the ‘correct’ form of Welsh rabbit was Welsh rarebit. ‘No, it’s not,’ said my husband. ‘I had one at my club only last week.’ It is difficult to see why rarebit should be accorded stronger explanatory force than rabbit. The lamented Robert Burchfield noted in his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘This dish of cheese on toast emerged, with rabbit so spelt, in 1725.’ It is also rabbit in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, By a Lady.

Dot’s found a funny thing. Here’s a funny thing. The New Oxford American Dictionary (or Noad, for short) has nominated teabagger as the runner-up for ‘word of the year’. The winning word was unfriend, a piece of jargon used by people who drop so-called friends from popular networking sites such as Facebook. As for teabagger, it is said to refer to someone protesting at ‘President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)’. In that case, one might think it would be called tea-partying.

The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used. His latest amuse-bouche, The Wonder of Whiffling (Particular Books, £12.99), is a sort of reverse Call My Bluff, which groups the true meaning of English words according to themes. Imaginative appeal still sometimes trumps sense.

Two rather odd pronunciations to have gathered ground this year are of the words women and lieutenant. I think I heard Evan Davies say lootenant the other morning, though it might have been a stumble. My husband does not like the pronunciation lootenant. He thinks it is an Americanism. It certainly is these days; the puzzle is how the f-sound got into it in the first place. The agreeable John Trevisa, a Gloucestershire vicar with connections with the Queen’s College, Oxford, mentions in his translation of Ranulf Higden’s history of the world that the Archbishop of Canterbury was lieutenant to the Pope, and the word is variously spelled in the manuscripts of his book leeftenaunt, lutenant or levetenaunt. That was in 1387, in the decade after the word is first recorded.

Dot is very exercised by Shakespeare.. Every time I see a Shakespeare play, I wonder how many of the words the audience is picking up. It is all very well their getting the drift from the behaviour of the actors, but that makes it like a mime accompanied by unknown utterances. Matters are not helped for the poor children who must study Shakespeare by internet glossaries that mislead. So, in Hamlet, the word gall in the line ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’, is explained on a commonly used website as ‘Bitterness, anything bitter’. The meaning here, though, is not ‘embittered’ but ‘afflicted with a swelling’. The consequence is tenderness to pain.

Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions. Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions. The question, and some answers, are included in an entertaining selection from Notes and Queries made by Justin Lovill under the title Ringing Church Bells to Ward off Thunderstorms (Bunbury Press, £12.99). I gave a copy to my husband to keep him quiet, but he keeps reading out bits from the next room, just out of earshot, while I’m cleaning vegetables.

Pity the poor undergraduate who falls into the clutches of Professor Bernard Lamb. The youths might be wizards at genetics but if their spelling is shaky Professor Lamb will provide strict correction. It’s for their own good. Some undergraduates can’t even spell Hardy-Weinberg! Either they forget the hyphen, he notes, or they make it Weinburg. When I asked my husband who Hardy-Weinberg was, he laughed, a little unkindly I thought. It isn’t a he it is a they: G.H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg, who noticed something interesting about alleles and genotypes. Anyway, a third of British undergraduates failed the Hardy-Weinberg test, whereas only an eighth of foreign undergraduates did.