Mind your language

I’ve been reading a most interesting book. I’ve been reading a most interesting book. It’s all about the books Gladstone read, the way he read them and what he did with the 30,000 books he collected in his long life. Most of the book is written engagingly enough. ‘Until the late 19th century, most books were published without an index, obliging the assiduous reader [like Gladstone] to complete their own.’ That is a clear sentence, even if its use of the plural pronoun their as a gender-neutral singular might annoy some. But the introduction uses an entirely different kind of language, a baffling thicket of unsignalled conjunctions and disjunctions, of clotted noun phrases, and heaped up jargon.

Jack pipped Mohammed as the most popular boy’s name for babies born last year. There were 8,007 Jacks and 7,576 Mohammeds, or similar spellings. To me Jack is a pet-name for John — a hypocorism, as the grammarians rejoice to call babyish versions of names. You wouldn’t baptise anyone Jack. There is no St Jack. (There is, I think, a St Ernest, from Zwiefalten in Germany.) The French name Jacques is their version of James. So, how did Jack become the English familiar byname for John? There are two fierce schools of thought. Some assert that Jack is indeed the same word as the French Jacques. The trouble is that, from its earliest appearance in English in the Middle Ages, Jack has been used as an alternative to John.

Much to my annoyance, and yours, I know, language changes. Thus Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary we celebrate with its author’s 300th birthday this week, defined urinator as ‘a diver; one who searches under water’. Charles II had a urinator of his own, as a letter by Robert Boyle indicates: ‘His majesty’s urinator, Mr Curtis, published in the Gazette, how he had practised.’ That example of changed meaning is given by David Nokes in his new life of Johnson. He took it, with acknowledgments, from the agreeable Henry Hitchings, who wrote Dr Johnson’s Dictionary in 2005. Actually, urinator in that sense was already obsolescent in Johnson’s day.

Taxi-drivers tell you all sorts of myths about history. (‘Yes, Blackheath got its name from the plague pits they dug there in the Black Death). The internet, it strikes me, is like a taxi-drivers’ convention. I’ve just come across this: ‘The phrase “the die is cast” has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead, it refers to a mould (die) which has been cast (made).’ That would have come as a surprise to Suetonius, who recounts that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon he declared alea iacta est. Philemon Holland translated it, ‘The dice be thrown’, which would help modern readers unaware that the singular of dice is die.

Errors stick like burrs. Forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock with a good deal of distortion on his guitar, mostly engendered by feedback. Some people, I learn, refer to this inaccurately as phase distortion. Phase distortion cannot of itself be heard, the physicists tell me. Phase, again, is identified in many minds with faze. Indeed Phaze is a popular trade name for products in fashion, music and photography. Phaze 1 is an alias of the DJ or musician Rupert Parkes, better known as Photek, though not to me. The word faze has in reality no connection with phase. Its true relations are resolutely unfashionable, indeed mostly obsolete. Faze, also spelled feaze, is nothing more than a variant of feeze.

My husband wanted to use the lavatory in London recently, as husbands begin to, and, since all the public conveniences have inconveniently been closed, he popped into the Strutton Arms. I was delighted to find that it had changed its name from Finnegan’s Wake. My objection was not the apostrophe, which, though absent in the name of the book is present in the name of the song. Nor did I want it to revert to the Grafton Arms, a name deriving I think from its former landlord, Jimmy Grafton, in whose back bar the Goon Show was invented. Before that it was called the King’s Arms. It wasn’t the name as much as the fake Irishry that was unwelcome during the Finnegan’s Wake years. I suspect it had ‘Fir’ and ‘Mna’ on the lavatory doors.

Forming part of my husband’s baggage-train en route for another medical ‘conference’, I read a novel by an American. It contained this sentence: ‘It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.’ It could have been worse: it might have employed the subjunctive. I have nothing but affection for the subjunctive. I sing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the best of them. Yet it is odd that the subjunctive has not only undergone a revival over the past 100 years, particularly in the United States, but is pushing out perfectly respectable items of English syntax. It is most commonly found as the so-called mandative subjunctive, in a subordinate clause (usually introduced by that) following an expression of command, suggestion or possibility.

Mr Alan Moore asked my opinion from the Letters column last week on the mother who insisted that swearing meant ‘taking the Name of the Lord in vain’, but using the word f*** was just coarse language. I’m not sure this isn’t a question better directed to Dear Mary, since swearing is as much defined by its effect on social taboo as by dictionaries. The word swear extends even to a kitten as anyone who read The Spectator on 11 April 1896 will remember: ‘When Phyllis was a kitten she had wild fits, tearing round the room and swearing horribly,’ wrote Francis Galton. Since one of Galton’s habits was swapping the blood of rabbits and other domestic animals, it is no surprise that Phyllis should have sworn.

David Cameron innocently said twat on the wireless last week. He pronounced it to rhyme with hat, when it should rhyme with what. He hadn’t realised it was rude. It’s funny which words one can say and which one can’t. Mr Cameron seems to have thought twat was like prat, which seems to be acceptable. Oddly enough, an American dialect meaning for twat is ‘the bottom’, which is the modern meaning of prat. Similarly, the Americans also mean ‘bottom’ by the word fanny, a synonym in England for twat, which can lead to transatlantic misunderstandings. Prat used to mean a buttock, just the one.

Outside a theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue that offers a dubiously amusing entertainment a poster proclaims: ‘Pant-wettingly funny.’ This is interesting, because what one might have the misfortune to wet is not a pant but pants. The grammar, though, is undoubtedly correct. Nouns used as adjectives generally remain in the singular. This rule makes honest nouns with a singular meaning, but a plural form, shrink into singularity once they are deployed adjectivally: trouser-pocket, not trousers pocket. It is not as a simple as that, naturally. Take the rather silly term drug czar (or drug tsar). When in 1982 the United States appointed someone in charge of its policy on drugs, the news agency UPI announced him as the new drug czar.

The eccentric Sir George Sitwell, the father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, had a valet called Henry Moat, who would also have been called eccentric had he not been a plain-speaking Yorkshireman. One evening after lugging a heavy trunk up the stairs of an Italian hotel he opened the door with his elbow and threw the heavy object on to the bed in the darkened room. It was unfortunate that the novelist Hall Caine was attempting to restore his frayed nerves in that very bed.      Hall Caine, the first man in England to sell a million copies of a novel, is also the first recorded man to use a construction that is still controverted.

‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. ‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. He’d learnt the fact from the former, though he might have noticed it in the latter. I’m not sure there has been a bad year for daisies in the past few centuries. In the late 1380s Chaucer wrote: ‘Of al the floures in the mede,/ Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,/ Suche as men called daysyes.

Like the flying ants that swarm at this time of year, certain tricks of speech seethe in sudden outbursts. I heard the word testament used by mistake for testimony twice during From Our Own Correspondent last week, from different contributors. I was too kind about this usage four years ago when I mentioned it here. My husband, the plump canary in the coal-damp of misused language, has practically pegged out in response to the erroneous use of testament. In 2005, I noted that it had been misused in precisely the modern way 550 years ago, by someone called Sir Gilbert Hay. This only shows that in the 15th century people committed malapropisms avant la lettre. I can bear it once every 550 years, but not twice in half an hour.

Someone at dinner the other day tried to convince us that the origin of the phrase sent to Coventry had something to do with a London livery company expelling members for some misdemeanour, forcing them to practise in Coventry, beyond the territorial limit of livery authority or (according to another version) a free-trade town that took no cognisance of guild controls. I can’t say I was convinced by this explanation and I took an early opportunity to refer to a big fat dictionary. It offered little comfort. Indeed it suggested that readers might care to refer to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

The Queen has had a vegetable garden laid out behind Buckingham Palace. ‘No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole,’ reported the Sunday Times. This use of chemicals annoys some people, mostly chemists. By chemists, of course, I do not mean pharmacists, whom I normally do call chemists, to their annoyance. Fortunately I can distinguish between physicists and physicians, though I usually call the latter doctors, like my husband, even if many of them hold no doctorate, in medicine or anything else. I mean to suggest by these remarks about chemists and doctors that words do not always mean what we would like them to, or what they once meant. Thus the earlier use of the word chemicals, in the 17th and 18th centuries, often referred to medicines.

‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. ‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. What indeed? It seems that an American company had got up a PR stunt that caught the imagination of the press. As that reliable old linguistician, Professor David Crystal remarked, ‘It is total nonsense. English reached a million words years ago.’ All the more disappointingly, the word chosen by the American publicity people was Web 2.0. This is a vague term for a new generation of phenomena on the World Wide Web.

What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are no longer representing their constituents.’  What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are no longer representing their constituents.’ Quite apart from any political consideration, the grammar is awry. A single MP should not be followed by plural pronouns (they, their). Yet we all do this in speech, partly to avoid the difficulty of a singular pronoun, he, standing for women as well as men.

Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, has offered to stand for parliament against Sir Alan Haselhurst, the MP for Saffron Walden, who claimed £12,000 expenses for gardening. Mr Heffer commented on Sir Alan’s grammar, declaring that ‘the solecism “hopefully this website will also shed light on the parliamentary system” should have been beaten out of him decades ago’. It might have been, when use of hopefully was a shibboleth. Does it remain one? ‘Hopefully the critics will come to their senses,’ writes Patricia O’Connor in her new book Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. She is American, and I came across her verdict in The New York Times Book Review last month.

I was struck by Neil Tennant’s story (Diary, 23 May) about a message in a séance spelling out to a group of teenagers ‘My dear children, you are so young. Do not make my mistake. — Oscar Wilde.’ It reminded me of that passage in G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, where, having fallen into a period of dark nihilism at the Slade School of Art, he too had experimented with the planchette, which spelled out in its deceptive banality: ‘Orriblerevelationsinighlife’. For two or three weeks now we have been reading orrible revelations in the Daily Telegraph. Should these be denominated revelations, disclosures or exposés? The Telegraph’s chosen tag is ‘The Expenses Files’.

William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time: I come along where wide-horn’d cows, ’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs, Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls. The milking time in which MPs have now been detected has already spawned two words, one of them being flip. It is quite distant in meaning from the action of Barnes’s cows’ tails. In the 17th century, 200 years before Barnes’s time, flip had appeared from nowhere as an alternative to fillip, meaning ‘a flick with finger and thumb’.