Mind your language

A heads-up is one of those slangy terms that are disreputable not from their semantic content but from the company they keep. It is a cliché in the mouths of dull management types. The meaning has changed in its short life. Currently it means ‘an informal briefing’: ‘I’ll just give you a heads-up on the development of the budget compliance procedure.’ It used to mean ‘an advance warning’. As with most clichés, the origin of the dead metaphor is unknown to its users. It seems to be from aeronautics. A head-up visual display was one by which a pilot could read his instruments without averting his eyes from the course of the aircraft. The term has been in use since at least 1960. By the 1970s, motorcar manufacturers were using it.

My husband tapped the notice on the wall of the train noisily with his stick. Such behaviour would be embarrassing, if I let it. ‘Ramping!’ he said. ‘Pure ramping.’ Ramping in my husband’s private language means ratcheting things up, usually in an assertive and hostile way to cow the opposition. As usual, we were the opposition, in this case of those who had put up the notice in the train. ‘Be aware,’ it said, ‘that you may be prosecuted if you are not in possession of a valid ticket.’ The ramping in this example was the use of the words be aware as if they meant ‘beware’. Perhaps some people think they do. They seem to figure increasingly in public notices of a minatory nature.

In the Guardian Paul MacInnes last week suggested casting Russell Crowe as Derek Draper in the film McBride of Satan. The subject would of course be the filthy emails from Number 10, or Smeargate as the press has called the scandal. This means that two gates have been swinging open and shut simultaneously in the papers, the other being Liegate, an incomprehensible saga of Formula 1 motor-racing. The lame formulae Smeargate and Liegate show the lack of imagination of journalists, and the surprising vigour of the suffix –gate nearly 37 years after the incident that spawned it.

Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks ‘trying to convince the banks to renegotiate the structure of the loans’. This encroachment by convince on to the territory of persuade has been going on for most of my life. It happens all the time now, but I do not feel moved to frighten the dog each time I detect it. My husband, I am sorry to say, has adopted the attitude of Betsey Trotwood to donkeys’ trespassing on the piece of green outside her house. Instead of crying, ‘Janet!

What do you call today, the day before Easter? It is increasingly called Easter Saturday. That is what the BBC calls it in its programme guides. Robin Hood and Casualty await us as an alternative to the Easter Vigil. But Easter Monday is the Monday after Easter, and Easter Tuesday the day after that, and so on. The OED refers to these as ‘obvious combinations’, and after Easter Tuesday puts ‘etc’, noting that ‘in ordinary language Easter is often applied to the entire week commencing with Easter Sunday’. Certainly the week beginning on Easter day is Easter week, yet I do not feel in my heart that anyone would now call the Saturday after Easter Easter Saturday. If they did, they would be open to misunderstanding.

My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. Anyone would have thought I’d asked him the meaning of rimming or some such word with which if one lacked familiarity it would be better not to make an acquaintance. I had been perusing the LGA’s list of 200 items of jargon we should do without.

The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past that now. An advertisement that Veronica showed me on the internet offers T-shirts with the words: ‘Quieres tomar un café?’ The English-language website explains that this means: ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ It is not that I think ‘Can I get?’ is particularly rude. It’s just that it does not convey the thought I have when I want to buy a cup of coffee. The ‘No problem’ response is more complicated.

‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’ Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with the body politic. Even by the time he published Humphrey Clinker, in 1771, the year of his death, he had not vanquished his habit of presenting bodily distress as an object of humour. In the novel, a trick is played on a fat, high-living magistrate called Frogmore, whose drink is doctored.

The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables, stressed on the second, and pronounced cn-JEER-i-eez. That is logical, considering that it comes directly from Latin congeries, ‘a heap or pile’. Its connotation of heterogeneity is often suggested by a preceding qualification, ‘mere’.

Contemplating the sad fate of Jade Goody, the reality television celebrity, Mr Gordon Brown remarked: ‘I think everybody is sad about the tragedy that has befallen Jane Goody.’ Mr Brown is unlikely to watch Big Brother or read vulgar newspapers, apart from cuttings gleaned for him by servants, so there is no reason why he should have known that her name was Jade. Neither Jane nor Jade was among the top 100 names for baby girls in Scotland in 2008, according to the General Register for Scotland. Which names are ‘nice’ and which ‘nasty’ changes with fashion. Jade, one might think, would have been popular in the era of Rubies and Pearls. But it had the insuperable handicap of being a word for a strumpet.

A bright rainbow on a wall caught my eye, and the building behind it turned out to belong to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. On its website, the department has a cheerful image of helicopters and cranes constructing a rainbow. When I add that the home page is headed by a picture of a black boy in a wheelchair, you can see the lie of the land. What do they think they mean by their rainbow emblem? In recent years it has been the contested property of campaigners for peace and for homosexual activity. There is something called Broken Rainbow LGBT Domestic Violence Service. ‘LGBT’ stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’. The service does not provide domestic violence, but intends to help people suffering from it.

While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on the rock cakes in Brief Encounter). I said: ‘Un croissant’. The woman at the till said: ‘Una brioche’. Well, I have since discovered that there is a word croissant in Italian, and indeed a word cornetto with the same meaning. But she was quite right: they call croissants brioches. This is a deep question of semantics. In Spanish there is a word cruasan that answers to the breakfast pastry with the moonish shape.

‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. ‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. That was more than I knew, but he is almost right. There is a Barak who features in a stirring adventure in the book of Judges. He takes ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun, at the command of the prophetess Deborah and defeats Sisera’s nine hundred chariots of iron.

I am not going to go on about the word Paki, though it has an interesting enough history. But when I used the word Spaniard recently, my husband asked: ‘Are you allowed to say that these days?’ I wondered, until I heard a Spaniard use it himself on Radio 4. So it must be all right. A cause for unease at this designation of Spanish people is the connotation of the suffix -ard. Consider these examples: bastard, coward, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, braggard, stinkard. Neither mallard nor wizard are very strong counter-examples, the first coming from the word male (though female ducks of this kind exist too), and the second being once as pejorative as witch.

When my husband can’t put his chair-side whisky glass on the old familiar mat, he gets quite agitated. It seems like Asperger’s disorder. My own irritation is more rationally provoked, I hope. A recent irritant was the foolish philology that I came across in the Daily Mail: ‘Politicians and the Catholic Church have warned that singing The Hokey Cokey could land you in prison.’ The objection is to Rangers supporters offending Catholics by chanting to the tune at football matches. What annoyed me was the baseless claim that the song ‘originated from Puritans in this country before being taken to America by 18th-century religious refugees’, as the Mail said.

When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by word of mouth or email.) One viral which appealed to me was an entry in February 2008 in a Bulgarian television pop music talent competition. Valentina Hasan sang, in the manner of Mariah Carey, a song that she called Ken Lee. The judges suggested it might be Without You. Miss Hasan, knowing little English, had learnt it from a recording. ‘No one ken to ken to sivmen,’ she began, ‘Nor yon clees toju maliveh.

One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. A likely story, I thought.

What new word has dominated 2008? Nonebrity, perhaps? No, I have never used it either. It is a portmanteau term for a ‘celebrity nonentity’ and is one suggestion for words of the year proposed by Susie Dent, who appears on Countdown, a programme that anyone claiming incapacity benefit is obliged to watch on pain of disqualification. Miss Dent popularises philology for the Oxford University Press and, in her recent book Words of the Year, she plays with neologisms such as moofer (‘mobile out-of-office worker’), scuppie (‘socially conscious, upwardly-mobile person’) and funt (‘financially untouchable’). I do not think they are anything but vogue terms. Even if some people understand them today, they’ll be forgotten soon.

Dot Wordsworth wades through clichés Clichés gather on the tide and stick on the shingle of daily life like tarred bladder-wrack. A curious species of cliché sets a stereotyped pattern, into which words may be fitted to taste. A particularly annoying example, because it has pretensions to humour, is exemplified by: ‘The words door, horse and bolted spring to mind.’ Or, in an online discussion of US relations with Venezuela that I have just stumbled across, ‘The words pot, kettle and black spring to mind.’ This is a sort of double cliché, because it incorporates in its unvarying mould some already well-worn proverbial remark. I’d be interested in any information about its origins, but I fear they are irrecoverable.

‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. ‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. Here sides simply meant ‘vegetables’, a usage grabbed from America by restaurateurs, because it often enables them to charge separately for meat and two veg.   Side is a word that leads a double life, at once fashionable and subterranean. When I was a girl I pondered what could be meant by: ‘He has absolutely no side.