Mind your language

Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone: ‘He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.’ Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone: ‘He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.’ At least, she said so according to G.W.E. Russell (1853-1919), who wrote biographies not only of Gladstone but also of Sydney Smith, E.B. Pusey and H.P. Liddon. It’s a good line, cleverly used by Jeremy Butterfield in Damp Squid (Oxford, £9.99), his new book about changes in the English language. ‘The quote from Queen Victoria,’ he writes, ‘suggests that even she may not have lived up to the standards set by some purists.’ In saying that, he introduces two more red rags to some purists: quote for quotation and may for might.

My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading the very good new biography of the young G.K. Chesterton by William Oddie. My husband, having found my book more interesting than his, looked up from it and said: ‘What does he mean by pessimism?’ Certainly, a revolt against pessimism was the central event of Chesterton’s life. In 1894, when he was 20, he went through a crisis at the Slade school of art.

‘I hate jokes,’ said my husband affably, and added: ‘Hwumph!’ The latter was an oral marker as he heaved his body from his armchair to the sideboard where the contents of the whisky bottle needed adjusting. With the former remark, I concurred, for he meant formalised jokes (‘Have you heard the one…?) that emerge from the ether like a flu virus. The internet has changed the dissemination of these, as it has changed the way quotations arrive in waves.

It is a curious misapprehension of many otherwise intelligent and well-informed people to think that a writer who is the earliest to be quoted in the dictionary as having used a word actually invented it. The lofty Oxonian Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947), who as the son of Bodley’s librarian should have known better, left in his Notebooks a list of words under the names of the people who ‘invented them’ (if the published transcript may be relied on). So he attributes insecurity to the invention of Sir Thomas Browne. The OED does indeed quote the old physician as using the word in 1646 but, later in its entry, quotes Jeremy Taylor using insecurities, in 1649.

I had not realised that T.S. Eliot was a Sherlock Holmes fan until I thought to look up the word grimpen, which occurs in ‘East Coker’, in the Four Quartets: ‘On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.’ We take grimpen to mean ‘a bog’. The OED undogmatically gives the meaning as ‘marshy area’, and the etymology as ‘uncertain’. This is no surprise since the word, it appears, was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson is on Dartmoor with Stapleton the naturalist. ‘“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or beast.

Dot Wordsworth on sex and séances In 1885 W.T. Stead bought a 13-year-old girl for £5 as part of his campaign to get the age of consent raised to 16. He was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, an evening paper. Stead’s allies included Bramwell Booth, the son of the founder of the Salvation Army, Cardinal Manning, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Frederick Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. The scandalous publicity Stead achieved helped to bring in a Bill by which the age of consent was indeed raised to 16. Stead did not mention in print that he had chloroformed the poor girl he had bought, and had her inspected at a hotel before she was whisked off to France. This came out at his trial, and he served three months in Holloway.

Dot Wordsworth on fashions in language There is no reason to disallow the phrase aside from (instead of apart from), but I know I shall never use it. Hearing it, with slight annoyance, set me wondering why people admit new terms for old in their personal speech. We hear politicians and football commentators saying aside from on the wireless and television. If the phrase filled a gap in the language, I could see the point of picking it up. But there seems to be no new meaning or connotation in aside from that is not conveyed by apart from. Both phrases have the separate meanings of ‘in addition to’ (‘Quite apart from his shoes, his cuffs were filthy’) and ‘except for’ (‘Apart from his lisp, his pronunciation was clear’).

‘Not really,’ replied my husband when I asked if he thought it would be nice for us to have the Gibsons over for supper. If you knew the Gibsons (not their real name), you’d see the force of his answer. Real is a slippery word. I laughed when reading, in Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s new book on parsonages, about mid-19th-century disapproval of stucco for making a building less real. Alfred Bartholomew (1801-1845), a translator of the Psalms and the architect of the Finsbury Savings Bank in Clerkenwell, prefaced his Specifications for Practical Architecture (1840) with a text in Hebrew, from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘One built up a wall, and, lo, others daubed it with untempered mortar. Say unto them which daub it with untempered mortar, that it shall fall.

My husband’s club was closed in August, which meant, paradoxically, that I saw less of him, because he enjoyed the chance to exercise reciprocal rights at other clubs, which I suspect might not have welcomed him as a member in the first place. Sitting in some smokeless smoking-room he took to reading the Financial Times, and there he saw an article by Michael Skapinker on the uses of simplified English. Apparently, Voice of America broadcasts some programmes in something called Special English, which has about 1,500 words, in comparison with an educated Englishman’s vocabulary of 30,000.

The Earl of Cottenham’s surname is Pepys. He doesn’t pronounce it peeps, like the diarist, but peppiss, stressed on the first syllable. It’s almost impossible to know how to pronounce English family names. The former deputy editor of this magazine, Andrew Gimson, pronounces his with a soft g. Jeffrey Bernard stressed the second syllable of his. James Michie, the late Jaspistos, rhymed with sticky. Christopher Fildes’s name rhymes with wilds. The BBC booklets on pronunciation published in the 1930s, about which I have been writing this month, had reached number seven by 1939, ‘Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some British Family Names and Titles’, still edited by Arthur Lloyd James.

‘What are all these letters?’ asked my husband, unhelpfully stirring the pile on the doormat with his foot, looking without success for any addressed to him. They were about the BBC recommendations to announcers, published in 1928, that I wrote about last week. To entertain you further, I’ve been rummaging in a successor booklet, from 1930, on the pronunciation of English place-names. By then, George Bernard Shaw had taken over from Robert Bridges as chairman of the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English (in existence from 1926 to 1940). I’m not sure how that trimmed the vessel.

Dot Wordsworth compares the pronounciation of words in 1928 and in the present day Do you pronounce the ‘l’ in falcon? That civilised Kentish man Mr Eric Brown has sent me an entertaining newspaper cutting kept for 18 years. It is from the Times’s ‘On this day’ column, with news from 27 July 1928, of the first published booklet on BBC pronunciation for the guidance of broadcasters. It cannot have been easy for the pronunciation committee, appointed in 1926, to agree. Its members included the learned phonetician Daniel Jones and the opinionated playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas about language were not always soundly based. Jones was the basis for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion.

Those Miliband boys are clever. I was trying to discover what they stood for, and I thought I’d found something interesting in a speech by Ed Miliband. Then I realised I was mistaken. ‘I want a society where there is intergenerational equity,’ he said in a speech to Compass (not the investor and analyst group of that name but the ‘membership organisation promoting left-wing debate in modern Britain’). Perhaps the investment red herring made me think that ‘intergenerational equity’ meant leaving property to one’s children, without having it confiscated by death duties. No such luck. To Ed’s interlocutors, ‘intergenerational equity’ is to do with ‘sustainable development’, global warming and all that.

After Padraig Harrington gave an interview to the Today programme the other day, Evan Davis, the presenter, commented that he had never heard the phrase ‘amn’t I’ before. Perhaps he has not been to Ireland. The Oxford English Dictionary does not seem to comment on the Irish character of the abbreviation. This interrogative form is cited only in illustration of another word entirely, in a quotation from the 1950s. Usefully, this makes the Irish link clear: ‘Haven’t I the art of a real Irish story-teller? Amn’t I the latter-day heir o’ the great bards and story-tellers?’ If one thinks of it, the English English form ‘aren’t I’ is just as odd.

Although I do not smoke, I find my sympathies drawn more and more to persecuted smokers. Outside Victoria station an aggressive notice says: ‘It is against the law to smoke in these premises including under this canopy.’ Never mind that the canopy, really a porte-cochère, is open to the elements, with a broken roof-pane that lets rain pelt the taxi queue, nor that the welcome Sir Nigel Gresley regularly enters the train shed smoking powerfully. What grates is to be bossed about in bad grammar. Including is a participial adjective. In neither of the ways that it is used can it qualify an adverbial phrase such as ‘under this canopy’. It would be correct to say ‘under canopies, including this one’.

Dot Wordsworth on the word 'sticky'. Longfellow, in the middle of writing ‘Hiawatha’, complained to his diary one hot day of ‘Chamber-maids chattering about — children crying — and everything sticky except postage stamps, which having stuck all together like a swarm of bees, refuse further duty.’ It’s funny how Longfellow wrote better informally than when he tried. Anyway, stickiness has, my daughter tells me, become a virtue in business circles. It is a desirable quality for websites, from which so many strive to squeeze money. Stickiness glues users to your site and makes them return to it, like flies to syrup.

It was either Kung Fu Panda or Prince Caspian, so I took my nephew and niece to the latter. Aunts are only flesh and blood. A trailer for the Panda film featured him exclaiming ‘Awesome!’ Strangely enough this word is used in C.S. Lewis’s novel, about Aslan’s How, though not in the film. Awesome does not appear in the Bible (although awe does, four times, always in the phrase ‘stand in awe’), but Lewis meant it in the sense that the Authorised Version expressed by dreadful, as when Jacob declared: ‘How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God.’ I could see that changes in connotation would be a problem for the screenwriters.

During my rather dry investigation last week of apostrophes on the London Underground map, I found something far more interesting. It is the anagram Underground map invented two years ago by the pseudonymous Barry Heck (after the great Underground mapper Harry Beck). Transport for London, as they call themselves at the moment, asserted, no doubt correctly, their own copyright in the map, and clamped down on reproduction of the anagram version. But the anagram names of the stations are not their copyright and may be discussed without locking the door. The anagrams were apparently done with an online anagram generator. To make them with a paper and pencil would be more satisfying, as crossword-solvers appreciate.

How funny to find the apostrophe described as a ‘notoriously difficult punctuation mark’ in last week’s Letters. It’s simple. So, the simple reason that St Thomas’s Hospital should be spelt with the final s is that it is pronounced by everybody as tom-ass-is, and the spelling must reflect that. I agree that Earl’s Court is, as the Underground philosopher Anne Wotana Kaye suggests (Letters, 14 June), a deeper problem, for historical reasons. The station bears an apostrophe, whereas Barons Court does not. (Perhaps Dublin should build an Underground so that it could have a station called Finnegans Wake, like Joyce’s novel, but unlike the fully apostrophed name of the song.

Does it matter when we lose battles as language changes? In Oxford the other day, I saw another piece of evidence that in the High Street has changed to on the High Street. A newsagent’s near Teddy Hall has for some time been called Honey’s of the High. It is now usually called Honey’s on the High. I don’t much like the change, but it seems triumphant. A change of a different kind that triumphed two or three decades ago was in the pronunciation of sonorous. It is now stressed on the first syllable, and that indeed is how I say it. Formerly, it was stressed on the second syllable. I am not conscious of ever hearing it so pronounced now.