Mind your language

Dot Wordswoth on pens and puns ‘Why,’ asked my husband, looking up from his book, ‘is Joseph Gillott a very bad man?’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Because,’ he replied, as if I had acknowledged defeat, ‘he wishes to accustom the public to steel pens and then tries to persuade them that they do write.’ By the way that he was slapping his thigh and spilling his glass of whisky, I could see that he thought this was a joke. There was, it appeared, a double play on words: steel and steal, and do write and do right. Who Joseph Gillott was, perhaps I should have known, but didn’t. He was, it turns out, the perfecter of the steel pen nib.

Queens' College, Cambridge or Queens' College, Cambridge I was interested by a note on the website of Queens’ College, Cambridge, because the use of the apostrophe in English is governed by such simple rules that it is hard to see how there can be much dispute about it. The college says that everyone is told to spell it Queens’ College because it was founded by two Queens of England: Margaret of Anjou, the wife of Henry VI, in 1448, and Elizabeth Woodville, the wife Edward IV, in 1465. But the college adds quite correctly that an apostrophe to indicate the possessive is ‘of no great antiquity’. (It is much more recent than the foundation of the college.

Dot Wordsworth gives it her best shot I hardly wish to interpose my body between Anthony Horowitz and Simon Hoggart, even though the former invoked me. He declared (Letters, 10 May) that he is puzzled by Mr Hoggart’s remark in his television column that ‘in 1945 nobody ever said, “I’ll give it my best shot”,’ as someone was made to in Foyle’s War. This is not just a matter of finding the two words best and shot next to each other. In Treasure Island, the answer to the question ‘Who’s the best shot?’ is Squire Trelawney. No, the shot we’re talking about is neither the discharge from a firearm nor the person who makes it.

‘What’s so super about these superdelegates?’ asked my husband from the other room, while I was washing the Jersey Royals. I do not intend trying to explain the American political system here. These delegates are not necessarily super at all. I wonder what connections superdelegates suggests in the American mind. If it suggests superman, the reference is likely to be the cartoon hero who first made his appearance in 1938, ‘champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need’. That hardly sounds like a description of the Democrat politicians who may have to devote their existence to deciding whether Hillary Clinton should be their presidential candidate.

The events of 1 May seem a long time ago, and so does their sequel, a so-called fightback by the Labour party. A press briefing last Sunday declared in a fine froth of mixed metaphors: ‘Gordon Brown will seek to kick-start Labour’s fightback today after its mauling at the polls.’ Fightback is a handy word for politicians because it suggests more than it says. It bears an ambiguous meaning, either ‘retaliation’ (which would sound too spiteful for a party done down by the electorate) or ‘recovery’ (which is the end hoped for, but certainly not guaranteed). The word has been around for the past 50 years or so, and is still considered colloquial in register.

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ writes Mr Peter Gasson from Aylesbury, ‘policies were implemented; services were provided; changes were made or brought about; promises were fulfilled. Now they are uniformly delivered. I suppose the word has become so popular because it sounds emphatic.’ I know just what you mean, Mr Gasson, and so must we all, which suggests that politicians and managers who use the word deliver should think again. To give the cliché its full deficit of originality it is coupled with solutions: business solutions, catering solutions, heating solutions, bovine health solutions. All will be delivered, at a price. By delivered they do not mean brought to your door in a cardboard box, like organic vegetables. They mean ‘done’.

The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward. The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward. It is much used by management-brains and media-types. I told my husband that I was looking out for examples in the press, and he came back with a handful of cuttings about football matches. The footballing usage, as I patiently explained to him as he turned to the whisky on the sideboard, is spatial, not temporal. There is another variant in meaning, which seems to signify the same as going on. Joan Bakewell twice used the phrase in this sense in the same article in the Independent.

‘I wonder,’ writes Kim Parsons from Helston, or nearby, ‘if you have seen the new government-generated No Smoking signs which declare: “It is against the law to smoke in these premises.” Since when has on in this context become in?’’ I have seen the signs, because there is one at the church door in my parish, even though the incense continues to rise within. I suppose a church is ‘premises’, but the classic context of premises comes in the quotation from a licensing Act written above many an inn door, permitting the named proprietor ‘to retail beer, wine, spirits, and tobacco to be consumed on the premises’.

Dot Wordsworth on why locust may sometimes not mean 'locust'. When the Bible says that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey, what does it mean by locusts? The question may be a chestnut, but I’ve found some jolly new material in seeking the answer. Jews are forbidden to eat winged insects that walk around, but locusts are excepted. Leviticus (xi 22) says: ‘Even these of them ye may eat; the locust after his kind, and the bald locust after his kind, and the beetle after his kind, and the grasshopper after his kind.’ Beetle seems a bad translation. So why think that locust does not mean ‘locust’?

Dot Wordsworth follows a hissing S with a nasal N. A musician, Alexander Faris, writes with a list of words beginning with hissing S and nasal N: snarl, snatch, sneak, sneer, sneeze, snicker, snigger, snip, snob, snore, snort, snot, snub, snuff and snout, all of them negative in connotation. He makes the point that they seem to share an onomatopoeic element. I can see that more than half of them have to do with the nose, an organ we treat with some caution. Although it is regarded as unclean (when it is someone else’s and gets too close to us), at the same time, we make enjoyable use of our own, nosing our wine or scenting the breeze. Your sniff bad; my sniff good.

I’ve found the origin of the football cliché ‘over the moon’. Or I thought I’d found it. In a speech written in 1857 for W.E. Gladstone by Lord Lyttelton, his brother-in-law, in a family dialect known as Glynnese, comes the following sentence: ‘The Dolly was over the moon with a magpie sandwich which she took like pork.’ This may be translated as: ‘The dowager was in high spirits with an underdone sandwich, which she took without any feeling of gratitude.’ I’ve always been in two minds about Glynnese. Sometimes it makes me laugh, with its presupposition of a houseful of larks and children. Its great exponents were Catherine, Mrs Gladstone, and her sister Mary, Lady Lyttelton.

A medical friend of my husband’s came to me in some distress, having stumbled upon an advertisement in the New Yorker mentioning a ‘documentary débuting November 6’. He was amused by the careful use of an acute accent, puzzled by the word’s pronunciation and shocked by the brutal transformation of a French noun into an English verb, of sorts. Annoyingly for those who find that this usage grates, the first example garnered by the Oxford English Dictionary is from as long ago as 1830, from Fraser’s Magazine: ‘He debuted at Naples, about five years ago, and has since performed in the principal theatres of Italy.

My husband went to a medical conference, paid for by a pharmaceutical company, in Padua, where the university has been teaching medicine since the 14th century. So I went too and popped over to Venice, taking with me Mrs Ruskin. I mean Effie, who, poor thing, ran away from John Ruskin in 1854 after six years of marriage when he had still not steeled himself to do the deed. Nothing wrong with her. She had eight children after she married Millais. Her letters Effie in Venice, edited by Mary Lutyens, were, I found, just the companion to a few days in that irresistible city. Effie refers to a visit to the Borromean Islands, the property of the rich old family to which the sympathetic saint Charles Borromeo belonged.

During the martyrdom by the press of Dr Rowan Williams, the Sun carried as its front-page splash headline ‘Bash the bishop’. I was surprised that a sentence of which the demotic meaning must have been familiar to the supposedly ill-educated readers of that paper was completely unknown to a brilliant and highly educated friend of mine engaged in periodical journalism. There are two unreliable but useful lexicons of improper slang easily available on the internet. One is ‘Roger’s Profanisaurus’, based on the foul-mouthed inventiveness of a character (Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly) in Viz, the amusing comic for childish adults. It gives as synonyms for bash the bishop: burp the worm or bank with Barclays.

In my husband’s coat pocket when I took it to the cleaner’s I found a piece of paper that he had brought home from the dentist’s. It contained remarks about the word merry, for his dentist is a well-read man of letters. I should have written about this before Christmas, but it was still hidden in the pocket. ‘Merry is a spectrum word,’ the notes say. ‘At one end is the old northern meaning of “strong” or “brave”; at the other end is the southern meaning of “jolly”, “happy”.’ The northern meaning he says is in the dialect dictionary. I can’t find it in this sense in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary or in the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary. No matter.

Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect  See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect phonetically. In fact it is a product of the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament lists ‘Scottish citizen languages’ as ‘Arabic, Bengali, British Sign Language, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Scots and Urdu’. Polish does not get a look-in. The delusion under which the Parliament labours is that Scots is a different language from English. In reality it is a dialect, no more different from standard English than the dialects of Northumberland or Devon.

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliché. It is generally a deal or settlement that is brokered, according to correspondents on radio and television. The cliché is not unconnected with the need for an ‘honest broker’. Yet there is a perfectly good word to broke, literally and metaphorically, which has served for hundreds of years. Originally a broker was one who dealt in wine au broc, in other words from a broached barrel, as a tapster. Both broker and broach come from Latin broccus, via the unrecorded form brocca, ‘a spike’.

I caught my husband perusing a menswear catalogue. I don’t know where he got it. It can’t have been sent to him. It was the kind that leans towards nightshirts and Barathea blazers. The language used was extraordinary. The ‘striking set of gentleman’s pure silk-club ties’ — ones with thin stripes — would be, it assured the purchaser, ‘sure to receive the nod from the doorman’. If by chance it matched the real tie of the club in question, perhaps more than a nod. Can men really think they’ll be taken for clubmen and gents by sending a cheque for £30?

An advertisement for birdfood said: ‘To differentiate between the imported niger oilseed, used to feed wild birds, and thistle — as well as to eliminate any possibility of offensively mispronouncing the word “niger” — the Wild Bird Feeding Industry trademarked the name Nyjer in 1998.’ They might have done, if an industry can, but I’ve seen a packet of seed bearing the name of the British Trust for Ornithology, on sale at a garden centre, labelled ‘Nyger’ in big letters, which is neither one thing nor the other. There is also a standard blurb that birdseed merchants copy on to their websites, both in Britain and America.

Those who indulge in the ‘infuriating genteelism’ of saying Christmas lunch must be castigated, a reader from Leicester, Mr Clifford Dunkley, tells me. Castigate them, do. But they won’t stay castigated. Yet it must be Christmas dinner, for the phrase is fossilised, as much as ‘God save the Queen’ is fossilised in preserving the subjunctive. Christmas dinner is unusual because the thing is fossilised as well as the name. The new online Oxford English Dictionary preserves the definition of dinner that it gave in June 1896: ‘The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. Ger. Mittagsessen), but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening.