Mind your language

Some years ago The Spectator was sued for libel. It was a silly case, but it went to court and, early on, the counsel for the defence explained that The Spectator had no connection with the periodical of that name founded by Addison and Steele in 1711. But in the summing up the judge said, ‘And here we have a respectable magazine, founded by Addison and Steele . . . ’ I was reminded of this absurd incident by a reader, Mr Lawrence Brewer, who spotted the zeugma in Boris Johnson’s tribute to the late James Michie (Jaspistos), where he wrote of his ‘sitting with a glass of wine and a half-smile’. Mr Brewer goes on in his letter to discuss what might be called zeugmatic similes. An example is ‘camp as a row of tents’.

He’s the man who gave us The Meaning of Tingo, full of words that look funny in English (bum, Arabic for ‘owl’) or encapsulate an idea that it takes a sentence in English to explain. Very amusing it was too. My husband kept reading bits out while I was peeling the potatoes. Then doubts crept in. Could tingo, a word from Easter Island, really mean ‘to borrow things from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left’? Mr Jacot de Boinod’s definition came from They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, by Howard Rheingold (1988).

Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf or into anything too energetic, such as a hare. There are strong hints in the poem that Beowulf is a shape-shifter or skin-changer too. They’ve made a film of Beowulf, which is strange, because hardly anyone finds the poem of any interest whatsoever. And one gets the feeling that whatever good things there are hidden in the poem do not make it to the screen. For all its computer effects, the film does not bring out the shape-shifting aspect.

Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out of him. ‘I fear that the Prime Minister now cuts a rather sad figure,’ he began. ‘He was introduced to us a few months ago by his predecessor as the great clunking fist, but the boxing story has gone completely awry.’ But Dr Cable pronounced awry as OR-ee. Fellow MPs, like so many schoolboys, mocked him by calling out ‘Or-ee’ as the good doctor attempted to go on.

Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC. One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too, and has been for the past 800 years. Poor old BBC. People say all sorts of things on air, and many of them annoy me and you. But this is our laboratory. We listen to these locutions as samples of how the language is changing, and what is going wrong. The BBC still has a pronunciation unit and thanks to its labours the OUP has brought out the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99, but £10.49 on Amazon).

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case. The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English words were written as a gloss between the lines a couple of hundred years later.

‘Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt’, read an advertisement for toddlers’ T-shirts that Veronica showed me. In British English, tyke means ‘bitch, cur’ or ‘Yorkshireman’. In American English it is often used innocently enough for ‘child’. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me: pimp my ride. It sounded pretty rude to me, with unplumbed sexual connotations. Not suitable for toddlers. But Veronica explained that there is a popular programme on the MTV channel that goes by this name. It is all about tarting up cars.

When the postal strike was in full spate we heard quite a bit about ‘Spanish practices’, or at least we did sometimes. On one morning the BBC referred to ‘Spanish practices’ in the nine o’clock news and merely to ‘practices’ in its later bulletins, presumably for fear of offending any Spaniards who were listening in. ‘It used to be old Spanish customs in my day,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair like a badger on a sunny winter’s day. But he was right about the grey years when unions would come out over the slightest disagreement over demarcation. They stayed true to old Spanish customs. To be sure, practices is well enough established in a pejorative sense, having been in use for the past 500 years.

A mondegreen is a term for a misheard word or phrase from a poem, song or piece of prose. It derives from a couplet in an old ballad, ‘They hae slain the Earl Murray/ And laid him on the green’, with the last line misheard as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreen was coined in Harper’s Magazine by Sylvia Wright in 1954. I’ve just been leafing through a collection of mondegreens and malapropisms by Martin Toseland in The Ants Are My Friends (Portico Books, £9.99) The title refers to a mishearing of the Bob Dylan lyric ‘the answer my friend’ (is blowing in the wind). Mr Toseland also includes eggcorns.

I was having lunch with friends last week in a fairly swanky gastropub, and the menu promised a ballontine of quail. The waiter told me that ballontine meant that the quail had been deboned, then stuffed. It was quite nice to eat, but I have only just discovered what the menu intended to say, which is ballotine. I was put right by an amusing little book on French words in English with the not fantastically funny title of French Letters and the English Canon (Timewell Press, £9.99). It is by Mark Daniel. Actually, Mr Daniel says that the correct spelling is ballottine. He has seen it on menus even as balantine. I can’t find the word in my Littré, though he has ballotin, from ballot, a bundle.

I have stumbled across a translation of Shakespeare into English on a website called No Fear Shakespeare. Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy goes: ‘The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all?’ The double is is certainly a modern touch. Nobler is a surprising survival, considering how much else was jettisoned. I’m not sure about nasty. If it does not have a babyish tone, then it connotes dirtiness, as in that resolution for ‘When I come to be old’ by Jonathan Swift: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.

Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy Day. (There is such a thing.) ‘The most popular so far,’ said someone involved, ‘are those associated with positive aspirations, like peace, love, and serendipity.’ Yet serendipity is in a different category from peace or love. People might like peace and love, but it’s the sound of serendipity they like. It is like Boris Johnson’s choice: carminative.

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines with the Russian for a barn (in which soldiers might well be billeted), calling it a capau (whereas the Russian would be transliterated saraj). This I discovered from a new book on slang from the war called Fubar by Gordon L. Rottman (Osprey, £9.99). Unusually, in addition to two sections on British Commonwealth and American slang, he devotes 70 pages to German slang. Naturally, German servicemen exhibited some of the same weary humour as British soldiers or schoolboys.

A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. Very pretty. They have posted up some examples from famous writers free at www.optimumcomms.co.uk. ‘Surviving words from Old English have a special power to communicate,’ says their introductory blurb. ‘Great writers, especially poets, have always understood this.’ By Optimum’s analysis, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four takes 74.

Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang. Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.

I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. It did not bring sleep, for on page 80 I stumbled across ‘Top ten complaints about pronunciations’, from viewers and listeners that is. The ten were: clostridium difficile, controversy, Davos, the letter H, harass, kilometre, Kuwait, New Orleans and schedule.

The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. Ordinarily you may speak of Dr Foster’s middle but not the night’s middle, or England’s middle or even my nose’s middle. It is not the end of the world (or the world’s end), and numberless counter-examples may be cited, some from long ago. But the established idiom is undoubtedly shifting.

After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ I’m not sure that the significance of knighthoods is better understood in Iran than the title ayatollah is in Britain. This Grand Ayatollah likes grand statements.

‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone. I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors, the news kept referring to specialties, and I itched for specialities. Fowler’s Modern English Usage confirms that specialty is used especially in North America, but also in Britain, in the two chief senses of ‘a special pursuit’ and ‘a special feature or skill’.

‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. ‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. It was the memorial to the 202 people killed in the Bali bombing in 2002. London has acquired a sprinkling of memorials recently — to the women of the second world war in Whitehall, to animals in war in Park Lane, to the Battle of Britain on the Embankment. The Bali memorial has been there since last autumn, although my husband has only just noticed.