Mind your language

Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not mean ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as the parents suggested, but was a designation of the Lord Krishna in Hindi. Now I’ve caught up with the name that Nelly Furtado has given her own little daughter. Nelly Furtado, aged 27, is, as you must know, today’s most successful Portuguese–Canadian singer. She was named after Nellie Kim, the Soviet gymnast who rivalled Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics.

The sort of people who humorously say ‘Eat your heart out’ are also likely to say ‘To die for!’ as if they had just coined either phrase. ‘Eat your heart out’ has adjusted its meaning since the Oxford English Dictionary was redacted — 1893 for the letter E, edited by Henry Bradley. Then the definition was, ‘To suffer from silent grief or vexation’. Now an element of jealousy is added. The OED quotes Spenser from the 1590s, but there is a celebrated passage in the contemporary Essays of Francis Bacon, warning how bad it is not to have a confidant.

There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English. A contrary rumour was, I think, put about by enemies of the conservative approach taken, after Vatican intervention, by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. Its chairman is an Englishman, the Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche. My husband tells me he is not a baddy but wears a white hat. The text of the Latin Mass is one long crux for translators. The temptation to use deign comes in the Canon: ‘Nobis quoque peccatoribus famulis tuis … partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus.’ How to render digneris?

Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai sword at police (what a lot of people possess samurai swords; not a recommendation of character, I’d have thought), but had ‘aspirations to become a landscape gardener and is now attending drink counselling off his own back’. Back should, of course, be bat. This is a typically mangled example of a dead metaphor, a cliché if you like, or, more respectably, an idiom.

The play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot was Our American Cousin. Its English author, Tom Taylor (1817–80), reached the height of his great popularity with The Ticket-of-Leave Man, staged two years earlier, in 1863. I noticed a belittling reference to it in Stevenson the other day, so I decided to read it. He’s right, it isn’t very good, though if you like ‘relevance’, it does deal with a criminal on probation. Taylor sprinkles his dialogue with slang. A neddy is a life-preserver or cudgel, and flimp is, in his usage, to steal. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes sources suggesting that flimping is robbery with violence, either with one man pushing the victim in the back while his accomplice steals his watch, or simply by garrotting.

My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-of-season ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears in the Pyrenees. Well I wasn’t eaten by a bear, but I did get an appetising sample of a language that I hardly knew existed. I don’t mean Basque, which is a language that does not belong to the Indo–European group. This one does, and it is called Aranese (Aranes by its speakers). It is spoken in the valley of Aran, which had no proper road into it until a tunnel was completed.

Are we now more ignorant than Bertie Wooster? Orwell, in his essay defending P.G. Wodehouse, noted that when ‘he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology’. Orwell characterised such references as deriving from a ‘traditional education’. I’ve been looking at the Ukridge novel, Love Among the Chickens (revised 1921), with the help of the indefatigable Trevor Mordue’s internet source notes. Bertie had, of course, as a boy won the Scripture Knowledge prize, and, even though his biblical references are not recherché, few of the friends I’ve tried can place them.

On BBC television’s Newsnight they have got one of their reporters to live for a year ‘ethically’. By this they do not mean that he must remain faithful to his wife, eschew false expenses claims, be patient with his children and observe a strict adherence to the truth, though no doubt these virtues already come second-nature to him. They mean he should be green. This ethicality entails low-energy lightbulbs, cycling, recycling and the forswearing of aeroplane travel. What Aristotle’s opinion would be of this notion of ethics I leave to my neighbour Dr Jones, but it was certainly to the Greek philosopher that we owe the term.

There has been a dramatisation of some Jeeves stories on the wireless. The great flaw has been presenting them as slapstick, which hardly works without pictures and ill serves Wodehouse’s writing, which depends so much on playing with language. In what must have been additional dialogue, I heard some annoying anachronisms. Wodehouse’s books have acquired a period flavour that is part of their attraction. They were always old-fashioned, for their author’s fictional world drew on the days of his boyhood, or even upon those before his birth in 1881. But in the broadcast version a little rhyme about the newt included the word dinner-suit. I doubt that Wodehouse would have used the word. Often Bertie Wooster refers to the old soup and fish.

I thought my husband had fallen unconscious on the doormat, for I could not push the front door open. But I was mistaken. It was a huge drift of post complaining that I had used the word quick as an adverb.

‘Veronica,’ I said when she was taking her Wellingtons off outside the back door and couldn’t run away, ‘what does cotching mean?’ ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I thought you were Mrs Language.’ But cotching is meant to be young person’s slang, and, although Veronica has taken her degree, she still seems a young person to me. I’d found cotching in the Sun in an article about slang likely to be used by Jade Goody, an ordinary girl from south London who’d once been on Big Brother on television. The Sun said it meant ‘hanging out at a friend’s house to relax’.

I’m stuck in a fine old barney with Prof Michael McCarthy, the co-author of the new Cambridge Grammar of English. This grammar calmly notes that like can be used to introduce direct speech, instead of said, as in ‘I was like, “Wow!” He was like, “Come off it”.’ I can’t abide this construction, which is hardly grammar at all, more oral punctuation. People who use it, often the would-be young, are annoying. But Prof McCarthy thinks me an ignorant old housewife stamping her foot at historical inevitability. It is, he says, ‘an unequal battle between a columnist and a robust, living organism that has weathered hundreds of such onslaughts’ — not himself, but the English language.

My husband lives almost entirely in the past, generally finding it a more agreeable place to make his habitation as, often, do we. To sustain him, the television has recently screened a number of dramatic reconstructions of the last days of Harold Wilson, and on some other channel a retrospective of the Thatcher years under the would-be witty title Tory, Tory, Tory. A snatch of film of Margaret Thatcher showed her, after her victory in the general election of 1979, standing in Downing Street saying, ‘Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.

‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity. In a publication like The Spectator, conventions have to be adopted to keep the herbaceous borders of language neat. It is house style to use a singular verb with collective nouns such as government, BBC, nation. If in British English it is normal to regard a company as plural (‘British Leyland are defunct’), that convention extends in colloquial usage to the word denoting its line of business.

A semantic challenge of the genuine kind comes to me from the distinguished geographer Professor Alice Coleman. She has been responsible for a survey of the whole country’s land use, or utilisation as her project called it, though that distinction is not the semantic question under discussion. She is also the author of more than 300 academic papers (not that she told me this, being politely modest) and this is connected to her challenge. Professor Coleman has a high concept of research as the discovery of something previously unknown, or ‘putting one’s hand out into the dark and bringing in a fistful of light, or — since the unknown might not co-operate — risking only a fistful of continuing darkness’.

My husband has discovered ‘organic’ dried apricots, which lack the traffic-light glow of their coloured cousins and the concomitant taste of sulphur. He chews them while watching rugby on telly, then complains that he has lost his appetite for dinner. The apricot seems a fruit straight from the Arabian Nights. One is so used to coming across words that we borrowed from Arabic that there is a tendency to forget that the Arabs borrowed some words from Indo–European languages in the first place. And the apricot first received its name from the Romans. Apricot is related nominally to dementia praecox, for in Latin the apricot was labelled as a fruit (malum) that ripened early — malum praecocum.

A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light. My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as invisible as ever. I don’t know if it’s more extraordinary how many words we know the origins of, or the commonness of the words of which we remain ignorant — bun, bird and pig, for example. For dogs, hound is the word we once used, as hunting folk do now, but suddenly in the 11th century dog popped up. At first it was used of a particularly fierce kind of creature. In about 1225 the eremitical author of the Ancrene Rule, who I seem to remember kept a cat, likens the very devil to a dog.

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies: do not leave handbags on the seat while receiving Holy Communion.’ It is no simple matter to catch the thieves that make the warning necessary. At the same time, I have been told that pick-pockets like to hang around signs that warn, ‘Pick-pockets known to operate in this area,’ because when people see the signs they reach into their handbags or pat their pockets where their purses and wallets are. Most signs are useless.

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine. I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and made it beringela (which is also whence brinjal comes, an Indian English name for the vegetable). But the Arabs borrowed the word from Persian, an Indo-European language like our own. In Sanskrit the aubergine was called vatinganah. The compilers of that enjoyable but unreliable dictionary called Hobson-Jobson attribute to the Sanskrit word the meaning ‘the plant of Bengal’.