Mind your language

In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers — that’s another old Borewich saying you’ll not have heard, I dare say. Come and meet my wife. A right Borewich lass. Garn thrixen. Better a troust ner a thoutch, eh?

The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a few minutes’ rooting around. Deeper spadework showed how wrong I was. The Greek sukophantes, literally ‘fig-revealer’, had a picturesque derivation thrust upon it, sceptically retailed by Plutarch in his life of Solon.

The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel Foote, the actor and satirist (1721–77). It came in a piece of nonsense that he invented to test a claim by the actor Charles Macklin (1699–1797) that he could repeat anything after once hearing it. Behind the challenge was a feud that Foote had begun with Macklin in December 1754. Macklin, who had been Foote’s teacher, had set up a school of oratory, and Foote visited it to heckle him.

In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen ... 15/-’). It was from its function of separating shillings (solidi) from pence (denarii) that the sign acquired its name of solidus. In the Middle Ages the same sign had been used in manuscripts in much the same way that we use a comma, and in this function it was called a virgula in Latin, because it looked like a rod or stick. The English version virgule is dated only to the 19th century by the Oxford English Dictionary.

You know how you can tell a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard in a crowd without hearing them speak a word? Well, a friend of my husband’s who is interested in anthropology refers to that bundle of cultural characteristics as the jizz. It was not a word with which I was familiar outside a fairly grubby slang meaning familiar to Veronica’s generation. But I gather that it is widely used in ornithological practice, with reference to recognition of a species in action by its special behaviour and appearance. The word appeared no earlier than 1922, in the work of T.A. Coward (1867–1933).

I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of Venice, the film with Al Pacino as Shylock. At the end of Act Three, Scene Two, Bassanio reads out a letter, part of which says, ‘All debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death.’ At first Dr Schofield put it down to some American mangling, but then, in an act of scholarship, the learned doctor looked it up in the handy Shakespeare without which no consulting room is complete.

More on treacle, thanks to Mr Christopher Couchman of Bath, who sends a lovely recipe for Venice treacle, taken from the English Dispensatory of John Quincy (who died in 1722). My husband, before going off on some pharmaceutically funded freebie, said he remembered the book but hadn’t used it recently. I love strange lists, but have no room for all the contents of this ‘capital alexipharmic’.

I think that, like a hosepipe ban, we might just be spared the permanent establishment of the term 7/7. After all, some people were inexplicably fond of the phrase Y2K, meaning 2000, and it seems as ridiculous now as platform soles for men. I find 7/7 distasteful. It is non-native, and it makes claims for an event that unfortunately are unlikely to persist. The bombs of 7 July were certainly not as important as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, nor will they remain as memorable. It is only by a fluke that 7/7 is as transparent to British English-speakers as to American, for they put their days and months round the wrong way. It is this habit that momentarily makes me think every now and then that the attacks of 9/11 occurred on 9 November.

To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’ Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47. I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary reference to a ‘wild beast’, from the Greek for which the English word treacle derives.

As his contribution to Anglo-Islamic understanding, my husband asked me what the connection was between genius loci and the genie in the bottle. I couldn’t say that I knew, although I don’t suppose Osama bin Laden knows either. Genius is complicated semantically. I think it has gone a step further than the OED suggests, now signifying an Einsteinian ‘brains’, not so much in contradistinction to a man of talent as 100 years ago. In Latin it meant first the tutelary deity accompanying a man through life, like Socrates’ daemon. The Middle Ages entertained what was said to be a Pythagorean belief in a good and a bad genius that lead us on to good or ill actions.

‘It’s a Welsh rare bit,’ said my husband carefully, staring at some toasted cheese on toast. What, I asked him, would a ‘rare bit’ be like that wasn’t Welsh? He was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. It is strange that people not only insist on spelling Welsh rabbit as Welsh rarebit, but also think that by doing so they are performing some sort of explanatory task. Dear old Hannah Glasse knew all about it. ‘To make a Welch-Rabbit,’ she says in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), ‘Toast the Bread on both Sides, then toast the Cheese on one Side, and lay it on the Toast, and with a hot Iron brown the other side.

A glory of British packaging was the Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup tin depicting a dead lion under what appeared to be a cloud of flies. If the tin was kept in a damp larder long enough, spots of rust would spread through the sticky deposit round its rim. Next to the dead lion was the motto, ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’, which was only enlightening if the reader was aware that, in the book of Judges (XIV 14) it was the challenge in quite a difficult riddle game played by Samson, who had killed a lion with his bare hands, the body of which was then used by a passing swarm of bees. But how was anyone meant to know about the lion and bees? Samson justified himself by asking, ‘What is sweeter than honey? And what is stronger than a lion?

A recent cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a punkish teenager saying to a more conventional youth, ‘I’m bored. Can I shave your head?’ Ho, ho. But then the paper published a letter from ‘Merrill’ from Nova Scotia saying, ‘Would you please explain why nobody here knows the difference between can and may? In Nova Scotia, our teacher would not let us out of grade three if we didn’t know the difference.’ In reply the paper said, ‘Cartoon creators want their characters to be believable, so they have them speak in a way that would be typical for the characters.’ Then it went further: ‘In our country, so many people use can instead of may that many dictionaries now show that it has come to mean the same thing.

‘Have you noticed,’ asked Kim Fletcher, a man, at a party to launch his brilliant new Journalist’s Handbook, ‘how people say testament when they mean testimony?’ I couldn’t quite say I had, yet a nagging feeling in my brain suggested he was on to something, so I looked through the newspapers to examine their testimony. Testimony is straightforwardly used in the ordinary courtroom way for ‘giving evidence’. This can be extended to a solemn statement such as a ‘series of miracle “testimonies”’ mentioned by the Scottish Daily Record recently. Testimonial usually refers to football matches that raise money for superannuated players and the like, as benefit nights once did for the stagebound thespian.

I have been enjoying in a way a book my husband gave me for my birthday called Shop Horror (Fourth Estate, £10). This compilation by Guy Swillingham of colour photographs of the ‘best of the worst in British shop names’ shares something of the spirit of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards, which were, of course, not boring at all. For some reason, hairdressers are particularly given to adopting painful puns. There is Ali Barber’s at Leyland, Herr Kutz at Warsash, Hants, Barber Blacksheep in Brighton, Director’s Cut at Wombwell, Best Little Hair House in Hereford (in Hereford). These are lopsided puns, for there is no necessity for the shops to be run by Ali or a German, or a black sheep of the family, or a cineaste or a retired madame.

An unquiet correspondent sends a ‘breath of rage’ all the way from Burrum Heads, Queensland. ‘I do wish you could manage to educate some of your fellow columnists,’ barks Mr Geoff Baker, adding a few paragraphs about ‘ignorance’, ‘solecisms, ‘disappointment’, ‘Bad English’, ‘after-hours adult education’. Goodness! What have we done? Why, we’ve used ‘or not’ after ‘whether’. Mr Barker’s gripe is that this introduces a culpable redundancy. That, however, is not the way the community of English-speakers has seen it over the past few hundred years.

This week: the mystery of the missing banister. But first an example of equable temperament, compared with many inquirers into language, from Dr Sylvia Moody. She mildly wonders why we sometimes say ‘a friend of the family’ and sometimes ‘a friend of the family’s’. The latter construction (like ‘a habit of mine’, ‘a play of Shakespeare’s’) is discussed briefly by the late Robert Burchfield, in his revised Fowler’s Modern English Usage, under the heading ‘double possessive’. It is called ‘post-genitive’ in the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language edited by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik.

‘What does SIM mean?’ asked my husband, looking up like a sulky sunset from a mobile-phone instruction booklet. Well, I knew what it was, but not what the acronym stood for. This independence of word and significand allows the tiresome multiplication of new labels for new technological gadgets, but it also teaches old words to learn new tricks. The Queen Mary 2 still sails saillessly. And though I hate train station instead of railway station, at least the train part was used in the 15th century for the trailing part of a dress (as now), and in a bundle of connected senses of things pulled, extending to the retinue of a magnate. The oldest sense (from the 14th century, now obsolete) means ‘delay’ — a familiar concomitant of the mechanised transport.

I was surprised by the number of people who disliked the Daily Telegraph’s headline on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy: ‘“God’s rottweiler” is the new pope’. I don’t think it was meant to be as rude as many thought. But what puzzled me was that I had never heard anyone refer to Ratzinger as ‘God’s rottweiler’. It seems to be a common failure of the whole press to assert that people are ‘known as’ some catchy nickname, when no one ever uses it. One might call it the Dubbing Fallacy. Dub, since the 12th century has signified the conferring of a knighthood, and by the 16th century had been extended to mean ‘to give a nickname’.

‘He has just had a lunch of eels and is in good spirits,’ wrote Mr Alistair McKay of Mr George Melly, in the Scotsman. ‘If he finds it tiresome to talk about himself, he does a fine job of disguising it. But the stories are worth waiting for and the louche music of his voice is compelling. He talks somewhat like a man blowing smoke rings from a rusty trumpet.’ It was the word louche that worries Mr Cecil Gysin from Farnham. He fears that writers do not appreciate its true meaning. ‘The Shorter Oxford gives us “oblique, not straightforward” and directs us to the French, where I find “squinting, dubious, ambiguous, equivocal, suspicious, shady”.’ Certainly one or more of those meanings might suit Mr Melly, and others not.