Mind your language

Usher, who is no relation of Poe’s unfortunate family, has, I hear, decreed that jeans and trainers are not enough. Usher is an African-American singer, with a new interest in gentility. He is shocked by people not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and he is disgusted by ‘profanity’. Profanity in this context is language of the kind used after 9 p.m. on the television. It means rude words that are not necessarily blasphemous — you know the f-word, and mother, though Americans, even of a gangsta disposition, seem less given to the c-word. Profanity is not literally ungodly, but then nor is swearing, for to say f—– is no more swearing a false oath than it is taking the name of God in vain.

What is the difference between a cad and a bounder? It depends on your dictionary. ‘A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards women,’ says the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) of cad, and of bounder, ‘a dishonourable man.’ Both words are marked ‘dated’. The origin given for cad is: ‘Late 18th century, denoting a passenger picked up by a horse-drawn coach for personal profit.’ This demonstrates the difference between etymology and explanation. Certainly that was the meaning of the word in the late 18th century, but the appeal that the former denotation makes to the imagination does not explain the current meaning of the word. This passenger was not regarded as caddish, to women or anyone else.

While I was trying to puzzle out the Hebrew for ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ last week my husband was moved to begin a series of Christmas carols from the shelter of his armchair, occasionally waving a little mat soiled with the glass-rings of ages in time to the music. Lovely. There was method, or at least a tenuous anchorhold on reality, in his madness, for he began with ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’. He tried it out alternately with ‘God rest you’, and seemed equally happy with either. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has it as ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, the version given in the Oxford Book of Carols. It is anonymous. The first thing is that merry is not an adjectival qualification of gentlemen.

I enjoyed the book Long Live Latin rather more than the Spectator reviewer (5 February) seems to have done, and its author, John Gray, has put his finger on a misleading passage in Lynne Truss’s famous book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. (I’m not sure I wouldn’t have hyphenated ‘Zero-Tolerance Approach’, but no matter.) Mr Gray takes a sentence from the prophet Isaiah (xxxx 1): Consolamini consolamini populus meus dicit Deus vester. This is translated in the Authorised Version (which Americans and people who say ‘toilet’ call the King James Bible) as, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.

What a terrible injustice Angela Cannings went through, being wrongly accused of killing her baby son, after having lost two previously, and then imprisoned. I heard her on Woman’s Hour and felt great sympathy for her and not a little anger at her persecutors. I do not mean to trivialise her sufferings by latching on to two words she used on the wireless, inmate and soulmate. She spoke of ‘fellow inmates’ in prison, and this is the way the word is used today, as a synonym for ‘detainee’, in a prison, asylum or institution. Originally it meant a fellow lodger, so ‘fellow inmate’ would be a pleonasm. The Oxford English Dictionary leans to the idea that it derives from inn, meaning a place to stay, rather than in, the preposition.

‘Chalk’n’cheese, hole in one, salt’n’pepper, three-in-one oil, sheep’n’goats, eyeless in Gaza, Swan’n’Edgar,’ said my husband, not pausing for breath, so that nature took over, and a sharp inhalation whisked some whisky into his trachea, bringing on a fit of coughing that turned him a plum colour. I hadn’t heard anyone say ‘Swan and Edgar’ for some time. It is the only familiar coupling from those lines in Princess Ida: ‘Let Swan secede from Edgar — Gask from Gask;/ Sewell from Cross — Lewis from Allenby!

Wednesday was the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, and it was also the Chinese New Year, the first day of the ‘Year of the Cockerel — Year 4702 in the Chinese calendar’ as a site on the Internet had it. The cockerel? What’s wrong with the cock? The answer is obvious, and so obvious, it seems, that the word can no longer be used. A cockerel is a young cock, but it does not serve a double life as a rude word. An alternative to cockerel is rooster, an Americanism (though this name for the cock was once usual in Kent). The London Chinatown Chinese Association calls this year the Year of the Rooster, and so does the BBC website and the Mayor of London.

Radio Four had a trailer programme for a series it will run in August called Word 4 Word. (Yes, it is a bit silly to have a visual pun on the wireless.) It is intended to contribute to Leeds University’s new dialect map of the United Kingdom, a splendid project. I am not sure how much Radio Four’s findings are contributing so far to the Leeds survey, since the programme encouraged interviewees to come up with what were in effect nonce-terms and jocular slang coinages. An example was five-finger disco for shoplifting — not a lexical item that is likely to find a long-lived place on the nation’s verbal atlas.

Do I, asks Mr Peter Andrews, who lives romantically at the New River Head, know the origin of the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’? Does anyone know, really? One can judge its vintage from the fossilised word omnibus; one would never say ‘man on the Clapham bus’. I had thought that it was coined by Edmund Yates (1831–96), the rackety (brought up above the Adelphi Theatre, bankrupt, four months for criminal libel, died after an attack at the Garrick Theatre) journalist.

I’ve just come back from the Army and Navy Stores, only it is not the Army and Navy Stores any more. They have changed the name, which was about the only thing that wasn’t wrong with it. It joins the Public Record Office, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Railtrack, although in the last case neither the thing nor the name was good. Now that Christmas is distant and reduced, let me prepare you for next year. An intelligent publisher told me last week that the origin of the term Boxing Day was unknown. I told him I would look it up in the dictionary, which he thought was cheating. But I wish more people did so. The OED is garrulous on the subject.

It might seem a little early to say so, but if there’s one word this year can do without, it is edgy. It has become a cliché and people seem to use it without any discernible meaning. Both characteristics no doubt go together. I was brought up to take edgy as meaning ‘irritable, on edge, nervous’. Those are the latest of the established meanings, it having escaped the attention of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, though the supplements later supplied a sample from the 1830s. A sense in which I have never used edgy is ‘having the outlines too hard’, with reference to a painting. ‘There were two Holbeins, flat, shadowless, edgy compositions.

From 1 January 1888 ‘all substances, whether compound or otherwise, prepared in imitation of butter’ had to be offered for sale under the name of margarine. I can’t pretend that this date is exactly a round number, but it seems more admirable than some of the anniversaries trotted out over the past week. Is this Act still in force, does anyone know? If it is, the supermarket shelves require rearrangement. The Act was a triumph for the margarinists over the butterinists, for the latter, represented by grocers’ wholesalers, wanted to continue calling such spreadables butterine, especially when they had been churned up with perhaps 10 per cent of milk.

I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the opposite of the paulo-post-future.) There was a good example on the television receiver after the collapse of the panda-like mating ritual between Mr Gerry Adams and the Revd Ian Paisley. ‘There were always going to be recriminations after the failure of the deal,’ said the reporter. Were there, indeed? That rather supposes the inevitability of what has happened. If the deal had not failed, where would the ‘always going to’ be? For this reason the tense might be called the Hindsight Future.

John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: ‘Verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed — but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life.’ ‘When and why did “progress” become a verb, as in “Let’s progress this development”?’ he wonders. ‘Probably about the same time as “impact”.’ But it is not difficult to discover that this speculation is wrong.

A reader tells me that he had always thought ‘one-horse town’ must have derived from a 1940s film script in which John Wayne pushes open the swing doors of a saloon, gets his whisky, then inquires, ‘Whadda they call this one-horse town?’ But my correspondent finds Trollopean connections for the phrase. He does not say which biography he is drawing on, but he sets the scene in 1855, when Trollope had to appear before a parliamentary committee at the instigation of some Irish MPs. It is certainly the case that in 1854 Trollope had returned to Ireland, where he had made a new life in the 1840s. In the hot July of 1855, I am told, he answered 1,672 questions from the committee about Irish postal arrangements.

‘Lord Rutherford,’ said my husband, looking up from the Telegraph and taking a glug of whisky. He might as well communicate by flags, because ‘Lord Rutherford’ means a letter to the editor from a reader who knows no more about a subject than he does about atomic physics. This time it was marmalade. ‘I was told by the French owner of a well-known brand of jam,’ wrote the reader, ‘that the origin of the word marmalade is in fact the English mispronunciation of the French phrase ‘‘maladie de Marie’’. Mary, Queen of Scots, would visit her close ally the French king by sea from Scotland rather than risk the wrath of Elizabeth I by travelling through England. Mary suffered awful sea-sickness during the often choppy crossing.

BBC television is devoting a frenzied week to a children’s knockout spelling competition. Goodness knows, spelling needs attention, if Veronica’s vagaries are anything to go by. But even where words are spelt correctly, there is the difficulty of their pronunciation. ‘What about Julia?’ said my husband, trying to be ‘helpful’. I couldn’t think there was much doubt about the name’s pronunciation, but it turned out that he was talking about Herrick’s poem, with its couplet, ‘Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes.’ The OED, 100 years ago, described that pronunciation of clothes, without sounding the th, as careless or vulgar.

‘Whodunnit?’ asked my husband mildly as I threw The Da Vinci Code into the cardboard box intended for kindling, next to the hearth. ‘Whyreadit? That’s the question.’ The Da Vinci Code, which follows so many of the clichés of pulp thrillers, also employs the airport school’s convention for titling, which applies to films too. It entails the adjectival use of a proper noun attributively with some common noun that sounds possibly interesting. You know, The Shawshank Redemption, The Thomas Crown Affair, The China Syndrome. I should like to know who started it.

The suburbs are perhaps not so despised as they were in my youth, now that every house costs £1 million. And I was delighted to learn that my friend and columnar neighbour Christopher Fildes is next month publishing a selection from his City and Suburban pages under the title A City Spectator (£12.99). ‘City and Suburban’ comes from Milton, or almost so, for in Paradise Regained the poet writes of ‘Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts / And eloquence, native to famous wits / Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, / City or suburban, studious walks and shades.’ John Betjeman used the phrase for his column in The Spectator in the 1950s; I’m glad it has been preserved.

‘Foxes’ tails are just like ladies,’ says Felix Graham, riding to a meet in Trollope’s Orley Farm. The spirited Miss Staveley replies, ‘Thank you, Mr Graham. I’ve heard you make some pretty compliments, and that is about the prettiest.’ ‘A faint heart will never win either the one or the other, Miss Staveley.’ ‘Oh, ah, yes. That will do very well. Under these circumstances I will accept the comparison.’ No doubt compliments to young women will soon be criminalised, but Trollope commits another crime in the eyes of some by writing ‘under the circumstances’. To object to the phrase was, in Henry Fowler’s eyes, ‘puerile’, but that didn’t stop its enemies.