Mind your language

The ‘execution’ of captives, instead of their ‘murder’, is a longstanding gripe of Mr Don Barton of Powntley Copse in Hampshire, who wrote to me before the current round of deadly abductions in Iraq. I’m just wondering about the derivation of Powntley, and I’ll have to make further investigations. The point for now is misuse of language. I mean that doubly: catachrestic usage that is not justified by precedent, and distortion of language for political motives. Mr Barton is quite right, historically. Execute has been around in English since the time of Chaucer, 600 years ago, first in the sense of ‘put into effect’. That usage has survived. On some computer keyboards there is a key that says ‘execute’, which makes things happen.

In the glorious new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which came out on Thursday, the article on Colin Welch says that the Daily Telegraph in his day was for the lumpenbourgeoisie. At first I thought that was merely an ignorant error. The word Lumpen in German means ‘a rag’. Lump means ‘ragamuffin’. Karl Marx is the originator of the term Lumpenproletariat, which he applied to the ‘lowest and most degraded section of the proletariat; the “down and outs” who make no contribution to the workers’ cause’, as the Oxford English Dictionary neatly puts it. Marx did not share Mother Teresa’s regard for the poorest of the poor.

‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number. ‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What does Gresham’s Law mean?’ my husband has said, ‘Ah, you don’t understand.’ That is surely what I had admitted by asking the question in the first place. I knew Gresham’s Law said: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ But what that meant or how it could happen were blanks to me.

‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played a larger part in the folk consciousness of England than the rabbit. The rabbit, or coney as it was called, was introduced by the Romans perhaps, but was popularised as a reserve of meat and fur by the Normans. I rather think the Anglo-Saxons, before they settled on the British mainland, were familiar with hares.

New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us neglect, or lump with Australian English. Oxford University Press has published a dictionary of New Zealand English and one of its slang, but popularly we still tend to conflate the two.

The term ‘Middle England’ has been drifting a bit in the last few years, but never so far, so fast as under the impulsion of Mr David Miliband, a young minister in the Department for Education. He said last week that educational ‘improvements have released the potential of Middle England’. This sudden reference to ‘Middle England’ — in recent years the misty lost domain of the Daily Mail — baffled Mr Ed Stourton on Today one morning, and it puzzled the Daily Telegraph, for which Middle England was ‘mortgagers in Cheshire with a Renault Espace in the drive’. According to interpreters of his own private language, Mr Miliband merely meant a socio-economic lower-middle-class division.

I’m sure I can’t remember hearing it used wrongly before, and now I’ve heard it twice in a fortnight from politicians. Perhaps they catch it from each other. The phrase in question is in extremis and it has been used as if it meant ‘extremely’ or ‘in extreme circumstances’. In truth it means ‘on the point of death’, as the OED records. The earliest citation is from 1530, in a letter to Cardinal Wolsey about the Dean of St Paul’s, who was on his way out. Well, that is the earliest citation in English, as it were, though it has long been used in Latin with this meaning.

Shakespeare invented the words anchovy, well-ordered, worm-hole and zany. Or did he? I’ve been nagged at the back of my mind (a tender spot) by doubts about Shakespeare ever since I wrote (5 June) about Dr David Crystal’s remarks in his excellent book The Stories of English. Dr Crystal notes that of the 2,035 words (or ‘lexemes’) first attributed to Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary, 743 are found elsewhere within 25 years of his using them, and that 900 words eventually fall out of usage. So how many coinages can we attribute to Shakepeare? Dr Crystal concludes, ‘Whether we assess his lexical contribution as 800 or 1,700, it is still hugely impressive compared with the contribution of other writers.

M. Jacques Myard, the bouncy French deputy, was talking on the wireless the other day about ‘unsecurity’. I am not mocking his English; there was a word unsecure in the 17th century, and we still talk of unsecured loans. But the meaning of security is like a pea in the butter-dish — hard to get hold of. In France security (or its French analogue) is an unsubtle codeword for ‘safety from mugging by foreigners’. By foreigners I don’t mean French people, but Algerians and other immigrants widely feared and hated. Hence Le Pen and, in Holland, Pim Fortuyn, the murdered populist with the strangely pronounced surname.

The film Around the World in Eighty Days, though identified as a turkey by the taxonomists of the critics’ circle, took more money in Britain last week than any film but one, with incalculable effects on the English language. But before I drone on about that, let me mention a satisfying sighting of well reported by Mr Robin Taylor of Blackburn. It is from Thomas Hardy’s poem on the loss of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Mr Taylor mentions it as an example of Hardy incorporating everyday speech, but I was surprised by the proportion of elevated ‘poetic diction’ in the composition, even if Hardy knew what he was at.

The summer flowers are blowing, and I was reminded yesterday of a slightly outlandish-sounding line in the summery poem Pearl which speaks of the plants ‘gilofre, gyngure & gromylyoun’. I am still not sure what gromylyoun is. I know it’s gromwell, but I haven’t got any in the garden, and my husband has never had occasion to use it, despite its medicinal reputation in the Middle Ages. I thought I knew what gillyflower was, though — the wallflower, with its candy popcorn scent. But Michael Quinion has disabused me. He is the author of an excellent new book called Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Myths (Penguin, £12.99), which explodes erroneous etymologies.

I had just looked up a phenomenon that a sharp-eared reader had heard on the wireless — the remarkable ‘double is’ — in Robert Burchfield’s New Fowler’s, when the telephone rang and I heard that he was dead. Dr Burchfield was a New Zealander, born in 1923, who developed a fascination for language in Trieste where he was serving during the second world war. As a Rhodes Scholar he read English at Magdalen, Oxford, where C.S. Lewis was a Fellow. Lewis was a mediaevalist, but it was J.R.R. Tolkien, the Merton Professor of English Language, who proved to be the ‘fisherman who drew me into his philological net’, Burchfield recalled. He worked with C.T.

As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying ‘well’, especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation. With conversation as its habitat, it naturally occurs frequently on programmes such as Today on Radio 4. I did see it the other day in a headline in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Champagne (well, English sparkling) for the men about to wreck Brussels’ — a reference to the UK Independence Party. In the Telegraph sense, well is what Dr Svartvik calls ‘an editing marker for self-correction’.

‘What, what, what,’ said my husband, as if he had bought up a job lot of whats and wanted to use them up before the hot weather spoilt them. He was provoked by my having read out a sentence by W.W. Skeat: ‘Argosy is not really of Slavonic origin.’ Skeat (1835–1912) had meant to go into the Church, but an affliction of the throat cut that short. A lectureship in mathematics at Christ’s College, Cambridge ‘left him ample leisure’. He edited Langland and Chaucer in several volumes and made an etymological dictionary. In analysing a difficult word, he allowed three hours: ‘During that time I made the best I could of it and then let it go.

I heard the other day that the late Lord Hartwell, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, had once exclaimed that when he was at Eton he had been taught never to begin a sentence with the word but. He then found to his slight mortification that his chance remark had been set as an iron rule for the newspaper’s stylebook. God knows what material their stylebook is made of now. Something spongy, I think. Now Professor Canon J.R. Porter has written to me about a related question: beginning sentences with and. I had mentioned that sentence after sentence in the so-called Authorised Version of the Bible begins with and. The Revd Prof. points out in the politest way that this ‘has no bearing on what should be correct, idiomatic English usage.

On The South Bank Show in January 2000 a contributor said excitedly, ‘Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language.’ Rubbish. I found that reference, and its refutation, in a new book by the indefatigable Professor David Crystal, The Stories of English (Allen Lane, £25). First, he asks, how big is an Englishman’s vocabulary? Dr Crystal says he has lost count of the times he has been told that the Sun uses a vocabulary of 500 words. His reckons an average issue contains 6,000 different words (or ‘lexemes’, i.e., words stripped of bolt-on features). Academics, by inviting respondents to look through a slice of dictionary, say that an average English speaker uses 50,000 words actively and understands a quarter more. Shakespeare uses just over 29,000.

‘High street stalwart Marks & Spencer is preparing to go head-to-head with the likes of Topshop,’ said a news report the other day. Never mind ‘going head-to-head’, a metaphor presumably taken from the life of the caribou or elk, and enthusiastically seized upon by people who like to speak of going ‘belly up’ or ‘pear-shaped’, or being ‘dead in the water’ or, more unpleasantly, ‘twisting in the wind’. It’s ‘the likes of’ that I find curious. It has in recent generations borne a derogatory sense.

To pronounce when reading aloud an entirely different word from the one written on the page might seem a more than Mandarin complication, or perhaps be reminiscent of the Hebrews’ reverence for the Name that prompted them to substitute ‘Adonai’ orally for the word represented by the tetragrammaton. Yet we do just such a thing with Mrs. Once it stood for mistress. Quite when the spoken realisation became missis is not easy to tell. ‘The contracted pronunciation, which in other applications of the word has never been more than a vulgarism,’ comments the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘became for the prefixed title, first a permitted colloquial licence, and ultimately the only allowable pronunciation.

‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later. But the occasion for my original remark was that someone on the wireless had just said, ‘That’s a post facto justification.’ I had merely observed that it isn’t post facto but post factum, since ‘post’ takes the accusative, not the ablative. The reason it is so often wrong is because of a confusion with the phrase ex post facto, used by our learned friends in the phrase ‘ex post facto law’, implying retrospective force.

Well, the Poles are in the European Union, and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Already Tesco and Carrefour are flogging the poor things centrally distributed comestibles with sell-by dates on them. From my archives (a bundle of post extracted from a pile of unread medical magazines to which my husband subscribes as part of his ‘ongoing education’), I retrieve an interesting letter from Mr Peter Kassler of Haslemere. ‘We noticed recently,’ he writes, ‘in a Carrefour supermarket in southern France that a lack of mineral water on the shelves was explained by a printed card as a result of “mouvements sociaux à notre plateforme de distribution”.