Mind your language

‘A light, pleasant, and digestible food,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition: the best). ‘Come off it,’ said my husband, and for once I agreed with him. The food in question was tapioca, which is a starchy derivative from the cassava plant. The word is Brazilian, the thing is disgusting. The frogspawn particles are agglomerations that formed when it was dried. This knowledge will, I hope, remain academic, but a related and more practical question arose while I was tucking in to some couscous with a friend. She asked if couscous was the same as semolina, and I didn’t know. I eat but don’t cook couscous and do neither to semolina. But my ignorance is not, I think, unusual.

Here’s a modish metaphor that is dead but hasn’t stopped breeding: ‘If I had taken cannabis, I would be transparent about it,’ said Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. ‘I want a transparent, non-variable law on drugs.’ And here’s another specimen caught in the verbal butterfly net of Mr Francis Radcliffe of York, who sent it in, chloroformed and set on a pin: ‘We need a transparent set of vocational qualifications,’ says Mr Mike Tomlinson, the educationist. First, let us admit that Shakespeare used it. ‘Transparent Helena, nature shewes art,/That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart,’ we find in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

‘It’s all Greek to me,’ said my husband, putting down his whisky glass, which was not wet but might have been, on the cover of Liddell and Scott. ‘Oh, darling,’ I said, snatching it up and restoring it to a ‘Guinness is good for you’ mat next to his chair. ‘Don’t pretend to be stupid. There’s no need.’ I had been rummaging around perichoresis, which has suddenly become voguish in English among the sort of people who speak of the ‘anthropic principle’. Not that it is a new word. Gregory of Nazianzus was happily using it in the 4th century. But he spoke Greek. What does it mean? It is something to do with the Trinity.

The Metropolitan Police have put up big posters on the Underground telling people what to do if they see a bag without an owner. ‘Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999,’ it says. You might think that I am being captious in thinking this reads badly. If the word don’t governs all the subsequent imperatives, then the doubting passenger ends up doing nothing. The ambiguity is not helped by the conjunction or. The Met’s message in conventional prose would have the first two words as a separate sentence: ‘Don’t touch. Check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999.’ (I don’t much care for the Americanism call.

I was listening to Radio Four’s serialisation of the Palliser novels while doing the washing-up after Sunday lunch, and I heard Mr Wharton saying that he preferred Arthur Fletcher to Ferdinand Lopez because he had a ‘proper job’. (We’re in The Prime Minister; it does rattle along, somewhat to the detriment of the characterisation.) That’s funny, I thought, it doesn’t sound like Trollope. Blow me if a few minutes later we didn’t get the Duke of Omnium complaining that being prime minister was turning out not to be a ‘proper job’ like being chancellor of the exchequer. So as soon as I had finished chasing the teaspoon that got away round the sink, I dried my hands and went to check.

Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish word chaval, meaning not ‘a pikey’ but ‘a bloke’, comes from the same source. And so it does, I find on inquiry. Corominas’s six-volume Spanish etymological dictionary confirms this, though it quotes among its supplementary authorities George Borrow. Now Borrow was a brave linguist, but he was neither exact nor comprehensive in his linguistic analyses of Romany. In any case, the Spanish took to their hearts this Gitano word chaval.

According to that very annoying programme Woman’s Hour (one minute being militantly gynaecological, the next giving recipes for butternut-squash soup), a mother complained to a school that allowed her son to say toilet instead of lavatory. A vox pop discovered more people in the street were at home with toilet than with lavatory, which one respondent identified as a word used only by those unfamiliar with English. Then they got on to napkin against serviette. Here, I think, one cannot ignore the fact that most people do not use table napkins. Perhaps there is an idea that serviette more properly applies to insubstantial paper objects. Certainly in Spain every bar has its dispenser of little paper servilletas.

I blushed to learn I had been wrong all my life. ‘Though Sir William Golding consistently pronounced the word as contsh in a lecture that he gave on The Lord of the Flies at the University of Oxford in 1990,’ says Professor Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler’s, ‘the more usual standard pronunciation is conk.’ I cannot think that I have ever heard anyone pronounce conch as conk. William Golding, a man interested in language, might have been expected to know, especially since the shell played a notable part in his novel. Etymologically there is some sense in the conk sound, since the word comes from Greek konche; I should make clear that the letter transliterated as ch here is the chi, as in Christ, and undoubtedly a hard sound.

‘We need closure,’ said Mr Greg Dyke after resigning as director-general of the BBC. ‘Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there.’ Over the past couple of months the newspapers have reported the closure of more than one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, of mother-and-baby units, of factories, railway stations and motorways. Some of these closures were more welcome than others. But Mr Dyke was not proposing the closure of the BBC — a truly radical idea; he was using a metaphor, or, if you prefer, borrowing a bit of psychobabble. He meant much the same by his phrase as Mr Blair meant by ‘drawing a line’ under events. There is a meaning of closure in computing which I do not quite understand.

I asked Veronica what the difference was between a pikey and a chav. ‘A pikey is like a pram-face, really rubbish, eats economy burgers and oven chips and watches telly all day. A chav dresses in sportswear, with white trainers and wears a fake Burberry baseball hat and hangs around the bus station starting fights.’ I began to feel out of my depth. There seems to be warfare going on among the late teens, between college kids and aggressive youths variously designated as townies, estate-dwellers, neds, pikeys and chavs. It sounds unpleasant. The popularity of the term chav has increased no end since the establishment of a website called ‘chavscum’ on the Internet. This takes a lofty attitude to chavs, regarding them as almost subhuman.

Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle was practising her vowels for Rex Harrison as Professor Pickering in a bit of My Fair Lady that I came across on the television the other day. If Eliza was to pass for a duchess, it was a very sensible thing to do. But the film represented her pronouncing the names of the vowels instead of their sounds. From the start Eliza said the name of ‘a’ very much as Pickering did. It wasn’t that, but the give-away sound of ‘a’ in words like lady, that she would have to change. I noticed this little piece of illogicality when I was thinking about our names for the letters of the alphabet. We learn to name them as children, but we seldom write the names, and indeed can hardly agree how to.

So many much-loved books have been badly done on television — The Irish RM, and just now The Young Visiters, which anyone could have seen would be difficult to do well on telly — that I wonder how much longer they can resist dear old Parson Woodforde. I’ve been reading bits of his diary again and wondering about some of his characteristic uses of language. Some are just strange, such as spelling off as ‘of’, like William P. Taplow in Private Opinions of a British Bluejacket. A puzzling usage was plumb in plumb-pudding. I half remembered Charles Lamb explaining in jest that he spelled plumb-pudding himself with a b because it made it sound heavier. But James Woodforde does it consistently with no hint of a joke.

I've just looked up foxglove in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, not because I expected it to tell me the word's origin, but because I hoped it would give a false origin. I love Brewer, but it tells the reader not the facts of history and etymology but what the widely educated High Victorian thought were the facts. This is very useful in understanding references in 19th-century books. To me it also means that an edition from the lifetime of E. Cobham Brewer (1810'97) is more valuable than a modern revision. One never knows with what shockingly correct facts the reviser has displaced former baseless myths and popular etymologies. Sure enough the 1895 edition (from the edition Brewer had revised in 1894 for '250) says foxglove is 'either a corruption of Folk's-glove, i.e.

This year we have seen a word born like one of those volcanoes off the coast of Iceland. The word is issue, in a new and puzzling meaning. It had been looming through the seawater for many months before, but now it has come hissing and steaming above the surface. I had become used to people, usually employed in the social services, speaking of issues around things like race, ‘gender’, poverty, class, alcohol. The adoption of the pronoun around was pretty annoying, and since many of the people who used issues around were fools, I quickly came to assume its use was foolish. Moreover the meaning of issues in this context was slippery, it almost seemed deliberately so.

'What? What! What?!' said my husband with a provoking profligacy of punctuation. 'What?' I said before I could stop myself. 'Buttonhole,' he said. 'You say here it's nothing to do with a hole. But it is. Look. I put my poppy in it.' 'No dear, the verb.' Buttonhole, as a verb meaning 'detain in conversation', comes from the idea of holding a button of someone's coat. The word button-holder is first found at the beginning of the 19th century. By the 1830s examples crop up of buttonhold. And as late as 1880s it took the past tense button-held ' Charles Lamb, being button-held by Coleridge, simply cut off the button. But button-hold sounds like buttonholed.

In connection with J.R.R. Tolkien — who with the much feebler J.K. Rowling is soon to be dominating school-holiday cinema once again — there was an interesting piece in the TLS this month by that clever old philologist Tom Shippey. It was about Joseph Grimm’s ironly scientific success in analysing and predicting historical sound changes in language and his lack of success in similarly regimenting myth. I can’t help thinking that Tolkien wanted to supply a worthy body of myth for an ideal of England so obviously flawed in reality — a Shire under Sharkey, as we have it now.

A query comes from Argyllshire: ‘What is the infinitive of can?’ The reference is not to canning peas. But before I forget, Harry Henry of Esher, who sounds a sport, reminds me, if I ever knew, that (as Max Beerbohm tells us in A Variety of Things) the original pattern for all publishing titles containing the word After was set by T. Fenning Dodsworth, with his article ‘The End of All Things — And After’. Since the fictitious Dodsworth’s name is a sort of apocopation of my own, I should not forget that. Now, can. It does not have an infinitive because it is a modal verb, like may, must, shall and will, indicating the mood of another verb.

A Kentish man, Mr Spencer Jones, sends me a photograph of a street named ‘The Forstal’. It is a cul-de-sac, or dead end, as we say in Oxfordshire. Why, asks Mr Jones, is this perfectly ordinary word not in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? The answer would be that it is dialect. There are lots of words not in the OED — slang, jargon, personal names, place-names and dialect words. Some of each category, though, do get in. Forstal is in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary. The earliest citation it gives (although Wright could not use as wide a catch as James Murray at the OED) is an interesting one from Aylesford Parish Register for 1661: ‘Henry Gorham and John Allen ...going into the river at Jermans fforstall to wash themselves ... were both drowned.

‘This is a good one,’ said my husband, bubbling into his Famous Grouse. ‘Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome appointed to draw up the Pope’s briefs.’ ‘But that can’t possibly be a joke intended by James Murray or his collaborators working on the volume for “A” in the Oxford English Dictionary in the late 19th century,’ I said. ‘Briefs isn’t recorded in that sense until the 1930s.’ ‘You can always spoil a joke,’ retorted my husband, returning to a less beetrooty hue. To be fair, Simon Winchester in his new book on Murray and the OED had explained the impossibility of an intended joke. In fact I don’t think Mr Winchester’s book is so bad at all.

My husband’s favourite programme on television, to judge by what he shouts at the screen, is Grumpy Old Men. You should hear him when they sound off about automated telephone answering (‘Press 2...’, etc). I think I have caught something from him, because when I was listening to Poetry Please on the wireless, I too began to bay at the machinery. Someone was reading ‘Jabberwocky’, and she said ‘borogroves’. I don’t blame her; this is a common misreading of borogoves. She did it both times. I do blame the producers. Someone ought to have noticed. She said ‘frabjuous’ too, for frabjous, and she pronounced tulgey with a hard ‘g’. That isn’t right, is it?