Mind your language

I was trying the other day to find out who first came up with the term moral equivalence, and so I turned to Twentieth Century Words, edited by John Ayto (Oxford). He doesn't list it, though he has Moral Rearmament (1938) and Moral Majority (1979). Dr Ayto arranges his words by decade, and gives the first year in which each word is recorded. In most cases examples might still turn up from slightly earlier years. One of the mistakes people make in using dictionaries is not to realise that when the Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest citation a word used by Milton, say, it is not suggesting that he invented the word. Even the intelligent Geoffrey Madan, I think, made this mistake in his Notebooks. Anyway I soon found myself lost in the 1940s.

Mr Peter Bonnett from Downham Market, Norfolk, appeals to me as 'The Spectator's custodian of language'. God forbid! I have troubles enough! Mr Bonnett is worried about the prevalent confusion between deprecate and depreciate, and I had just written down my deprecatory exclamations when what should I come across in the fat OED but a quotation from 1631, from proceedings in the Court of Star Chamber: 'My Lord Keeper answered with a deprecation: God forbid that Norfolke should be divided in custome from all England.' Well! Koestler, thou shouldst be living at this hour! I have now used up my allowance of exclamation marks for the year. Deprecate, barring obsolete usages, means either 'pray against evil' (to ward it off) or 'to express earnest disapproval of'.

A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he'd seen a programme dated 1862 for an 'Enthronization' in the cathedral. Well, I thought, perhaps that was for the American market, although transatlantic tourists must have been rare then. The event must have been the enthronement of Archbishop Longley. The ceremony had been revived by his predecessor Archbishop Sumner in 1848. Before that the last archbishop enthroned in person was Wake in 1716.

'What do you mean, "gapering"?' asked my husband during a pause from shouting at the television. 'Is it like capering?' He wasn't following, because he had been busy excoriating a television reporter for invoking global warming on the local news. (Local news means uninteresting things that have happened near you. It is even worse in London, since a lot of real news happens there, so the criterion is to save the chaff for the local bulletin. I only have it on while waiting for the weather forecast.) Before picking up my husband's dropped stitch, I'd like to apologise to Dr Christopher Heneghan, the anaesthetist barrister, for spelling his name wrong. Secondly I'd like to show off a card from Sir John Keegan, which is now pasted in my autograph album.

Veronica tells me she is 'against the war'. At least she hasn't joined up for the Baath party. While she was making a placard or two on the kitchen table, I have been puzzling over a letter from an anaesthetist. But before that, may I mention a couple more figures of speech that the war has thrown up? One comes out of an incident near ad-Diwaniyah where an American marine was killed and another wounded by fire from Iraqi irregulars. A marine officer, Lieutenant-Colonel B.P. McCoy, described the engagement as 'blue-collar warfare'. At first hearing, this was grotesque, but I suppose that the metaphor means 'workaday', which is accurate enough. Worse is a new humorous acronym: KI/CAS, standing for Killbox Interdiction/Close Air Support.

I've just been reading with pleasure a facsimile of a little book called Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World, by Johannes Amos Comenius, as published in London in 1672. Dear old Comenius (1592-1670), a Bohemian by origin, sought a universal sharing of knowledge, hoping that 'scarecrows may be taken away out of wisdoms Gardens'. His picture book, first published in 1658, with its captions in Latin and native tongues, would, he thought, 'entice witty Children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the School, but dainty-fare'. Poor Comenius had the misfortune to get caught up in the Swedish-Polish war, suffering the destruction of his books and manuscripts in 1656.

Dr C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as 'Caucasian'. She wondered what connection she was supposed to have with a mountain range. She might well. We are all familiar from American cop shows on television with Caucasian as a racial label. But as far as I can tell, a German was to blame for the category. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) thought that the 'white' races came from the Caucasus region, and he was acknowledged as the founder of physical anthropology. Actually, that is what a late-20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica said. The 11th edition (1911) calls him the founder of anthropology, not physical anthropology.

The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, 'If I'd have known that...'. At first he wondered if I'd here stood for 'I would/should' or 'I had'. Then he heard someone say, 'Had I have known that.' Mr Norman thought people might be using in the protasis the formula that should apply only to the apodosis. But it is a question not of repeating the auxiliary would but of inserting a redundant have. I pondered it for some time before thinking to look it up in R.W. Burchfield's New Fowler's.

Mind your language In They Came to Baghdad, a topical-sounding novel by Agatha Christie, the heroine, Victoria Jones, finds 'all was above board, mild as milk and water.... Various dark-skinned young men made tentative love to her.' Or so I am told by Mr Bruce Harkness from Kent, Ohio. He also has, on occasion, to write footnotes explaining Conrad novels, and for Almayer's Folly he found he had to explain the following phrase: 'whether they made love under the shadows of the great trees or in the shadow of the Cathedral or on the Singapore promenade'. The problem was that readers took make love to mean 'engage in sexual intercourse'. Mr Harkness wonders until how recently writers could use the phrase in the more innocent social sense.

I am excited by a letter from Kensington, but before that let me notice a fearful symmetry between Martin Bashir's interview with Michael Jackson and the advertisements that punctuated it. These were intended to appeal to young people. One, for the Disney rehash of Treasure Island called Treasure Planet, has the animated Jim Hawkins saying, 'How cool is that?' - not a sentence of Stevenson's. I mentioned this phrase a fortnight ago, and so I was bound to notice it all over the place. But I didn't expect it to be quite so ubiquitous, for, immediately after the commercial break, we heard poor old Jacko remark, 'How ignorant is that?' about people who accused him of having plastic surgery or spending the night with children or something.

'Are you interested in penises, darling?' I asked my husband. 'Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?' The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by a tired old joke resorted to with ever-increasing frequency by journalists, often in headlines. It is to write 'Size does matter' or some variant in an article that is not about sexual performance. Oddly enough, the Guardian, which one might think would be sensitive to silly sexist sniggering, is given to this sort of thing.

I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer calves (which must be grown-up by now) using this word because it is pretty and because she was prompted by a nursery rhyme in a Victorian book: Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk And I will give you a gown of silk; A gown of silk and a silver key If you will let down your milk for me. Iona and Peter Opie in their admirable Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes record this rhyme from as early as 1805. The version they give has tee for key, and tee is a 'cow tie'.

The vogue word of the year so far is extreme. It has been around for centuries, deriving from the Latin superlative extremus, 'outermost'. But for the English word recently a flavour of danger and convention-breaking has developed. 'Extreme' sports are those like mountaineering or paragliding that offer physical risks. Now extreme is taking on a life of its own. Soon one will not ask 'Extremely what?' People will exclaim 'Extreme!' as they do 'Gross!' Indeed, extreme as a noun has already acquired this connotation: 'It does give lovers of arthouse extreme something to get their teeth into,' said the Scottish Daily Record of some dreadful American movie. Telly enjoys extreme sport and there is money to be made.

'These yours?' asked my husband with his back to me, his head ostrichised in a cardboard box and a sheaf of envelopes in his upraised hand. They were, indeed, a bundle of letters from 1999 caught up in his circulars from cricket clubs and rubbish from pharmaceutical companies. He was tidying up four years late. One of the letters came from Mr James Fairbairn who wondered what had happened to -ize as a suffix. He found it was authorized on his American spellcheck, but anathematised on his UK English spellcheck. Looking through the Guardian, Radio Times, Strathearn Herald and Perthshire Advertiser for 1971 (a touch of my husband there, to have those about the house), he found no verbs ending -ize, but in his Penguin English Dictionary (1969) found plenty. Dr R.W.

I lapped up Liza Picard's Dr Johnson's London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas. In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as dictionaries. The first is 'hoping to cure himself with the hair of the dog that bit him', said of a man with a hangover going to the bottle again. This was in Dr Willis's Oxford Casebook, she says. Is that Dr Thomas Willis (1621-75)? No doubt it was in use in his time, for John Heywood, writing in 1546, has: 'I praie the leat me and my felowe have a heare of the dog that bote us last nyght.' (I like bote as the past tense of bite.

People seem to lose the use of their native wit when they consider the origins of words. That idiot's sorting office, the Internet, has a well-intentioned site (at io.com/gibbonsb/words.words.words.html) edited by Gibbons Burke that discusses nautical terms used by Patrick O'Brian, who, Mr Burke remarks, uses expressions 'in a way that allows the reader to make the connection between a familiar phrase in everyday language with its marine heritage'. But when I read Patrick O'Brian's books three or four years ago, I was struck by how often his etymologies are wrong.

'Is having personal demons like having a personal trainer?' asked my husband, casting aside a newspaper magazine to the peril of his glass of whisky. (It survived, briefly.) He might well ask, for these 'personal demons' have been having quite an outing in the newspapers recently. Anne Diamond, according to a so-called friend quoted in the Daily Mirror, 'like most people has her demons - if she has issues with work or family, she eats and drinks'. Indeed, she 'balloons'. I like, or rather don't like, 'has issues with'. According to the same newspaper, Robin Williams 'has been tortured by personal demons' including cocaine, which he wittily remarked was God's way of telling you you've got too much money.

I was last in Zaragoza when my husband was bribed by a drugs company to make the sacrifice of attending a conference in a luxury hotel. I was on my own. It was hot and dusty, the dustier for the demolition of a neighbourhood of a seedy but engaging character around 'El Tubo' (east of Calle Alfonso I, if you know it). So I stopped to ease a blister on my foot and take a glass of horchata, a drink I've mentioned before. It wasn't quite as relaxing as it might have been because in the heladeria was a lunatic at a table shouting threateningly at anyone near, or even at anyone who wasn't.

Mr Iain Duncan Smith, with his calm, Japanese face, introduced an American note into his 'unite or die' speech last week. He quoted Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), or almost did, when he said, 'We must hang together or we shall hang apart.' People were uncharacteristically kind in not mentioning that the joke does not work like that. Franklin was reported to have said, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 'We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.' Talking of errors, Mrs David Beckham has been taking legal action against Peterborough football club for using the word Posh commercially. Peterborough has had it as its nickname for 80 years, it says; Mrs Beckham has only borne it since she joined the Spice Girls.

'That's telling 'em,' said my husband, rubbing his hands. He is something of a connoisseur of angular language and enjoyed an inscription in an old book I showed him. It was in Ninety-six Sermons by Lancelot Andrewes, the fifth edition, of 1661. On the fly-leaf it says, 'R. Bathe Semper eadem. This booke is not only my gift to Randale Payton but wth all my Command to him that he be daylly conversant here-in, wch will not only advantage him selfe; but lik-wise be very Benifficiall to all his Auditors when God shall soe blesse him wth a part of his flock to feede. 1739/40.' I suppose it was not quite so bad, since Payton had yet to secure a benefice, but it hardly showed confidence in his preaching abilities.