Etymology

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus. My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a trade or craft, as the medieval plays were performed by companies of trade guilds. He might have been reading the website of the Chester Mystery Plays, due for their five-yearly performance in 2023: ‘The word mystery comes from the French mystère meaning “craft”, and apprentices joined the guilds to learn their mystery or craft. When the guildsmen began dramatising the Bible stories, their plays thus became known as Mysteries.

A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked and last month failed in his appeal. A reader wrote to me saying he came across the word pikeys in the 1970s in Oxfordshire and ‘understood it to mean dishonest low-life characters, though not necessarily of a specific group like gypsy or other travellers’. He also remembered as a teenager in Cheshire coming across a hayfork being called a pikel, and wonders if the terms are related. They are, but not straightforwardly. Pikey dates from the second third of the 19th century as pikey-man, meaning a traveller who has come into the locality on the pike or turnpike road.

‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a play on the German Spätkapitalismus, ‘late capitalism’. There is also a German wine category called Spätlese, ‘late harvest’, and another, when the grapes are exposed to noble rot and allowed to wither on the vine, called Trockenbeerenauslese. Hence the joke. I do not encourage this sort of thing. But late capitalism deserves no encouragement either. It is generally used to mean anything thought unpleasant about life in western society.

‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the Summa Theologiae. There aren’t all that many jokes in Thomas Aquinas’s survey for beginners in the field of theology. As it’s such a large field, his summary runs to 1,800,000 words. (Incidentally, just as Dan Brown went wrong in his book title by referring to Leonardo as ‘Da Vinci’, so it would be against preferred usage to call the theologian ‘Aquinas’ rather than Thomas.) Anyway, it always makes me smile to think of Thomas’s exasperation with a 13th-century university teacher, David of Dinant, who stultissime posuit Deum esse materiam primam, ‘most stupidly made out God to be prime matter’.

‘Nurse! The tenaculum!’ exclaimed my husband in the manner of James Robertson Justice playing the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. I’m not sure I should describe the work of the tenaculum, in case you’re having breakfast, but be sure it holds as fast as a Staffordshire terrier. The motive for my husband’s outburst was the declaration by yet another politician that Boris Johnson’s position was untenable. Yet there seems to be no end of people who keep hold of a position declared by others to be untenable. The other day, Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York, tweeted: ‘It’s untenable for the Duke of York to cling on to his title another day longer.’ Anybody would think he was Perkin Warbeck.

My husband is forever being sent magazines from his Oxford college inviting him to give it money. I suggest he should ask it to give us money, since it has much more than we do. But the clever men at Oxford, as Mr Toad called them in his song, seem to have lost the use of their wits. The rot became apparent in 1988, with the publication of the university magazine: ‘This is the first appearance of the university alumni magazine, Oxford Today.’ What did they mean by alumni magazine? Of course they knew that alumni is the plural of alumnus. But why tack a plural noun on to magazine? If it had been a student or graduate magazine, the noun used attributively (student, graduate) would remain in the singular. That is how English works.

‘Lashings of ginger beer?’ asked my husband when I mentioned backlash. He thought the phrase came from Enid Blyton, though it occurred only in the television parody Five Go Mad in Dorset, first shown in 1982 — 40 years ago, for heaven’s sake. Backlash, now in vogue, is often misused. The Guardian wrote about ‘the mass protests in the light of the George Floyd murder and the backlash to this movement’. That usage seems correct. But when it said that Chanel ‘recently faced a backlash online for the contents of their Christmas advent calendar’, backlash was the wrong word. The metaphor backlash comes from mechanics. It is pretty much a dead metaphor, since some who use it think it has to do with lashing a back.

‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary has just published a new entry for witch. It is less dismissive of old women. The former version spoke of a ‘repulsive-looking old woman’. Now it is ‘a term of abuse or contempt for a woman, especially one regarded as old, malevolent, or unattractive’. In that sense it is still definitely a woman. But what has lexicographers in a ferment of excitement is the decision to undo the division of the main entry for witch into male and female. Before the Conquest it had only been formally distinguishable in the nominative singular: wicca (masculine) and wicce (feminine).

The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one of the country’s most prolific serial killers’ as the Sun did last weekend. The difficulty is that the word still carries connotations of its Latin origin prolificus, ‘capable of producing offspring’. The Latin word was in use in Britain from the 14th century, and the English form developed only in the 17th century.

‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be blith; oh how this festive joy / Stirs up my fury to revenge and death.”’ ‘Very Christmassy,’ he agreed. The lines came from a series of five plays by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Heywood, in which he canters through classical mythology. Here Althea is commenting on her plan to kill her own son Meleager at a feast by consigning to the fire the piece of firewood that magically preserves his life. He feels as though the fires of Etna were in his bosom and dies. It was not of course a family Christmas, which was yet to be invented.

When my husband’s whisky glass fell off the little table next to his chair on to next door’s cat, which was on an unauthorised visit, provoking it to make a speedy exit, en route scratching the postman, who had for a change that afternoon rung the bell to deliver a parcel instead of putting a little card through the door saying we were out, it was, my husband averred, a perfect storm. He really meant he had fallen asleep and let his copy of The Spectator fall. We are in a perfect storm of perfect storms. ‘A perfect storm has arisen due to a combination of factors relating to Brexit and the pandemic,’ wrote someone in the Times about the petrol shortage. I fear the tempest will blow more perfectly yet.

In its coverage of the shuffled cabinet, the BBC added a note: ‘BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) is a term widely used in the UK to describe people of non-white descent, as defined by the Institute of Race Relations.’ The Institute of Race Relations was founded in 1958, but in 1972, by its own account, it became ‘an anti-racist thinktank’ and began to focus on ‘direct analyses of institutionalised racism in Britain’. Earlier this year, its director Liz Fekete complained about the government indicating it would abolish, as recommended by the Sewell report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, the concept of BAME in data collection.

When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he joined Sacheverell Sitwell on honeymoon in Amalfi. I don’t know what Mrs Sitwell thought of it. I learnt this odd fact because I was seeing what connection his name had with quenelles, the fashionable dish like rissoles or gefilte fish traditionally made with pike in Nantua in France. Their quenelles are big — no fiddling around with spoons — and covered in crayfish sauce. They may be better eaten on location than tried at home. Anyway, there is no connection. The surname Quennell comes from the Old English cwen, meaning ‘woman’, and hild, ‘battle’.

‘This crossword is problematic!’ exclaimed my husband, tossing aside the folded newspaper marked with a ring where his whisky glass had rested. He was being facetious, a common register of speech with him when vacancy does not take over. Problematic has acquired new life as a label for something disapproved of and therefore ripe for banning or cancelling. Thus The Tiger Who Came to Tea is ‘problematic’ to an influential pressure group called Zero Tolerance because of its ‘old-fashioned’ portrayal of women and families. Shakespeare too had problematic views on whiteness, according to people at the Globe.

‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He was responding to a remark on the wireless about Iran being a bad actor. Language, as usual, is in a state of transition. Actor is now employed to mean some person, or moral entity, acting in a good or bad way. But if you ask anyone what an actor is, the answer would be a person taking part in a drama, on stage or the equivalent. This goes to show the difference between the main meaning of a word now and the meaning of words from which it originates. Actor in the Oxford English Dictionary, which takes an historical approach, is listed with the first (obsolete) meaning of ‘a person involved in a legal action’.

‘They asked me if I wanted to wash up before we even went in to dinner,’ my husband recalled with mock horror of a visit to America some years ago. He doesn’t get out much. It is true that Americans use wash up differently from us, to mean washing your hands (and perhaps face while you’re at it) rather than the plates after a meal. Of course washing your hands might be a euphemism for that other euphemism of going to the lavatory. Now there is an outbreak of wash-up in management lingo. We must learn to live with it. Annoyingly, management-speak turns perfectly good phrases into weapons of time-wasting theory. Anyway, after some team project, a meeting is arranged to see what went well, what went badly and what could have gone better.

The title of the keenly awaited volume of memoirs by John Martin Robinson sounds like a crossword clue: Holland Blind Twilight. Would that be a Dutch kind of unseeing twilight or a drinking-session blind at twilight when Hollands gin is consumed? Of course not! It’s plain enough. Blinds are often made of Holland, a linen fabric. When unbleached it’s brown Holland. Holland came from Dutch Holland in the 15th century. Holland is also one of the Parts of Lincolnshire, the other two being Lindsey and Kesteven. The Parts of Lindsey are divided into Ridings (West, North and South, unlike Yorkshire). A riding is a third, from trithing a Norse affair, or in Old English thriding. One can see how the geographical designations (West, North) collided and lopped off the initial th-.

‘Oh, yes,’ said my husband, enthusiastically, ‘a loathsome disease. The tongue goes black and dry.’ He was referring to an historical grouping of symptoms given the name prunella. If you are thinking it is therefore an unkind name to give a girl, that is because the name also applies to a pretty wild flower related to mint, commonly known as self-heal. Some say it was so called because it cured the disease, but the plant name is older than the disease name. There is a third meaning of prunella, in the phrase leather and prunella. This phrase used to be deployable to any middle-class readership. George Eliot and Anthony Trollope both used it, in the sense ‘a matter of indifference’.

‘Ping, ping, ping went the bell,’ sang my husband, making his eyes wide and jigging in his best imitation of Judy Garland, ‘Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings.’ The effect was horrific. And ‘The Trolley Song’ doesn’t go ‘Ping, ping, ping’ but ‘Ding, ding, ding’. Everything else has been pinging, though. ‘Missing a holiday because you’ve been pinged can be a big disappointment,’ remarked the Daily Mirror, solicitously. The pinging in question is that of the NHS Test and Trace phone app. Incidentally, the government has made a breakthrough in moral philosophy during this pandemic, distinguishing between should and must.