Language

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,” wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual “grooming?” Are they victims or are they survivors? Or should they be neither?

"Rollicking time,” sang my husband to the tune of “Mull of Kintyre.” He had been amused to hear of this misapprehension of the lyrics and smugly enjoyed it not being his mistake for a change. That kind of mull is a Gaelic word meaning “bare headland.” I think it is related to the Welsh word for a bare hill, moel, which Gerard Manley Hopkins used, with initial mutation, as voel in “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” That is all very well, but I have been annoyed recently by people saying that they want to mull things. I don’t mean wine, but possibilities. I would say “mull things over.” Why can’t everyone else? But the history of mull is fearfully complicated and obscure for such a little word.

I've never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the “inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the same parent.” So he reintroduced “a good Anglo-Saxon word,” and it stuck. It’s not quite that simple, for cultural anthropologists had, a decade earlier, adopted sib for a kindred group, apparently from the parallel German word Sippe. My aversion to sibling was merely its artificiality. We never used to use it in speech, but would say brother or sister.

"So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,” wrote Samuel Pepys on January 13, 1667. They were eight. “I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30 shillings, and a tart, and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough.” My husband said he liked the sound of this and asked if I might manage something similar out of doors, for six, duly distanced. I noticed he had doodled in the margin of his Times #rabbits. Hash sign shares an origin with rabbit hash, both being related to the French hacher, “cut in pieces.

The first person I heard refer to their child as ‘mama’ was a friend I met at a prenatal yoga class when I was pregnant with my daughter six years ago. After the babies were born, I would hear her croon to her daughter as she put on her tiny snow suit, ready for the bitter New York winter outside: ‘Come on mama; let’s go mama.’ She does know it was she who gave birth to the child and not the other way around, I would wonder. To begin with I didn’t think much of this somewhat idiosyncratic nickname.

Anyone who follows left-wing Twitter, or reads the more exotic NYT columns, might have noticed the rise of an increasingly fashionable new political language: therapy-speak. Just look at the weird self-helpy terms which now seem everywhere in political debate – phrases like ‘validate’, ‘call out’, ‘tone-policing’, ‘trivializing’ or ‘macroaggression’. Others are more specific – like ‘gaslighting’, an obscure psychological term which, as Megan McArdle notes, has become an obsession for the woke left.