Language

‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James Russell Lowell where he found decuman, meaning ‘big wave’. The line ‘Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman’ came in Lowell’s ‘The Cathedral’ (1870) about Chartres. Lowell was Longfellow’s big-beardy successor as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard. Though fellow members of the Fireside Poets, both fearlessly translated Dante and Homer. Lowell had no idea where decuman had come from. Ovid and Lucan used decumanus, he found, of a wave, but not absolutely, as a noun. Finally he unearthed it as a noun in Du Cange’s dictionary, citing ‘one of the Latin Fathers, I forget which’.

‘I know the difference between ictal and icteric,’ said my husband proudly, reminding me of Tweedledum in Through the Looking-Glass. He explained, accurately enough, that ictal was to do with strokes and icteric with jaundice. But he hadn’t heard about the bird. Pliny in his Natural History says that there is a bird called ikteros (icterus) from its colour of yellowish green, like jaundice. If someone with jaundice looks at it, the patient will recover and the bird die. Pliny thinks it the bird called in Latin galgulus, and this has been identified as the wodewale, woodwall, witwall or golden oriole. On the unjaundiced side of things, ictal derives from the Latin ictus, a stroke, and here there is something that the dictionaries omit, for no good reason.

In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said that the Scottish government should ‘face up to the situation they are in and double down on recruitment efforts’. I think she just meant double. Double down is a phrase from blackjack, an American casino card game resembling pontoon. It entails a player doubling his stake in return for only one more card from the dealer. It is not just the behaviour of degenerate gamblers.

On my way to a party in Ealing I saw a shop called Pan Rings. A mental image popped up of a saucepan with marks from milk round the sides. It is, in fact, a jewellery shop. Fashion outlets happily attract attention with negative names. Nasty Gal was founded in 2012 and has I think been taken over by Boohoo. Nasty is a word that Swift used in poems of scatological curiosity. In one, Celia’s ‘basin takes whatever comes: / The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews’. One of Swift’s resolutions for becoming old was: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.’ Swift’s Celia might like the sportswear shop Sweaty Betty.

It was most unlooked-for that a king should ally with Whig politicians to seek parliamentary reform, but that was what William IV did when Earl Grey was trying to carry the Great Reform Bill in 1831. When Grey apologised for putting him in a hurry, the Sailor King exclaimed: ‘Never mind that. I am always at single anchor.’ Parliament was bedlam, Peel seemed ‘about to fall into a fit’, the Speaker had ‘a face equally red and quivering with rage’. The Lords had tabled a motion to stop the King dissolving parliament. To head them off from infringing his prerogative, William decided to prorogue  it in person. When told by the Master of the Horse that the state coachman was absent, William cried: ‘Then I will go in a hackney coach.

I’ve noticed a tendency among townies like me to call all cattle cows (which they feel they must mention in discussing Brexit). You’d think that a cow was an obviously female creature. (Didn’t Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part, shown from 1965, call his wife Else a ‘silly old moo’?) But that doesn’t stop them. Indeed the main character in an American cartoon film called Barnyard (2006) was a cow by the name of Otis with a milk-giving udder. He was reckoned male and wooed a (female) cow called Daisy. This was not presented as any daring exercise in gender fluidity. One critic recommended that parents should take their children to it if they wanted to ‘depress them while making sure they fail biology’.

My husband, with a dependable appetite for chestnuts, says he would be the ideal person to start an Apathy party. There is, it is true, a great lack of appetite for politics at the moment, yet people are annoyed to find they cannot ignore it. It is unwelcome and insistent, like toothache. References have been made recently to William Whitelaw complaining of Labour under Harold Wilson ‘going round the country stirring up apathy’. A variety of circumstances is given for this remark. Some, including Ian Aitken, Whitelaw’s biographer, writing after his death in 1999, attached it to the election campaign of 1970, which Heath unexpectedly won. The late Frank Johnson, normally a careful journalist, placed this Willie-ism in ‘the 1976 Common Market referendum’.