Language

When Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’, I was willing to believe that the word gloomster existed. Well, it does now. English abounds in elements like the suffix ster by which new words may be generated. We know without thinking about it that words ending in ster are slightly derogatory. A rhymer is romantic, and a rhymester vulgar. Originally all sters were feminine. Before the Conquest, a seamestre was a sempstress and a bæcestre a baker. Among the Anglo-Saxons, it seems those trades were followed only by women.

How might an oath lend its name in England to a religious extremist and in Spain to a moustache? That has been the claim for the German bei Gott as the origin of English bigot and Spanish bigote. In his Gatherings from Spain (1846), the great English traveller Richard Ford did not doubt the origin of bigote, ‘moustache’. ‘The free-riding followers of Charles V, who wore these tremendous appendages of manhood,’ he explains, ‘swore like troopers.’ The Spanish connected their oath bei Gott with their moustaches, and named the one thing from the other. Did not the French in the Peninsular War, he observes, call the English soldiers Goddams?

Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for the origins of words, it is universally known that the origin of posh is from ships’ tickets to and from India stamped ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. None of this triad of certainties is true. Let me touch upon posh, about which I wrote here in 2002. Since then, the admirable philologist Michael Quinion has published a book called Port Out, Starboard Home, a title emblematic of popular etymology. He doesn’t think that this was the origin of posh, of course. No one has ever found such a ticket or any reference in shipping archives.

In Casablanca, Mr and Mrs Leuchtag resolve to speak English to each other in preparation for emigration to America. Mr Leuchtag asks: ‘Liebchen — sweetness heart, what watch?’ Mrs Leuchtag: ‘Ten watch.’ Mr Leuchtag: ‘Such much?’ The head waiter, Carl (played by S.Z. Sakall) comments: ‘Hmm. You will get along beautiful in America.’ A development in the use of watch, as a verb, has emerged recently. ‘Harry Kane was forced to watch on as Spurs scraped through,’ reported the Sun, and the Guardian wrote of Amish women playing volleyball ‘as their husbands watch on and cheer’. To me, it should either be look on or simply watch.

Doggy sounds childish. ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ asks the popular song. (The song title used the spelling doggie, being American, though Britain enjoyed a cover version by Lita Roza in 1953, the same year as Patti Page’s original.). Doggo sounds cooler (like daddy-o in hep talk), but in the strange world of internet image-sharing it goes with a sentimentality which would shame the nursery. The internet has said ‘Aaah’ (or in America ‘Aaaw’) to cute cats, but people post pictures a-plenty of cute dogs. One Twitter account, WeRateDogs, has 8.13 million followers and simply tweets photos of dogs with a caption and a rating out of ten. Like the 110 per cent that employees are asked to give, its ratings exceed the maximum.

My husband has been growling: ‘You cross-legged hartichoak.’ He tries it on obstructive pedestrians hypnotised by their mobile phones. He thus hopes, optimistically, to utter insults while avoiding any ism that could get him into trouble. This imprecation hartichoak he took from the mouth of Young Tom Strowd, a Norfolk man, in The Blind-Beggar of Bednal Green, a play from 1600 by John Day (a Norfolk man) and Henry Chettle (in and out of debtors’ prison). The artichoke jokes went down so well that two sequels were performed, though their text, sadly or not, does not survive. Artichoke displays a modest degree of folk etymology. It came into English in the 16th century from words already obscure in their derivation.

A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful and aesthetic purposes): gadroon, astragal, larmier and rabbet, but none is chunkier or more mysterious than bolection. Bolection mouldings cover joints, especially between surfaces of different levels, such as round the panels of a door. Such three-dimensional things are hard to describe clearly in words. No one knows the origin of bolection and even its proper form is uncertain: balection, belection, bilection, bolexion. It sounds like the Liberal Democrat attitude to Brexit. Gadroon derives from the name of a round convex fold sewn into a piece of textile, found as goderon in 14th-century French.

Some birds seem inherently comical. I can’t help being amused by the duck taking its name from its habit of ducking. In English it has enjoyed this name for some time — a thousand years or so. Before that it was called ened, a word related to the Latin anas, anatem. Similarly, the swift is so called because it is swift. That name seems to go back fewer than 400 years, and I’m not sure what it was called before that. Swallow, perhaps, since it has something in common with it. But there are some false friends among the feathered tribes. The lapwing was itself friendless last week, when Natural England stopped farmers shooting its predators. Its alternative name, peewit, comes from its cry, and it is also known as the peeweep, peesweep or tewhit.

‘The term coloured, is an outdated, offensive and revealing choice of words,’ tweeted Diane Abbott last week in response to Amber Rudd having remarked on the radio with regard to verbal abuse: ‘And it’s worst of all if you’re a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse, and I think that’s something we need to continue to call out.’ Rudd rapidly apologised: ‘Mortified at my clumsy language and sorry to Diane Abbott.’ It is funny to think that if Rudd had said woman of colour she’d have been immune to criticism. But she tripped over a shibboleth. The Oxford English Dictionary abides by strict neutrality over the use of language.

My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In 20 years’ time that sentence may seem normal. To me it seems at best whimsical, perhaps arch. There’s a lot of interrogating at the moment, quite apart from the traditional kind by unpleasant policemen. Jay Rayner, in the Observer, said that he saw some people in a restaurant interrogate their plates. In the Guardian someone suggested we should ‘interrogate the things that make us want to drink too much’. In the Guardian again someone else declared: ‘It’s important to challenge and interrogate sexist beauty ideals, of course.’ Of course.

‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a review of ‘a gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on the River Humber’. The name of the drama was Jack Lear. A true drama that gripped the popular tabloids is that of Jack Shepherd, convicted in absentia for the manslaughter of a young woman he took out in a speedboat on the Thames, and now in jail in Georgia (on the Black Sea) facing extradition. Shepherd’s namesake Jack Sheppard (1702-24) was celebrated as a jailbreaker after his conviction for burglary. His exploits remained famous enough for an unsuccessful film Where’s Jack?, starring Tommy Steele, to be made in 1969.

The parliamentary press gallery has in the past given a pair of silver shoe buckles to the Speaker as a token of respect, since his shoes were all they could see of him from their perch above his chair. They won’t be giving buckles to John Bercow, for he has done away with most of his official attire. He wears a gown like a teacher in the Beano and sports a variety of what might be categorised as snazzy ties. I was struck recently by hearing him refer to MPs collectively as ‘colleagues’. I can’t remember previous Speakers doing so. ‘I will come to other colleagues, if that is what colleagues wish,’ he said during a long series of points of order on 9 January after his ruling that let in one of Dominic Grieve’s amendments on Brexit procedure.