Language

‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much like rocket salad and wishes all supplies had perished along with the lettuces of Spain. So as a distraction I tried telling him that rocket leaves were connected with street urchins, caterpillars, caprices and hedgehogs. The herb rocket is older in English than the sky-rocket, which appeared no earlier than 1566. The firework rocket took its name from rocchetta in Italian, meaning ‘little bobbin’, from the similarity in shape. There is a related old word in English, rock, which once meant ‘distaff’ and is used by historians now to mean ‘spindle’. But that is nothing to do with the greenery.

A law I’d like to see passed would exact severe penalties for the use of the word trope. It is as welcome in our language as toxic particulates are in the air we breathe. I saw a piece in the Guardian about a dramatic monologue called The Encounter offering ‘a recognised narrative trope: the white interloper introduced to a new way of being via an encounter with the other, the magical native’. Here trope seems to mean ‘a story in miniature, a recognisable theme’. The notion of a trope pops up all over the place these days. ‘How jazz ruins a young white man’s life,’ observed Caitlin Moran in the Times, ‘is quite a niche trope.’ She was making a little joke.

Waiting for my husband in a Rome hotel, I was reduced to reading some of the weekend newspaper supplements. The Italians think themselves highly fashionable, and using words from English cements the image. La Repubblica’s weekly magazine called D has two sections with English names: Beauty and Lifestyle. Coverage of Paris Fashion Week was headlined ‘Parigi Fashion Week’ and a discussion of cosmetics was headed ‘No make up’. This is the sort of thing that drives the Accademia della Crusca into a frenzy. The academy has been making judgments since its foundation in 1583 on the use of the national language. Crusca mean ‘bran’ and the academy likes to sift out indigestible foreign bran from the fine home-ground flour.

‘Look, darling, a spelling mistake,’ said my husband, looking out of the window, as he had been for minutes, like a lonely old woman. Sure enough, a van was parked in the street with a word painted on the side: Carillion. Now, an unpleasant collection of bells hit automatically by hammers is called a carillon. Carillon can be pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, with or without a Frenchified middle consonant. Or it can be pronounced to rhyme with ‘a million’, which is perhaps where people get the idea that it contains more than one i. As a trade name, you might think it perpetuates some founding father. But the company was demerged from Tarmac in 1999. It is surprising how random are the names in the FTSE 100 index.

The title of America’s first woman bishop was claimed in 1918 by Bishop Alma White, leader of the Pillar of Fire Church, noted for her feminism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, for her alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, and for her nativism. I was puzzled by the word. After all, Native Americans are what we used to call Indians. Native American is not a new piece of terminology. Sir Fulke Greville in his Life of Sir Philip Sidney, published in 1628, inveighed against the Spaniard as a race for suppressing ‘the poor native Americans’ with heavy impositions. But these American Indians, no matter how heavily suppressed, hardly seemed the sort of native that Bishop White would have championed. Nor had I heard that Donald Trump was a big fan of Native Americans.

Here are the first 50 words in the order that they were learnt by a child called Will: 1 uh-oh; 2 alldone; 3 light; 4 down; 5 shoes; 6 baby; 7 don’t-throw; 8 moo; 9 bite; 10 three; 11 hi; 12 cheese; 13 up; 14 quack-quack; 15 oink-oink; 16 coat; 17 beep-beep; 18 keys; 19 cycle; 20 mama; 21 daddy; 22 siren sound; 23 grrr; 24 more; 25 off; 26 tick-tock; 27 ball; 28 go; 29 bump; 30 pop-pop [fire]; 31 out; 32 hee-haw; 33 eat; 34 neigh-neigh; 35 meow; 36 sit; 37 woof-woof; 38 bah-bah; 39 hoo-hoo [owl]; 40 bee; 41 tree; 42 mimi [ferry]; 43 sss [snake]; 44 ooh-ooh [monkey]; 45 yack-yack [people talking]; 46 hohoho [Santa]; 47 bye-bye; 48 doll; 49 kite; 50 Muriel. Isn’t that extraordinary?

My husband has an irritating habit of holding his hymn book open at the right page but obviously not referring to the text as he belts out carols. He is perfectly happy growling, in what he thinks a light baritone, the Latin version of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, even the fourth verse, beginning: ‘Ergo qui natus die hodierna.’ I’m not saying he’s wrong to apply his sticky brain cells to the Latin version, for that was the one first written down in 1750 by the scholar John Wade, a reviver of plainchant. If you ask me, Wade was the author of the words. His manuscripts, with his own illuminations, included lyrics of many an ancient hymn, such as the Eastertide ‘Vexilla Regis’.

‘When I asked the bank,’ said my husband, ‘they were no help at all.’ My attention was distracted from his Kafkaesque predicament, which is both typical and too complicated to explain. Instead I was pondering the reference to the bank as they. This is well established in British English. The bank, Sainsbury’s or England (the cricket team) can be they, or equally correctly, it. Just be consistent. But my husband’s ramblings had reminded me that David Willetts, when talking on the radio about adult education, had said ‘someone in their thirties or forties’. The Willettsian usage has their, a plural personal adjective, referring back to someone, a singular antecedent.

There’s something suspicious about the name for a fear of clowns which was on the shortlist of words of the year compiled by Oxford Dictionaries. This phobia, coulrophobia, oddly enough illustrates the meaning of Oxford’s eventual chosen winner: post-truth. Post-truth applies to a circumstance ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion’. Because 2016 saw an outbreak of ‘creepy-clown’ behaviour (with America swamped by people dressed as clowns lurking in the shadows, armed with samurai swords), there has been a demand for a learned word derived from Greek to designate the fear of them.

At the Queen’s Coronation, the Duke of Northumberland carried the Sword of Mercy called Cortana. I mention this for three reasons: by way of a holiday, since it is as far from the American elections as we can get; because I am worried that the sword might not be carried at the next Coronation; and because I was surprised to find the word cortana in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary. The OED does not include proper names, so in 1893, when it reached the letter C, it pretended that cortana was a common noun. It notes that the sword has no point and that its name comes simply from Latin curtus, short, which in Old French was extended to cortain and in Anglo-Latin cortana (feminine, agreeing with spatha, ‘sword’).

Staring at a brown envelope, my husband said: ‘I’ll deal with that post-breakfast,’ and then laughed as though he had made a joke. In his mind it was a play on words, the unspoken words being post-Brexit. It is true that no one is safe from that phrase these days. As a compound adjective, it’s not so bad: post-Brexit prosperity. As an adverb, it sounds awkward to me: prices rising post-Brexit. The word Brexit itself was established as more than a passing vogue only after the referendum, I think.

I’m very glad I followed a friend’s recommendation to read The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield, an author neglected to the point of disparagement. The vehicle of the book is a tale of seafaring in the 1860s, and one of Masefield’s great strengths is vividness. He deals with material objects in motion. But description of such objects is impossible for any writer. If the reader has never seen an oak tree, no amount of description will conjure it up. A simple example in The Bird of Dawning (the title is the name of a ship) comes when the hero remembers to take with him from a sinking ship a vice ‘nipped to a ledge; he released the nip and took that’. Without the technical term nip, the description is less exact and economical.