Language

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.

‘How can Bovril be suitable for vegetarians?’ asked my husband. ‘Bo- comes from bos, Latin for an ox.’ He was staring at a label that said: ‘Beef Bovril. Beef flavoured drink.’ This is a preparation of dried granules, containing yeast extract but no beef, which therefore not only suits vegetarians but also counts as halal. I must say I shared my husband’s confusion, for there is still the tarry-looking substance in jars labelled ‘Beef Bovril: the original beef extract’, which is 43 per cent beef stock and 24 per cent yeast extract. Bovril is made by Unilever, just like Marmite, which caused 24 hours of yeasty frenzy last week when the price was said to have been affected by looming Brexit.

Of the contribution to English that Polari is claimed to have brought, perhaps naff is the most current-sounding. An older suggestion for its origin, recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, is from northern English naffu, ‘simpleton’. But, in a refreshing wander through the forest of Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which this week went online, I ran into other possibilities. Not only does he record the suggestion that it came into Polari from 16th-century Italian, gnaffa, ‘a despicable person’, he also considers a Romany origin, from naflo or nasvalo, ‘no good’.

‘Americans,’ said my husband in much the same tone that Betsey Trotwood said ‘Donkeys’. It was his way of explaining my dislike of the verb critique. I had bridled most recently in reading a rather good review by Professor Sir Paul Collier in the TLS, where he said that ‘leading economists have critiqued the euro’. Some of my annoyance came from a vague apprehension that criticise had recently been replaced by critique partly to avoid the negative connotations of the former, yet here the connotations were as negative as the blackest black hole. At the same time, critique belonged, to my mind, strictly to the world of literary criticism and was unfit for application to currencies. I was wrong in most of what I assumed.

Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where the hearth is. The Spaniards have a proverb (of course) on the matter: El sol es hogar de los pobres, ‘The sun is hearth and home for the poor’, since they can afford no other fire than the winter sun. My columnar neighbour, Peter Jones, touches on this hearth in his wonderfully entertaining new book, Quid Pro Quo, What the Romans Really Gave the English Language. I found it fun to turn from one entry to a connecting entry and read it like a game of hare and hounds. For the Romans, notes Dr Jones, the household deity (lar familiaris) was worshipped at the religious centre for the family, the hearth, its focus.

Jonathan Swift, in his satirical poem ‘An Epistle to a Lady’, says modestly: ‘If I can but fill my Nitch,/ I attempt no higher Pitch.’ This notion of a social alcove was identical 300 years later when a character in Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse finds she has grown used to ‘his undynamic acceptance of his niche in the world’. But how would Wodehouse have pronounced the word? Certainly like Swift, to rhyme with itch. Yet today, when speaking of a niche market, we say it to rhyme with some French word like fiche. This is a case brought up by the brilliant John Simpson, not our man in the burka, but the former chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, in his new book The Word Detective.

What do you say to someone who is killing you? It is seldom possible to decide in advance. We are told that Fr Jacques Hamel, aged 85, murdered while saying Mass at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray on 26 July, said, as his killers brought him to his knees to cut his throat: ‘Va-t’en, Satan.’ It is a reasonable thing to say, not necessarily identifying the attackers with Satan, just indicating that he is at work in the actions of the moment. Fr Hamel’s death reminded me strongly of that of St Thomas Becket at the hands of fellow Normans in 1170. Language had due importance on that occasion. Reginald FitzUrse, on breaking into the cathedral, shouted: ‘Where is Thomas Beketh [sic], traitor to the king?

I’d seen The Gruffalo in Latin, so I was delighted when Veronica showed me a version her daughter had been given, in Doric. It begins: ‘A moose tuik a dander ben the wid./ A tod saw the moose, an the moose luiked guid.’ (I take it that every mother knows The Gruffalo by heart. The original starts: ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood./ A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good.’). Although Gaelic (Ghàidhlig) is the distinct language of Scotland, few bother to learn it, and the English-speakers there give the name Scots to various dialects of northern English. Sometimes they call it Doric, a very English word deriving from Greek and possessing pejorative connotations of rusticity.