Language

‘More deadly than the male,’ said my husband archly. He was knowingly quoting Kipling, though I don’t know why he should, since Kipling was not fashionable when he was young. His cue was a remark he overheard from an academic former colleague puzzled by the frequency of female in student essays, where woman might have been expected. This usage is said to be ‘now commonly avoided by good writers, except with contemptuous implication’, said the Oxford English Dictionary in 1895, when it got round to considering words beginning with F.

‘That’s not how you spell “system”,’ said my husband triumphantly, pointing with his whisky glass at a placard inveighing against the ‘Cistem’, held up by a transgender protester on television. ‘No, darling,’ I said, not even assuming a patient tone. ‘It’s a play on words.’ Among people who like using the word gender outside its grammatical homeland, cis- as a prefix is tacked on, to make cisgender: ‘someone whose sense of personal identity corresponds to the sex and gender assigned to him or her at birth’, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it carefully. Note that it is not held to be a question of being the same sex as you were born, but the sex and gender assigned to you.

One thing grabbed my attention from David Cameron’s speech, long ago in the middle of last week. ‘We need a national crusade to get homes built.’ I’m as interested in housing as the next mother with a practically homeless grown-up daughter, but it was the word crusade that astonished me. I did not think a politician could use it now. Just after the atrocities of 11 September 2001, George Bush said: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while.’ Some listeners feared this was confirmation of a ‘clash of civilisations’. But, from the Muslim side, some objections were ill-founded historically. English-speaking warriors who set off in the 11th and 12th centuries to free the Holy Places did not call themselves crusaders.

‘Is Nicky Morgan too “normal” to be the next prime minister?’ asked someone in the Daily Telegraph. That would make her abnormally normal, I suppose, at least for a PM. ‘Who and what dictates what is normal?’ asked Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, earlier this year, but, like jesting Pilate, did not stay for an answer. She posed the question because she does not like communities where ‘women normally stay at home, they normally get married very early, they normally wouldn’t vote, they normally don’t run a business’. They have been warned. Yet most people would prefer not to have an abnormal heartbeat, no matter how far out of the ordinary their opinions were.

I lost my husband on the way from Malabar. He is easily lost. We had been talking about the verb critique, which we neither much care for. But, in gathering ammunition, I’d come across this charming sentence from a book of voyages translated in 1598 by William Phillip. He referred to a ‘fruite which the Malabares and Portingales call Carambolas’. Carambola, the fruit, might have given the Portuguese and Spanish the word carambola meaning ‘a cannon’ in billiards, cannon coming from carom, a reduction of the French version of the word, carambole. But there is a little place near Seville called El Carambolo.

A great discovery has been made by Dr Paul Booth, a fellow of Keele University. It is a 14th-century example of fuck. We might think the word Anglo-Saxon, but it’s hard to find written examples before the 16th century. Chaucer never uses it. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a poem from 1500 in the surprising form gxddbov. That is a cipher which, by shifting each letter back a place in the alphabet, reveals fuccant, a dog-Latin third person plural of the verb. Dr Booth was an honorary fellow of the University of Liverpool until he called the institution ‘bastards’ for its architectural shortcomings. This was held to be against its ‘Social Media Compliance Policy’. So much for academic freedom.

‘Tweeting’s like text messaging, isn’t it?’ said my husband confidently, though not, as usual, from any knowledge of the matter. I find the register of language in tweets interesting. The tweeter in his own right must assume an easy tone, quite different from that of the niggling troll. As far as style goes, I was impressed by Jamie Reed, the Labour MP who made public his resignation from the shadow cabinet when Jeremy Corbyn had hardly finished his acceptance speech. Mr Reed is fond of tweeting, and quite good at it. The little picture (tweeters it call an avatar) with his account shows Larry Sanders, the fictional chatshow host. Having resigned, Mr Reed later tweeted: ‘Forgot to put the bones in my shirt collars and now my train has broken down.

In a wonderfully dry manual of theology on my husband’s bookshelves, written in Latin and printed in Naples in the 1830s, there is a discussion of whether ‘rustics and idiots’ are supported in their belief by ‘motives of credibility’, such as miracles. The same question has been asked about belief in Jeremy Corbyn, except that the city stands in for the country, and the idiots are often useful ones. ‘I am the only candidate who can offer a bold but credible vision,’ Andy Burnham has said. ‘I’ll have the confidence to reject Tory myths and the credibility to demolish them,’ countered Yvette Cooper. John Curtice, the political scientist, noticed that Labour MPs think Mr Corbyn’s ‘economic policy is not credible’.

Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, is going to use refugee instead of migrant in its English output. ‘The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean,’ one of its editors explained. ‘It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative.’ Doubts about terminology are not new. ‘Please don’t speak of those arriving in Australia from Britain as immigrants,’ wrote the Sydney Daily Mail in 1922. ‘Call them rather migrants, because to go from Britain to Australia is only to pass from one part of Great Britain to another.’ Perhaps.

We reached peak Charlie in 2012, when 5,571 baby boys were given the name. There were only 4,642 last year. Perhaps the Paris massacre early this year will leave more infants than ever lisping ‘Je suis Charlie’ when they learn to talk. Names go in waves. In the Office for National Statistics list of last year’s names in England and Wales, diminutives are noticeably popular. Charlie, not Charles, is at No. 5 for boys, with Harry, not Henry, at No. 3 and Jack, not John, at No. 2. The tendency is less pronounced among girls, with the tenth most popular name being Sophie, though Lily (ninth) and Poppy (fifth) sound like diminutives.

There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on the screen with the greeting ‘Hello, sailor.’ Last week, though, the man who was Sir Edward’s principal private secretary during his time as prime minister, Robert Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong, commented on the posthumous accusations against him. ‘You usually detect some sense of sexuality when you are friends or work closely with them,’ he said of political colleagues. ‘I think he was completely asexual.’ Asexual is an anomalous word, combining a Greek prefix, signifying negation or privation, with an adjective derived from Latin.