Language

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Should you be prejudiced against ‘pre-’?

‘Pre-diabetes is an artificial category with virtually zero clinical relevance,’ said an American professor in the Times. A friend of mine has even been told by the vet that her little cat is in a pre-diabetic condition, being a little over the norm on the feline body mass index. I began to think that pre-diabetes was like the countryman’s hills: if you can see them it’s going to rain. (If you can’t, it’s raining — you’ve got diabetes.) But then I did something sensible. I looked up the term in the dictionary. It is no neologism. The first example in the OED comes from more than 100 years ago. ‘At

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The bloody battle for the name Isis

‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph. For once he was right. It was a letter from the Pagan Federation complaining that the acronym Isis ‘is likely to form an inadvertent association in the minds of hearers between Sunni jihadists and followers of the goddess Isis’. These ‘may be caught up in unintended fallout’. They are not the only ones. Apart from the army of bloodthirsty Islamists, Isis is a centre for scientific research at Harwell, near Oxford; a group of schools teaching English; an ‘end to end’ professional photographic service in Clerkenwell; a private equity investor; and a seven-seater from Toyota. With no

Monday

Nick Cohen

Spastics, cretins and the political correctness of the right

Ruth Richards, head of communications at Mind, has written a response to my criticism of the pointlessness of politically correct descriptions of the mentally ill and handicapped. As you would expect it is worth reading in full, but I am afraid it left me unconvinced. She thinks that the effort to reshape language is worthwhile, and cannot see how today’s polite discourse will become tomorrow’s insults. ‘I don’t agree that in however many years’ time the terms we use today will become offensive in their own right. “Person with mental health problems” is just far too clunky to be shouted in the playground.’ So it is. But ‘mental’ is already

Tuesday

Melanie McDonagh

‘Britishness’ debate: can you do Magna Carta without also doing God?

Was anyone terribly surprised by the Social Attitudes Survey published today suggesting that most people thought that, in order to be British, you should be able to speak English? Some 95 per cent thought so; the only curiosity being that in 2006 the figure was as low as 86 per cent. Nor indeed is it terribly odd that, as the authors point out, the threshold for Britishness is getting higher. As the survey from January points out, three in four people think immigration numbers should be reduced; the question of identity has to be seen in that context. One interesting aspect of the survey is the decrease in the numbers

Tuesday

Nick Cohen

The cheating language of equality

If you write about the mentally ill – people who suffer a short breakdown, maybe, or long periods of crippling stress – or say that those who must cope with autism, depression or schizophrenia all their lives are “handicapped”, you will be hammered. But not by the state and its supporters, or by members of the public with deep and prejudiced fears about mental illness. You can say the health service is impoverishing care for the mentally ill because its administrators know they are an unpopular minority, who can be hit without a political cost. You can write about how the criminal justice system is imprisoning vast numbers of minor offenders

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

The sinister new meaning of ‘support’

When I asked my husband why paramedical professions were given to remaking the language in strange ways, he replied in a threatening tone ‘Whadya mean?’ I think he was in denial. But it is undeniably true that where two or three trained counsellors or disability campaigners are gathered together, the first victim will be the English language. Who was it, after all, that came up with the phrase ‘issues around’? The latest craze is to urge the need for supporting people to do something, or even into something. So, on the NHS careers website, part of the job of a social worker may be to work  with offenders, ‘supervising them in

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

‘Basta’ must be the Queen’s English — a Queen used it

My chickens do not usually come home to roost so rapidly. Only a fortnight ago I wrote that ‘some people use basta in English, but to my ears it sounds like saying ciao — inauthentic’. Then I went back to reading Jane Ridley’s Bertie, the life of Edward VII (and how much I enjoyed it too). What should I find on page 357? I found Queen Alexandra writing about what she would wear at the coronation in 1901. ‘I know better than all the milliners and antiquaries,’ she wrote. ‘I shall wear exactly what I like, and so shall all my ladies — Basta!’ I can hardly accuse a queen of England of speaking

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

How DO you pronounce 'Marylebone'? 

‘Take a trip to Marylebone station,’ chanted my husband. ‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.’ I had been to the station to take the rather nice Chiltern Railways train to Stratford-upon-Avon. En route I had developed doubts, not about my destination, but about the pronunciation of Marylebone. I’ve always said marry-bun, with the vowel of bun indeterminate. But a taxi driver and a ticket collector had said marly-bun. So, back at home, I turned to How to Pronounce It by Alan S.C. Ross, the man who invented U and non-U, but a proper linguistician for all that, and a man guaranteed to take into account traditional tendencies. He

Rod Liddle

If only Austin Mitchell had called Pfizer ‘racists’

I see the veteran Labour MP Austin Mitchell is in trouble for having used the word rape in a ‘deeply offensive’ context. He had castigated the government for having failed to prevent Pfizer’s attempted acquisition of AstraZeneca, and added: ‘Roll up rapists.’ The woman who described Mitchell’s use of the word as ‘deeply offensive’ was the Wimmin’s Minister, Nicky Morgan. Presumably one can use the word rape only about the sexual violation, by force, of a woman. And that further, all such violations are equally abhorrent. All other uses for the word, which you will find in your dictionary – such as ‘pillage’ or ‘plunder’ are henceforth banned. Presumably this

Wednesday

Steerpike

Austin Mitchell, 'rapists' and the death of language

In further proof that the devil makes work for idle thumbs, Labour MP Austin Mitchell described Pfizer as ‘rapists’ in a tweet. All hell has since broken loose. All of which leaves Mr S nonplussed. Definitions of the noun ‘rape’ are as follows: 1. the unlawful compelling of a person through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse. 2. any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person. 3. statutory rape. 4. an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation. Mr S is confident that Mitchell was using the word ‘rapists’ in the sense of the fourth definition – an act of plunder, despoliation and

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

What the French now mean when they say ‘bugger’

The French for tête-à-tête is one-to-one now, according to a new survey of English invaders by Alexandre des Isnards. Actually, only half of the 400 neologisms that M. Isnards has collected for his Dictionnaire du Nouveau Français (Allary Editions) are English, though that’s a high enough level. It seems to me that French and English people are in common cause here, for it is in business-speak that the English neologisms most easily put down their nasty little suckers — an unweeded garden in both languages. Bullet-points now seem as desirable to French business people as to English. Verbs are spawned simply by sticking –er on the end of English words:

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Why –y? The evolution of a suffix

Hitler was ‘dark, shouty, moustachioed’ in Churchill’s eyes, or rather, that was Jonathan Rose’s view of how Churchill saw Hitler, according to Sam Leith, writing in the books pages on 19 April. Shouty is not a word Churchill would have used in exactly this sense, for which no example is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary before 2001. It falls in the category of –y suffixes that connote condemnation, ridicule, or contempt, like catty, churchy or beery. There are plenty of entries for a rather different sense, ‘like a shout’, as Henry Coward noted in his Choral Technique and Interpretation (1914) of untrained voices that may be ‘shouty, throaty, cavernous,

Wednesday

Melanie McDonagh

Did the pope say 'inequality is the root of all social evil'?

The following blog from a Catholic commentator about the Pope’s controversial tweet suggesting that “inequality is the root of social evil” puts the row about it on Twitter into context. But the real question is the language in which Pope Francis first tweeted: Spanish or Latin? In Latin, as the author of this blog observes, the critical noun is “iniquitas”, which you might as well call “sin”; come to that “malus” doesn’t mean social evil so much as any sort of evil. And to say that sin is the root of evil is sort of tautologous, at least for Catholics. But if the pope’s thought was first expressed in Spanish,

Monday

Nick Cohen

You sexist/racist/liberal/elitist bastard! How dare you?

While he was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Tony Judt found the breath to educate those who believe they could ameliorate pain with soft words and bans on ‘inappropriate’ language. “You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.” Worry about whether you, or more pertinently anyone you wish to boss about, should say ‘person with special needs’ instead of ‘disabled’ or ‘challenged’ instead of ‘mentally handicapped’ and you will enjoy a righteous glow. You will not do anything, however, to provide health care and support

Thursday

The Spectator

Spectator letters: Interpreting Islam, and Spectator-reading thieves

Chapter and verse on Islam Sir: Irshad Manji’s generally very sensible article on ‘Reclaiming Islam’ (29 March) suggests using the Qur’an sura 3:7 as a verse to challenge Islamists who claim a fundamentalist reading. She quotes the verse as saying that ‘God and God alone knows the full truth of how the Qu’ran ought to be interpreted’. I don’t speak Arabic, but unfortunately in my English translation this isn’t quite what the verse says. What it says is ‘only God and insightful people know their true meaning’. Sadly then the verse, I suspect, would be next to useless in challenging fundamentalist interpretations — as most Islamists would, I suspect, consider

Dot Wordsworth

Why did we ever spell jail gaol?

‘Go to jail. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.’ said the Community Chest card in Monopoly. I was never sure what a Community Chest was, but it seemed American, like the spelling jail. Those who love the spelling gaol, which combines characteristics of being very English yet outlandish, might be surprised to find that the Oxford English Dictionary prefers jail. There is a logical explanation. Both spellings derive indirectly from the Latin cavus, ‘a hollow’, from which came Latin cavea, ‘a dungeon or cage’, and thence French cage and Italian gaggia (like the coffee machine). The changing of cavea into cage is paralleled by

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

When did we stop ‘tossing’ coins?

What kind of scientists do school inspectors not need to be? ‘Inspectors don’t need to be rocket scientists.’ For what must we make sure that the school inspection regime is fit? ‘We make sure that the school inspection regime is fit for purpose.’ In what manner do we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely.’ Apart from freely, is there another manner in which we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely and fairly.’ I don’t really mean to make fun of Jonathan Simons’s remarks on his excellent report

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Very bad poems on the Underground

My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he has a Nelson Mandela Memorial Freedom Pass, he seldom chooses to join us Morlocks down below. ‘Is this the work of a Chinaman?’ he asked, nodding towards a poster. ‘You mustn’t say “Chinaman”, dear,’ I said firmly. The poster showed people with vertical slits for eyes and no noses. They stood hunched in an Underground carriage, dressed in T-shirts, as if in a scene from some dystopian film like Idiocracy. Above the image, words were arranged in lines: ‘We really don’t mean to chide / But try to move along inside,

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

When Scotland goes, will England return?

Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question that Charles Moore raised last week about the name of the country if Scotland leaves. My husband, naturally, is all for calling it England. Even the Oxford English Dictionary defines England as ‘The inhabitants of England (sometimes also Britain) regarded collectively.’ The Welsh would certainly be aggrieved, and the Northern Irish up in arms. But we can’t include everyone in the national name. Even now, some of the Cornish are cutting up rough. As someone wrote in the Church Times not so long ago: ‘Our villages — Ingleby, Irby, Saxton,

Thursday

Mark Palmer

Warning: upspeak can wreck your career

A few weeks ago, I accompanied my daughter to an Open Day at Roehampton College, where she is hoping to start a teacher training course in September. I enjoyed it — and was impressed by the broad mix of motivated young men and women who, if all goes well, will soon be teaching the next generation of primary school children. Towards the end of the afternoon, the co-ordinator said she wanted to offer a few tips about the interview process that would begin once all the applications have been submitted. It turned out she had only one main tip: avoid upspeak. She stressed the point vigorously. Indeed, her message for