Language

I had thought that the saying ‘Accidents will happen in the best regulated families’ was a vulgar reference to children born unexpectedly. The Oxford English Dictionary records accident being used in just that way in the middle of the 19th century. On its own, ‘accidents will happen’ dates from at least as far back as 1705, and the Lady’s Magazine for 1791 gave this humorous version: ‘Mistakes will happen in the best regulated families; I have taken my opera fan to church.’ Ever since, it has been in common use, with Mr Micawber (1850) taking it up as ‘Accidents will occur in the best regulated families.’ You’d think it might have originated in a play or poem, but no such origin has been traced.

Q. My future son-in-law has been successfully house-trained in the use of upper-middle-class English over the years that he has been walking out with my daughter. However, one bad habit remains. How can I cure him of saying ‘must of’ when he means ‘must have’? He always says ‘of’ very clearly, as though he really means it. I dare not correct him for fear of making him feel inadequate. —Name and address withheld A. First disarm him with praise. Find an excuse to praise the fluency and elegance of his conversation, perhaps by comparing him with a less articulate contemporary. Then add, ‘And I don’t think I’ve ever caught you making a grammatical error — except of course for “must of”.

In this week’s magazine Rod Liddle has a piece on the worst ‘clichés, lies, evasions, obfuscations, PC euphemisms and disingenuous balls words and phrases which, in recent years, have annoyed me the most’. He was inspired by Brook Newmark’s recent shenanigans with a phantom lady and a computer, which were explained as the MP ‘battling his demons’. Rod also includes vulnerable, community, ‘bravely fighting cancer’, vibrant, diversity and, of course, ‘wrong side of history’. For a while I’ve been collecting my own worst words and phrases in the ever-evolving English language, a sort of dictionary of political cant that I work on to keep me sane.

I read C.J. Sansom’s novel Dissolution on the train recently with pleasure. For an historical novel narrated in the 1530s, what was the author to do about language? He eschewed godwottery (which Fowler, in a dated term, called Wardour Street, after the old furniture once sold there). But I did gulp at page 273: ‘I got up, waving my arms and stamping my feet to restore the circulation.’ The what? The word circulatioun is first recorded from 1535 in the sense ‘movement in a circle’. It wasn’t till 1630 that James Primrose published a commentary, De Motu Cordis et Circulatione Sanguinis, on the theories of William Harvey.

It should perhaps be called Yambuku fever, since that was the village in Zaire (as it was then, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where it was identified in 1976 by Peter Piot, a scientist from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. He is now director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and went back to Yambuku earlier this year, meeting a survivor of the 1976 outbreak. Professor Piot decided to name it after the river Ebola, 60 miles from Yambuku, because he realised the stigma that would attach to the disease. In that, Yambuku is luckier than the German town of Marburg in Hesse, where seven people died of a haemorrhagic fever identified there in 1967, or Lassa in Borno state, Nigeria, where another haemorrhagic fever was described in 1969.

‘Goosey, goosey gander,’ my husband shouted at the television, like someone from Gogglebox. It’s not so much that he thinks the television real as that he thinks himself an unreal part of the television. The cause of his outburst was something that had caught my attention, too. Someone had said: ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.’ We both thought this a mere garbling of the proverb: ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ It is not the benefit of either the goose or the gander that is under consideration but the delectation of their flesh. Certainly, the oldest books of proverbs mention sauce. Chief among these is John Ray’s collection from 1670. What a labour it must have been to compile.

Every day, without fail, some celebrity or public figure will be quoted spouting a meaningless or disingenuous off-the-cuff cliché, to either big himself up or excuse some misdemeanour. Or simply to gull the public. From now on, then, we’ll be highlighting this sort of egregious shit in this brand! new! 'Fatuous Phrase of the Week' spot. This week it’s one that has always got my goat: 'battling my demons'. I hate this phrase partly for its ubiquity and partly for political reasons. Slebs are always telling us they’re 'battling with their demons' and by so doing are attempting to get themselves off the hook.

At least I’ve got my husband’s Christmas present sorted out: the Dull Men of Great Britain calendar. It is no doubt intended ironically, as travelling the country photographing old pillar-boxes, for example, does not strike me as being in the least bit dull. I had thought that dull, in reference to people, was a metaphor from dull in the sense of ‘unshiny’. ‘Dieu de batailles!’ as the Constable of France in Henry V exclaims of the English, ‘where have they this mettle?/ Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull?’ But I was quite wrong, as so often. It started off (in the form dol) meaning ‘foolish’. In English almost as old as you could care to have it, the author of The Seafarer declares: Dol bith se the him his dryhten ne ondrædeth; cymeth him se death unthinged.

When I first heard ‘Wonderwall’ being played in a public house, in 1995 I suppose, I thought it was some unreleased Beatles record that had been just been discovered. The song appeared on an album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which has on the cover a picture showing two men about to pass in a very empty Berwick Street in Soho. It must have been daybreak. In the middle distance a magenta doorway indicates the location of a shop called Reckless Records. It’s a good name for a second-hand record shop. Is Reckless such a good name for an MP? I was surprised by how many people made a little joke about Mark Reckless’s name after he defected to Ukip at the weekend. Do they think he is descended (all paternity being regular) from someone who was reckless and thus earned the name?

‘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.

‘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.