Language

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.

I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it at his club. It had a very enjoyable review by Sir Brian Vickers of the Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson. I understood much of it and agreed with most. A point I applauded was the need to annotate not only rare words but also deceptively simple words with a different meaning in Jonson’s day. They include ill, perfect, action, subtlety, free and accident. So, when Thomas More wrote of the ‘sottle suggestion of vice’, he did not mean a fine-tuned or even imperceptible suggestion, but one that was deceitful. Since Jonson named one of his characters Subtle, it is an important word to understand aright.

How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into a store.’ But in my experience, lottery tickets are sold mostly in shops, along with confectionery and tobacco. You can, it is true, get them in Sainsbury’s, but I wouldn’t call that a store either, but a supermarket. Yet 2014 looks like the year of a fight to the death between shop and store. Store is making aggressive gains through the phrase in store. It is the opposite of online (which has now become one word, not only as an attributive adjective (‘online gambling’) but also adverbially (‘he began to gamble online’). Tesco now sees itself as having three ways of shopping: in store, online or mobile.

Sifting through the heaps of discarded language and redundant memes expended in the last twelve months, it’s clear that they don’t make ‘em like they used to. Ah, for the days when clichés were built to last! Twitter now rolls out disposable buzz phrases like a chopstick factory, and all we can do is get a bit angry and forget about them. This is not to say that Neology is dead. This year gave us ‘Twerking’, which I rather like - provided it remains confined to inverted commas rather than let loose in my kitchen. Another 2013 winner is ‘Chumley’ – shorthand for laddish berks with aristocratic pretentions and red trousers. It’s useful, it’s funny and it genuinely identifies something previously unformulated as a word.

Must say, I felt a bit defensive when I looked at the tables of origin for immigrants to Britain for the decades to 2011, helpfully set out in  The Daily Mail. The real gist of the thing was the numbers – an increase from just under 2 million in the decade to 1951 to 7.5 million in the decade to 2011. But what was riveting was the immigrants’ countries of origin. For most of the time, the Irish led the field, with about half a million a year arriving in the course of each decade, give or take 100,000. In the last decade though, we were knocked right off our perch. At the top was India from which almost 700,000 people came during the ten years to 2011, followed by nearly 600,000 Poles and nearly half a million from Pakistan.

‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the shop, but it seems rather distant to me, either verbally or associatively (the shops, being lit by fluorescent tubes, are staring rather than sparkly). The popular name is Marks and Sparks, but merely as a rhyme. There is already an outfit called Believe in Magic. ‘Believe in Magic is a charity,’ its website says, ‘that spreads magic to the lives of seriously and terminally ill children.’ It takes them on outings for a treat. There is little chance of Believe in Magic being confused with Marks & Spencer. There is also some stuff called Ibuleve, a gel for the relief of muscular and rheumatic pain, strains and sprains.

A few years back I did one of those online debates on the Times website, the subject being why feminism had fallen out of favour. Within about 60 seconds four people had used the phrase ‘gender is a social construct’ and, well, I sort of switched off at that point. It’s strange that the F-word is now so unpopular that even David Cameron, a man with a desperately keen ear for metro-liberal opinion, refused to identify as such last week. When asked by Red magazine, he said: ‘I don’t know what I’d call myself... it’s up to others to attach labels. But I believe men and women should be treated equally.