Language

‘Pop goes the weasel!’ my husband exclaimed, expertly muddying the waters. We had just been listening to another news bulletin that referred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer being expected to ‘break her pledge’ in the Budget. It seemed to me that the ink on pledges were scarcely dry before they became aspirations that came to nothing. We are told that not raising income tax was ‘a key manifesto pledge’. Why don’t we imitate the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of our forebears and resort to frithborh or frank-pledge? It was a system making each householder of a tithing (ten households) responsible for the other nine. This fits in with the root meaning of pledge – a hostage held as security for the fulfilment of a promise.

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: ‘I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.’ She has so far made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. ‘She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,’ wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual ‘grooming’? Are they victims or survivors? Or should they be neither?

‘“I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’ By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in a book you might not wish your wife or your servants to read. It is The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905) about boys at Harrow, more particularly the love between them. Surprisingly it caused no outrage at the time. The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F.

‘Oh, no!’ cried my husband from the other room in the tones of one who has upset the goldfish bowl on to a rare book. I rushed in, despite previous experience, and found the problem was that the BBC had just referred to ‘Princess Catherine’. To take his mind off it, I told him about Bedfordshire putting its foot down on the spelling of one of its villages. In future, when a road sign needs replacing, it will refer to Yelden – not Yielden or even Yieldon. There had been an attempt to resolve the uncertainty in 1998 when villagers were asked what they thought the village was called. Thirty said it was ‘Yielden’, but 44 said ‘Yelden’. The Royal Mail used the spelling Yielden but the Victoria County History (1912) had no doubts about calling it Yelden.

‘It’s got to be greenlighted,’ said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when ‘he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb’. The Observer looked back on the recent history of the National Gallery, when ‘the Sainsbury Wing revamp was greenlit’. My husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit.

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or so the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that he called on them to ‘reduce and defuse tensions’. What you do with a bomb in a Hollywood movie is to defuse it. Its fuse might be ticking away and you remove it. Tensions can be reduced by figuratively defusing them. But very often tensions and situations are said in newspapers to be diffused, as though they were a nasty gas in a room and you’d opened the window. Diffuse for defuse often appears in papers.

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until that happy day, the RYA has issued a slim volume,  Inclusive Language Guidance, with a sort of phrasebook thrown in. A sample is: ‘Ze went sailing yesterday. Zir boat is green. That boat belongs to zem.’ This indicates not that the speaker is German, or perhaps from Somerset, but that the person being spoken about has chosen those strange pronouns as zir own.

Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvellous bob hairdo, this month became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people the King likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here about content. ‘That is probably not a sign of dementia,’ said my husband encouragingly. Why is content such an unpleasant label for articles in a magazine? After all, the title page of the Great Bible, ordered to be published by Henry VIII in 1539, read: ‘The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content of all the holy Scrypture, bothe of the olde and newe testament.’ Still, no one thought of Moses as a content-provider.

Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before. Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian; working-class too Your Party. Anyway, the humble background had to be thrown off. Hers was not the professed outlook of the writhing Uriah Heep (seen as a ‘red-headed animal’ by David Copperfield). ‘“Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at school; it’s what goes down best. Be umble,” says father, “and you’ll do!” And really it ain’t done bad!

‘Do you know how many people Hallmark cards employs?’ asked my husband. I didn’t, and nor would he, had he not just looked it up on Wikipedia. ‘Seven?’ I replied. ‘No.’ ‘A million?’ ‘Now you’re just being silly.’ The reason that the birthday card people had come up was because James Heale began his column in last week’s Spectator: ‘If there is a hallmark of Keir Starmer’s leadership, it is a willingness to bash the left.’ I had wondered aloud whether a figurative hallmark implied something of value, like the marks on gold and silver. I thought the name of the Hallmark brand suggested as much. ‘When you care enough to send the very best,’ is the Hallmark slogan. But it turns out that the company was begun by a man called Joyce Hall.

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce introduces the question of whether ballocks is the only example of the dual number in English. In Irish English it is certainly used in the plural form with singular concord. Ballocks was in standard use up to the 17th century, after which it was seen as coarse slang. In 1885, the Oxford English Dictionary remarked that the word was ‘obsolete in polite use’. Now bullock may be going the same way.

When this century began we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely. But now I reach for my throwing-slippers when someone on the radio says: ‘One hundred per cent.’ It can be a hundred per cent, hundred per cent or (in the mouth of Gen Z) hundo P. Even odder is the development of an emoji with its own meanings. I had supposed that 💯 meant 100 per cent, implying agreement. But the immediate figurative reference is to examination marks (which to be sure are 100 per cent when the mark is 100).

I spent some time looking for the connection between the ancient city of Canopus and the English canopy. Nelson won the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay. The bay was named after the city of Abu Qir, which was named after a Christian martyr, St Cyrus. Abu Qir stands on the site of the city of Canopus, to which ran the Canopic Way, from Alexandria. Canopus was said to have been founded by Menelaus, the King of Sparta who figures in the Iliad. Canopus, the pilot of his ship, was fatally bitten by a snake, and around the monument built by Menelaus grew the city. At Canopus, the Egyptian god Osiris was worshipped under the form of a jar with a human head.