Dot Wordsworth

‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the sky, burnt during the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. It was eradicated by culling six million beasts, not by vaccination producing herd immunity. In Shropshire, stone memorials survive to the outbreak of rinderpest (like Covid-19 a viral disease) of 1865-67. One outbreak ‘swept 54 head off this farm’ near Market Drayton. ‘They died without remedy and here lie. “Shall we receive good from God and not evil?” Job 2:10.’ Nationally, 289,581 died. Britain had met the three big 18th-century cattle plagues by paying farmers to slaughter sick animals quickly, a policy pursued from 1714 by Dr Thomas Bates.

My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe at his resignation in 1990: ‘Rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.’ As my husband remarks, it is no easy task to break a bat and conceal the deed from the opening batsmen until they are already at the crease. No matter. Cricket does inspire figures of speech, and one is ‘off his own bat’. You’ll often hear it as ‘off his own back’, which is misconceived.

Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone seems to be talking about upticks. Usually it is to do with local increases in coronavirus cases. But my husband, not above reading the sports pages, found that Juventus was wondering whether Cristiano Ronaldo had brought ‘a big enough uptick in their revenues’. It is an increase, then. But where does the figure of speech come from? Is it from a graph showing a blip like a V-shaped recovery, which resembles the sort of tick that goes in a box (for those with a tick-box mentality)? I think this idea is reinforced by that of sums ticking up like the meter in a taxi.

A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the 60,000 entries in the Scots Wikipedia. This online resource is like Wikipedia in English, except that it is in the Scottish tongue — not Gaelic, but the Lowland Scots dialect of English, a Germanic language. Robert Burns was familiar with it, but unfortunately the energetic Wikipedia compiler was not. Even his American English seems shaky. He has been at it since the age of 12. ‘The Roman Catholic Kirk is the lairgest Christian denomination in aw the warld,’ begins one entry. ‘Ane oot o ilka sax humans belangs this kirk. It is lead bi the Pape an it haes ower ae billion follaers.

Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas-Home. She took the part to Broadway, but then in the film it was taken by poor Sandra Dee, who, if she was born in 1942, was still only 16 when it was released in 1958, the last year debutantes were presented at court. If it had been called The Reticent Debutante, the juvenile lead might have had fewer lines. I have noticed, with annoyance naturally, that reticent is now often used to mean ‘reluctant’. An article in the Telegraph about TikTok said that the businessman Zhang Yiming had been ‘reticent to give up control’. One can see how ambiguity crept in.

I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy, referred to the Queen as ‘The Queen’. It made her look like a work of fiction. The Royal Household is at it still, referring to ‘The Princess Royal’, ‘The Royal Navy’ and even ‘The Royal Arms of Canada’. The result looks like the late Betty Kenward’s ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in Harpers & Queen: the triumph of deference over grammar. No one, I hope, would write ‘The Tower of London’, even though it is Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress of the Tower of London. By its nature, the definite article does not partake in the capitalisation of proper names.

Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just thinking.’ If so, he seems recently to have been overthinking. Overthinking is a pretty annoying word, often used by people not noted as great thinkers. Taylor Swift, the belle of West Reading, contrasts it with honest gut feeling. ‘Before this year I probably would’ve overthought when to release this music,’ she said when suddenly bringing out a new album to coincide with one due from Kanye West. ‘My gut is telling me that if you make something you love, you should just put it out into the world.’ That is not how I regard a cup of coffee, but people differ.

T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what it would be like to live with the bust of a poet. A bust of Byron on one’s desk would be impossible, with ‘that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression’. Sir Walter Scott presented a different prospect: ‘Were one a person who liked to have busts about, a bust of Scott would be something one could live with.’ These days we are urged by some to learn to live with the coronavirus. It’s not quite a bust of Byron, but nor is it a spouse or ‘partner’. Living with is a phrasal verb first applied, in the 17th century, to spouses.

‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was published posthumously in 1997. The joke in the title depended on knowing two things: that there was an earlier book on English usage of that name (by the brothers H.W. and F.G. Fowler, 1906) and that a nickname of Amis’s was the King. Among those who bought the book, more, I’d think, might have been aware of the former. The point on which my husband was with the King is this: ‘Not many people used to reading could fail to spot that something is wrong in the sentence “If Napoleon had been at his best on the day of Waterloo, the result of the battle may have been different”.

The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there are such things as women) or even pronounce a taboo word. Taboo words have long been with us. The taboo word fuck was not even included in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Yet today the dictionary prints far worse words. Anyway, there is a curious connection between cancel culture and Rishi Sunak. In the 19th century, railway tickets were cancelled by clipping; indeed a scissor-like punch was known as a pair of ticket cancels. Postage stamps, the other glories of the Victorian era, were cancelled, often with Maltese crosses. But cancel originally meant to cross out writing using a lattice of pen lines.

I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with the magic money that Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, was throwing out from his tree. Then my eye was caught by my husband dozing over his newspaper where a little patch of whiskyish dribble had spread over the business pages, and I felt enlightenment. Deadweight itself is plain enough. In the 17th century, when the earliest examples appeared, deadweight meant a static mass, as opposed to a mass in movement possessing kinetic energy. A deadweight, though, might drive clockwork by hanging from the works. In the 19th century, which I regard as yesterday, every political soul would have recognised a reference to deadweight.

It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of us could only object by asserting that one simply could not say: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ It should be: ‘I love it.’ Yet I doubt we’d be more convincing by saying (truly enough) that love is a stative verb which cannot be conjugated in the continuous aspect. In that it resembles know, fear, own or hear. Anyway, apart from the great McDonald’s annoyance, I have become increasingly irritated by the widespread use of love followed by a clause introduced by that. An example in the Sun was someone enthusing about a dress from Tesco: ‘I love that there’s no zip.

At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the Guardian last week. Swathes tend to be whole. Either that or vast, huge, great. Soldiers on first world war battlefields were mown down in them. If a swathe retains a literal meaning, on which its metaphorical use relies, it is presumed to be a sweep of hay or corn cut down by a scythe. What strikes me is the pronunciation. Everyone makes it rhyme with bathe. If anyone used the first pronunciation given by the Oxford English Dictionary, rhyming with moth, they’d hardly be understood. The second pronunciation recorded by the OED rhymes with forth (if the letter r is not pronounced).

‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed (nor had since 2000). I don’t know why anyone should have told him, but I too regret its demise. Its title was high-sounding but meant no more than ‘a weekly meeting’. Indeed until an Act of Parliament in 1854, it was simply the Hebdomadal Meeting of heads of houses. We’d got on to that because my husband wanted the vice-chancellor of Oxford to jail some dons for writing a rude letter about her in the Daily Telegraph. He thought the proctors’ men could imprison them, in the Divinity Schools or somewhere, pending trial. Their offence in his obscurantist fantasy was to accuse her of ventriloquising.

Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives Matter protests. In reply Miss Patel gave some of her experiences of racism, such as being called a ‘Paki’. (Some news reports blanked out Paki.) Next day 32 black and ethnic-minority (BAME) Labour MPs declared in an open letter that the Home Secretary had ‘used your heritage and experiences of racism to gaslight the very real racism faced by black people’.

That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici (from the 1630s), ‘I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.’ His hat he took off in church. His hand? Did he make the sign of the cross with it? His knee he probably bent to kneel in prayer, certainly at the reception of the Sacrament, as the Prayer Book directed. Today, there are two things odd about take the knee: the phrase itself and the gesture it describes. Neither was familiar in Britain. The phrase finds a history in American football, which I don’t play.

‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,’ wrote Samuel Pepys on 13 January 1667. They were eight. ‘I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits, a lamb and a rare chine of beef. Next a great dish of roasted fowl, cost me about 30s, and a tart, and then fruit and cheese. My dinner was noble and enough.’ My husband said he liked the sound of this and asked if I might manage something similar out of doors, for six, duly distanced. I noticed he had doodled in the margin of his Times #rabbits. Hash sign shares an origin with rabbit hash, both being related to the French hacher, ‘cut in pieces’.

Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump. Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’. But J.M. Neale, the author of ‘Good King Wenceslas’, wrote a less successful ballad on the martyrdom of Archbishop Laud that included these lines: ‘So steadfastly the scaffold-steps/ That good Archbishop trod/ As one that journeyed to his Home/ And hasten’d to his God.’ Scaffold has a different connotation from scaffolding, with its loud voices, transistors and non-woke workmen.

I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband was out ‘exercising’. I don’t know whether he attracts dust, like a piece of amber, or produces it, as if by spontaneous combustion in slow motion. Anyway, when he settled in his chair again, he ran his finger rather annoyingly over the table next to him and said encouragingly: ‘Spick and span.’ It’s a curious expression, since neither part seems to have any meaning on its own. The table wasn’t spick. Nor was it span.

In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse Oblige, some words embody upper-class usage (U), and some definitely do not. To the Non-U toilet and serviette might be added floor in the sense of the ground outdoors. Did Boris Johnson succumb to Non-U usage in remarks about coronavirus? ‘If this virus were a physical assailant, an unexpected and invisible mugger,’ he said, ‘then this is the moment when we have begun together to wrestle it to the floor.’ Floor or ground? On VE Day 1945, speaking from the balcony of the Ministry of Health, Winston Churchill said: ‘A terrible foe has been cast on the ground and awaits our judgment and our mercy.