Dot Wordsworth

‘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.

‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a tunnel under an Alpine peak. One could almost hear the cowbells and the echo of a yodel. From schooldays the Prime Minister will remember in chapel the Psalm ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, which declares: ‘He shall feed me in a green pasture.’ The Prayer Book superscribes the psalm with its Latin beginning ‘Dominus regit me’. Under Elizabeth I, places where Latin was expected to be understood, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Eton, could use a Book of Common Prayer in Latin. I don’t think it has been much seen in living memory. Pasture comes from Latin.

‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank Churchill were to be married. ‘Did you ever hear any thing so strange?’ Those two words, strange and odd, are being used almost universally about the quality of the past few weeks. Odd is Scandinavian in origin, Viking if you like. The root idea is of triangularity, as when you have an odd bit of land left over. It’s found in place-names, such as Greenodd, which used to be in Lancashire until, in 1974, it was conquered and swallowed by Cumbria. Such three-cornered oddity is like that of the triangle of land called the Angle (in southern Schleswig, which I believe is German at the moment). This was seen by Angles of England as their old homeland.

In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to plump for the correct meaning of furlough. Was it a) a second swarm of bees in a season; b) a pole across a stream to stop cattle; c) a soldier’s leave of absence? I think the second swarm is called an after-swarm or piper. The government has published a whole document on water-gates to stop cattle. (You can get a £240 grant if the wood used is peeled and tanalised.) These are backwaters of life, but furloughing has become mainstream. Furlough was used before the present emergency. I remember in August that poor Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was let out of jail for a few days on ‘furlough’, but then taken back in.

My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard mat with a browning glass-ring on it where for most hours of the day he keeps his whisky glass. It was of course open at the letters page, where a kind-hearted reader expressed a most unwise readiness to hear more from him. I can’t say I’ve heard much more of him than usual, for he seldom ventures into the kitchen for fear that I should answer ‘Yes’ to the question he feels he must ask upon entering: ‘Anything I can do?’ But as they say, if you can’t do the time, don’t sign the marriage lines. Perhaps we have been slightly stir crazy for years. It is only now, though, that I discover my assumptions about that phrase were wrong.

My husband is fond of an old pub in Northumberland called the Red Lion, once a drovers’ inn, it says. In fact my husband is fond of lots of pubs, many of them unattractive. The red (or gules) lion of the Scottish royal banner is rampant, ‘rearing up’. This rampancy is connected in complicated ways with the ramping up of virus tests and such things, about which the government is forever talking. Scientific advisers and civil servants probably think ramping up is to provide an inclined plane or ramp. That kind of ramp is borrowed from the French rampe, used in the 16th century for the slope of a staircase. It derived exactly from the ramping of animals in medieval terminology, especially heraldic lions.

My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He used to throw a slipper at the television, and I feared he would graduate to a whisky glass. So I introduced the socks, like a sort of dog toy. The latest target has been the podium at government television briefings that says: ‘Stay home.’ My husband correctly regards this as an Americanism for ‘Stay at home’. The Oxford English Dictionary does not list the phrase, but it occurs 17 times in quotations illustrating the use of other words, and each is, I think, from an American source, except one from a Caribbean song: ‘Brown-skin gal, stay home and mind baby.

‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood because his offer to come out of retirement to save the NHS had not so much been rebuffed as received with uneasy amusement. It so happened that I had been rereading something that might fit the strange category of wholesomeness demanded. It was The Shell Country Alphabet by Geoffrey Grigson (1905-85). Grigson really knew about the countryside, from the Stone Age onwards, and the writers who delighted in it, from Thomas Tusser to Cecil Torr. Anyway, Grigson’s entry for barns explains that the word derives from the Old English for ‘barley-house’, bere-ern.

I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like an exercise book at school (in which the staples might be rusty from storage). The thing now has a virtual existence. Engagingly subtitled ‘Appraisal and evaluation in central government’, it had been a real paperback book in its 2003 edition, with a picture of a lamppost and the London Eye on the cover. It’s funny how colour names stick. The standard designation for official publications was Blue Book, a term in use before the English Civil War. The name was applied ad hoc to things like the three Blue Books issued between 1780 and 1792 by the self-appointed Catholic Committee of laymen seeking emancipation.