Dot Wordsworth

Ordinarily my husband is punctilious in keeping the pages of the Telegraph straight, especially when it is read by other people (me). ‘It’s all scrunched up,’ he exclaims if even the notoriously loose slip-page in the paper is misaligned. But he shook the sports pages into a toy-boat shape and slapped them against his leg when he read out this sentence: ‘There is a belief that a marquee annual tournament would develop cricket’s following.’ ‘Are they going to play it in a tent?’ he cried, knowing they weren’t. The sports pages have imported a peculiar new meaning for marquee. Its classic form is in the phrase marquee signing, which means ‘new star’. This sense comes from American showbiz.

Martin Allen has written with a very interesting question. It follows on from his initial query, which is why people use text as the form of the verb in the past tense: ‘I text him yesterday.’ He adds: ‘It sound moronic to me, but is this how irregular verbs originate?’ The funny thing is that Shakespeare himself might have used the regular texted as a past tense. He probably did, for he used the verb text in the imperative in Much Ado: ‘Text underneath: Here dwells Benedick the married man.’ The meaning, naturally, was not ‘send a text electronically’, but ‘write in a text-hand or in large letters’.

‘Just two sugars,’ said my husband as I passed him his tea. He is cutting down. I doubt he would have a better understanding of the effects of sugar on him, or the effects of his character on his sugar intake, if he took a granular view of the granulated sugar he shovels into his cup. I can see why granular has become such a successful vogue term, since it opposes the unspecific or even creatively ambiguous language that plagues us, from Human Resources departments and, ahem, Brexit, that cursed sinkhole of sense. The hope is to tether inflated dirigibles of verbiage to fixed points. Normally now, granular simply means ‘detailed’. ‘Maps on smartphones still have big gaps,’ someone wrote in the Times.

Latest despatches from the Dictionary Wars bring news of Oxford’s words of the year, a counterblast to last week’s words from Collins dictionaries. Collins’s winning word was single-use — feeble, I thought. Its runner-up, gammon, is on Oxford’s list too. But the Oxford champion word is toxic. This, with its connotations, is interesting, but not so interesting to me as a runner-up: cakeism. In November 2016, an aide to Mark Field MP was photographed in Downing Street with a handwritten note about Brexit reading: ‘What’s the model? Have cake and eat it.’ I thought this a splendid aim by the British negotiators. The Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Xavier Bettel, did not.

In the annual dictionary wars to nominate words of the year, in the hope of attracting publicity, Collins has made single-use its first choice for 2018. But of more interest is its second choice: gammon. It is used by Twitter trolls and other supporters of Momentum to signify ‘a male, middle-aged and white, with reactionary views, especially one who supports Brexit’. His face resembles ham. Collins said that in Nicholas Nickleby (1838), ‘Dickens used the word gammon to describe a large, self-satisfied, middle-aged man who professes an extreme patriotism in large part to disguise his essential selfishness and corruption’. I’m afraid the people at the dictionary have completely misunderstood what they read.

Someone on the wireless was talking about marrying in the Liberty of Newgate before the Marriage Act of 1753, and she said it would cost ‘Seven shillings, sixpence’. It made me realise that knowing of pounds, shillings and pence is not to recapture the language of the world in which the units were used. I would have said (not in 1753, granted): ‘Seven shillings and sixpence’, or simply ‘Seven and six’. If there were pounds before the shillings, I’d have said: ‘Nineteen pounds, seven and six’. I’ve just looked up Mr Micawber’s famous dictum in David Copperfield, and this is how he put it: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness.

Radio 3 tries to distract listeners from music by posing little quizzes and hearing quirky details of history from a ‘time traveller’. Last Wednesday we were assured that on the wagon, meaning ‘abstaining from alcohol’, derived somehow from condemned prisoners being taken from Newgate to Tyburn and having a last drink at St Giles’s. This is definitely not the origin of the phrase. That reliable philologist Michael Quinion gave the true version in his blog World Wide Words in 1998. The journey to Tyburn was a staple of popular miscellanies such as Hone’s Year Book and Chambers Book of Days, and earlier of fictionalised histories like Jonathan Wild (1725) and The Beggar’s Opera (1728).

My husband, who fancies himself as something of a classicist, was delighted to see the Turkish investigators of the Khashoggi horror in Istanbul with ‘Polis’ on their T-shirts. Against the odds of Ottoman rule and the Turkish cultural initiatives of Ataturk, this Greek word for a city society, polis, still designates the guardians of civic peace. The borrowed word was all the more striking as the police were acting in Istanbul, the name of which derived from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, to the city. Where are you going? Eis ten polin, which by the 16th century had become Istanbul. A Turkish folk etymology derives the name from Islam bol, ‘plenty of Islam’, but this has no more basis than the popular version of asparagus in English being sparrow-grass.

When I say that it has given comfort to my husband, you can judge how foolish the Wellcome Institute was in using the word womxn and then apologising for it. It had wanted to be more inclusive with a workshop on ‘how womxn can challenge existing archives’. There, womxn serves as a plural, but it can be a singular too. Wellcome did not invent the word. The BBC quoted Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance, of King’s College London, saying that it ‘stems from a longstanding objection to the word woman as it comes from man’. Dr Bradbury-Rance is not a philologist, preferring the ‘intersectional study of sexuality and gender in film and popular culture’. Some people assume that woman is derived from womb-man. This is not the case.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked of Sergei Skripal, whom his agents tried to kill, ‘He’s simply a scumbag.’ Scumbag at least is how the press translated his words. I’m afraid that from my sheltered life I did not know the literal meaning of scumbag. Look away now if you’d rather not know and I’ll join you at the next paragraph. Literally it is ‘a condom’, an Americanism first recorded in 1967, which is also the first year in which scum meaning ‘semen’ is recorded. An equivalent derogatory term also of American origin, used in the television cartoon Family Guy, is douchebag.

My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert Island Discs last week. Having confronted the terrible consequences of human error in this alarming speciality, the author mentions the bathetic absurdity of an NHS training presentation by ‘a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm’. Empathy is the great thing, it seems. Without it you’re a psychopath; with it you’re the carer we all want. Yet the word has only been in use in English since 1909. Was everybody a pitiless solipsist before that? Empathy translates the German Einfühlung (‘in-feeling’), a term used by Robert Vischer in 1873 with regard to aesthetics.

Embolden is a word in a million. In other words it is quite common. Using data from Google Books, the Oxford English Dictionary has put it in a band of words that are used with a frequency of between 0.1 and 0.99 per million. About 11 per cent of words fall in this band. The most frequent words, in Band 8, occurring more than 1,000 times per million, are exemplified by the, he, and, from and some. The only noun among these most common words is time. Embolden falls in Band 4, among words generally recognised by newspaper readers such as candlestick, rodeo and embouchure. A larger proportion, 20 per cent of words in the OED, come in the more difficult Band 3: words such as amortizable, prelapsarian and contumacious.