Dot Wordsworth

In the warm weather, I had an al fresco hit with my mad-apple bruschette. Mad-apple shows the tangle to which ‘a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology’. It is a name for the aubergine, or egg-plant as it was earlier known in England, as it still is in America. Why mad-apple? Because the Renaissance Latin name was malum insanum, from the lost Italian form mela insana. This was a rationalisation of the earlier melanzana, attested in Sicilian use by the Arab geographer Idrisi in the 12th century. There it was a straight borrowing from the Greek melintzana, earlier matizanion, adapted from the Arabic badinjan.

Scarcely a sober breath has been drawn in my house all week for celebrating the 90th anniversary of the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary. This stupendous achievement, in 15,490 pages by 1928, drew on more than five million quotations from old books sent in by volunteers. In 1879, when the heroic James Murray became editor, the Philological Society appealed to Americans to read 18th-century books — any, except for about 100 already combed. One, I was intrigued to see, was A Travestie of Homer written in 1762 by Thomas Bridges, under the name Caustic Barebones. The Philological Society spelt his name Brydgys, but I can’t find that he did likewise. Bridges’ Travestie went into revised editions until 1797.

Crooning is I think the word to describe what my husband was doing to the lyrics of a Beach Boys number. ‘Round, round, get around, I get around,’ he crooned ludicrously, for no one less like a Beach Boy than he, with his frayed tweed jacket cuffs, could be imagined. He was, however, right if he was implying that the boys from Hawthorne, California, were having their cake and eating it. Generally, where a choice is possible, Americans prefer around and the British prefer round. I can’t get used to references to All-Around Gymnastics. What next, cricketing all-arounders? Anyway, British English is suffering from prepositionitis, unable to come out with the correct preposition when it’s needed.

Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today and was pleasantly surprised by its poetic quality. My husband was harrumphing a bit because the poet began by saying, ‘Soo… basically,’ and in his opinion went downhill from there, by talking about the poem being an ‘intersectional exploration’ seen ‘through a queer lens’. ‘You used to be she and her,’ Sarah Montague said. ‘Now you’re they and them.’ On Twitter, Jay Bernard told off The Bookseller, for having ‘misgendered me. The press release says “they”, as does my profile. Why do you use “he”?’ The Bookseller changed its copy.

With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon product: the Echo Dot. I shan’t launch a billion-dollar lawsuit to retake control of my name. It’s more likely that Amazon would send the men in the horsehair wigs after me, though I declare that I, or my parents, got there first with Dot. I’m surprised, though, that Dot is regarded as a cheering name for a tech gadget 17 or 18 years after the dotcom bubble went pop. Companies that failed then were called, by way of a little joke, dot-bombs. But it was strange in the first place to give the name dot to the point before com (a ‘top-level domain’). The Oxford English Dictionary is vague about the history of dot meaning ‘full stop’.

A 72-year-old Australian called Stelarc, the BBC reported, has an ear growing from one arm. He hopes to connect a microphone to it so that people can hear on the internet the sounds it picks up. Mr Stelarc is a body-hacker. They tend to have names like Stelarc. Hacker itself was first used as a surname, but not for a body-hacker or a computer-hacker. Adam le Hacker’s name was recorded in 1224. He was probably either a hedger or a maker of hacks; tools for chopping. I had assumed without thinking about it that life hacks and computer hackers shared a verbal origin with journalistic hacks like myself. It is not so.

In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College School, after 32 years’ service, for discussing matters avoided by other masters when they appeared in Greek and Latin passages, ‘in direct opposition to the feeling of the age’. No improper acts had occurred. Cockayne was a clergyman and a pioneer philologist whose pupils included the great W.W. Skeat and Henry Sweet. His father’s name was Cockin. Perhaps he had changed the spelling to avoid offending the ‘feeling of the age’. The word cocaine was not invented until 1874. But the Land of Cockayne was a medieval fantasy world of pleasure.

I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger on examples in his oeuvre. In any case, I wrongly presumed that trahison des clercs dated from the Middle Ages, when clerks in orders were the learned ones, like Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, responsible for faithfulness to the knowledge they had. The old proverb went: Les bons livres font les bons clercs — ‘Good books make good scholars.’ But I now discover that the phrase goes back no further than 1927, when Julien Benda used it as the title of a book, translated into English as The Great Betrayal a year later by Richard Aldington, who turned more than 30 books into English in the 1920s, years before he got his teeth into T.E. Lawrence.

In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Bertie is moved to reward his inestimable valet for solving the unsolvable. Before requesting the sacrifice of the Alpine hat that Bertie had recently been sporting, ‘he coughed that sheep-like cough of his’. And there it was in the Foreign Secretary’s speech last week. EU integration deepened, he said, ‘in spite of sheeplike coughs of protest from the UK’. I enjoyed the social side of squeezing myself into a chair beside my husband for Boris Johnson’s historic peroration, within sight of the strangely scaffolded tower of Big Ben. I waved to Miriam Gross and swapped a cheery word with Lord Trimble in the lift.

My heart leapt up on Newport station, an unusual place for that to happen, when I heard a recorded announcement: ‘Wedi sylwi. Wedi sôn. Wedi setlo.’ It was a pleasure to hear it in an ancient language after so often having been annoyed by the English equivalent from the British Transport Police: ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ To make matters worse, one of the accompanying posters, the Jewish Chronicle reported, showed ‘a suspicious-looking man with dark hair, long beard and a hooked nose’. Even when the Nazi reminders had been sorted out, the word sorted remained unpopular. It is a verb used by threatening figures in EastEnders: ‘Sort it.’ It belongs to the same world as ‘Shut it’.

A range of book reviewers’ clichés was held up to mockery 60 years ago, in a letter by Jocelyn Brooke to The Spectator. Brooke (1908-66) was a strange man who thought he had found his vocation in the venereal disease branch of the Royal Army Medical Corps until he burst into authorship, publishing two books a year from 1949 to 1958. One reviewers’ cliché he singled out was the use of the adjective jejune. Today it survives as a shy visitor to the journalistic bird table, of uncertain identity. In other words, many who use it don’t know what it means. In the 1950s, jejune was generally used to mean ‘thin’ or ‘unsatisfying’ in some way.

Grooming is a horrible phenomenon of modern life when it happens to abused children. Yet a magazine such as GQ can announce the ‘Eight best grooming products in the world this week’. The GQ grooming is not of children, nor yet of horses, but of men at their own hands. Identical words can thrive in silos with quite different meanings. A groom was originally a boy, it seems, though the word popped up from nowhere in the 13th century. Some think it related to the Old French gromet, which gave us the English grummet or gromet, ‘ship’s boy’. In French, in the form gourmet, it came to mean ‘wine-merchant’s assistant’, and was borrowed by English again in the 19th century to mean ‘connoisseur of eating’.

Ministers must observe the rather curious ‘Seven Principles of Public Life’ in the new Ministerial Code published this month by the Cabinet Office. I call them curious not because they echo the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord), but because they seem inconsistent with government. The Seven Principles are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. Take selflessness. Selflessness means that ‘holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest’. I can’t see what the phrase ‘in terms of’ is doing there. Isn’t it just ‘in the public interest’?

In Polite Conversation, Jonathan Swift presents dialogues made up of clichés, banalities and catchphrases. When Miss Notable makes a remark seen as witty, Mr Neverout exclaims: ‘Why, Miss, you shine this Morning like a shitten Barn-Door.’ Perhaps we might not admit such an adjective, even in this archaic form, to polite company — except that among the chattering classes no word is entirely ostracised. In 2001, Barbara Amiel, Lady Black of Crossharbour, wrote in the Daily Telegraph that ‘the ambassador of a major EU country politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in the world were all because of “that shitty little country Israel”.

Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as bad as any. I saw two books about English in the 18th century reviewed in the TLS and thought I might buy them, until I read quotations from them that the reviewer had chosen, not by way of mockery, but to explain their arguments. In Multilingual Subjects, Daniel DeWispelare argues that ‘anglophone translation theorists gravitated towards one specific set of metaphors in order to advocate for protocols of linguistic inclusion and exclusion that would improve anglophone literary aesthetics within the space of global linguistic multiplicity’.

Writing about Meghan Markle and the Duchess of Cambridge in the Sunday Times, India Knight wrote: ‘I can’t help but be reminded of the relationship between Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sarah, Duchess of York.’ Reporting on the Ashes for the Guardian, Geoff Lemon wrote: ‘I still can’t help but think that England are going to completely implode within the first hour.’ Reviewing A Christmas Carol in the Times, Dominic Maxwell wrote: ‘You can’t help but grin as a new Scrooge springs to life.’ To me this seems wrong. When a little string of syntactic instructions becomes opaque it can be almost universally misused. You may say I can’t love you or the opposite: I can’t help loving you.

A book that changed my way of looking at the world was The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. It showed how playground rhymes and games were handed down to new generations without direct involvement of grown-ups. Iona Opie, one half with her husband, Peter, of the team that brought out the book in 1959, died this year, aged 94. In their research, they built up the world’s biggest private collection of children’s books, now in the Bodleian Library. I remember the thrill of finding duplicates, with their bookplate, in the Charing Cross Road 30 years ago. Children, with their independent culture, can parody things from the adult world.

‘You must have Tired Old Woman Syndrome,’ said my husband as I fell back into an armchair with a sigh after a morning clearing out the kitchen cabinets. It had to be done. He of course had just been sitting in the drawing-room waiting for a plausibly respectable hour to have a drink. His abuse was not utterly random, for we had been discussing Tired Mountain Syndrome. It is being blamed for small earthquakes near Mount Mantap in North Korea, where they have been testing nuclear weapons underground. The rocks become many times more permeable along lines of weakness. The name Tired Mountain Syndrome was popularised by a paper in 2001 by Vitaly V. Adushkin and William Leith on Soviet underground nuclear explosions.