Dot Wordsworth

My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to ‘follow the signage’. When do signs, he wondered, become signage? At the same level, I suspect, that rooms become roomage. Hardy wrote in his beguiling way: ‘When moiling seems at cease/ In the vague void of night-time, /And heaven’s wide roomage stormless/ Between the dusk and light-time,/And fear at last is formless,/ We call the allurement Peace.’ Suffixes function in a subconscious way. We use them without explicit intent. Signage, roomage or cellarage belong to Type 1 of four types of nouns ending in -age. Signage is the whole caboodle made up of individual signs.

We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in rural Britain. There is, I think, a confusion built into the term, though language is capable of accommodating such inconsistencies. Most of the stuff in the papers and on television on the subject derives from County Lines, Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply, a report published last year by the National Crime Agency. It says that the phrase county lines refers to the supply of Class A drugs ‘from an urban hub into rural towns or county locations’. It adds: ‘A key feature of county lines drug supply is the use of a branded mobile phone line.’ Just tap the number stored on your phone and the drugs come along like a pizza or Uber.

I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease, HIV or psoriasis. Perhaps I should describe myself as a person living with my husband. The formula is recommended by many Aids organisations that follow the ‘terminology guidelines’ of the UN Programme on HIV/Aids. Instead of saying that someone is infected with HIV, we should call them a person living with HIV. It is meant to be less patronising and avoids suggesting someone is ‘powerless, with no control over his or her life’. No one should even be called a patient, but must be called a client, which is ‘more empowering’. Tell that to clients of Southern railways.

‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked him what ideation suggested to him. Unknown to him, ideation has, since my husband’s day, made an unlikely leap from psychiatry to management theory. ‘Management gurus,’ wrote Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian, ‘seem inordinately obsessed with free office pizza and open-plan offices where people can bump into each other for out-of-the-box ideation opportunities.’ Ideation only means coming up with ideas. While that is essential to any business, this technical-sounding term has been recruited to the task of making it seem that coming up with ideas is scientific and susceptible to being harnessed for profit.

A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She said it reminded her of delft ware. That word has its own historical peculiarity. We used to call it delf, as you can find in Dickens and his contemporaries. That is because the town of Delf was spelt in the same way, taking its name from its chief canal. The Dutch shared with the English (though we have largely forgotten it) a word delf meaning ‘ditch’ — something delved or dug. But then the town added a t to its name to make it Delft, and the English followed suit in the spelling of the earthenware. Anyway, the blue of Portuguese tiles is caught in an even less likely knot of language. Tiles in Portuguese are azulejos (the same word as in Spanish).

‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and the promise of ‘a new iteration of softer suiting’. Suiting in itself is a comical word when found outside the technical pages of Tailor and Cutter. In that respect it belongs to the same family as trouserings, which P.G. Wodehouse (already convinced that trousers are inherently absurd) liked to deploy. Bertie Wooster often referred to evening-wear trouserings. Similarly, the determinedly humorous Owen Seaman, born over an artificial-flower shop, and editor of Punch from 1906 to 1932, cheered up a parody of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam with lines like ‘We sit in sable Trouserings and Boots.

Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that I remember Macmillan using in the 1970s. But it was in 1908, a year after Kipling, that Eucken won the Nobel prize for literature. (Anyone read a book by him?) His belief was that truth is arrived at through active striving after the spiritual life, and he called this principle activism. Within a decade, Eucken’s fellow Germans were concentrating on quite a different meaning of activism. It was the name of a movement, in neutral Sweden and among Flemish nationalists in Belgium in particular, in favour of the Axis Powers. Neither of these ideas of activism are invoked today by people who call themselves activists. Implicit in the word today is that activism is by its nature a good thing.

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only man on a five-person shortlist for a place on the Bank of England monetary policy committee. Mrs Miller herself chairs the Commons Women and Equalities committee, which has two men among its 11 members, but that’s fine.

To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked. Poor Jones had been so upset that he wrote no more poetry until the eve of his death aged 40 in 1860. It was all the worse because he’d hoped to escape through poetry the City counting house where, since he was 17 and his father died, he had slaved for 12 hours a day. Already a victim of unrequited love, he married unhappily. He suffered dyspepsia and pulmonary consumption.

I’m often annoyed by like being misused in different ways. (In place of as, for example: ‘Like I expected, he was late.’) But I’m now surprised by baffling uses of similar to. The Sun provided three examples in discussing the little internet craze for listening to an audio clip that either says ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’. (If this has passed you by, don’t trouble.) ‘The Yanny v Laurel debate,’ said the Sun, ‘has taken the internet by storm — similar to The Dress in 2015.’ There I’d probably say like, or more formally as did. In a different edition, the Sun hazarded: ‘Similar to the dress colour debate way back in 2014, there is a scientific reason.’ That should be as with.

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was asked if the Marine Corps forces he led might be defeated by the strong Iraqi army defending Baghdad. ‘Hell these are Marines,’ he said. ‘Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.’ Now he must cope with Donald Trump. At the end of last month it was reported, from an anonymous source, that he had remarked that the President was ‘becoming unhinged’. Before midnight that day, Mr Trump tweeted that ‘the Fake News is going crazy’ and ‘are totally unhinged’. Eleven minutes later, another tweet from him said: ‘Fake News is going “bonkers”!

I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when a character wondered aloud if he was paranoid. Paranoid? How could he be? The novel was finished by 1860 and paranoid was not invented till 1902 (in a translation of a book by the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin) Kraepelin applied paranoid to delusions in what he called dementia praecox. From 1912 dementia praecox began to be supplanted by schizophrenia. None of this was dreamt of by Wilkie Collins. The TV adaptor, Fiona Seres, would never have introduced references to Tesla cars. On the other hand, she no doubt used invisibly anachronistic turns of phrase. It’s the in-between anachronisms that catch me in the ribs.

Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited her. She was passionate and outspoken. My husband was of course terrified of her. She did not mind mentioning that she was a hermaphrodite. ‘If God made me hermaphrodite, that is how I stay,’ she said. I mention Fiore because if she were alive today she would come in for public obloquy. Sex and gender are a battleground, and words are made shibboleths. Take terf. Terf is an unlikely acronym, deriving from trans-exclusionary radical feminist. It is a label given by their enemies to feminists who reject alliances in their struggle with people who used to be men.

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’.