Dot Wordsworth

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.

In Amsterdam the courts have given leave to ban the bierfiets. Fiets is the Dutch for ‘bike’. (The plural is fietsen.) A bierfiets is a float on which a dozen people sit on high seats facing each other across a narrow bar running fore and aft, enjoying their beer and pedalling away to power the vehicle. Someone sits at the front to steer and brake. Some suggest that bierfiets has entered the English language as the name of this newish thing. I’m not sure it really has, any more than many another name in a foreign language for foreign things (churros or currywürste). If the bierfiets itself survives it is as likey to be called a beer-bike in English.

‘It’s up there on the shelf you can’t reach,’ said my husband in an unhelpfully helpful tone. The ‘it’ was a copy of The King’s English, Kingsley Amis’s book on usage. I quoted it the other week on the deployment of the. On the same page is a Kingsleyish word I wanted to follow up — pissily. ‘Until quite recently,’ Amis wrote, ‘it looked as if you could write of Greene’s Confidential Agent and Burgess’s Clockwork Orange and Kafka’s Castle, but indexers unnecessarily and pissily put a stop to that by throwing The and A and so on back in front of the main body of the title.’ Pissily figures nowhere in the Oxford English Dictionary. That is not out of prissiness.

The inventor of the verse form known as the clerihew, Edmund Clerihew Bentley, had a way with this seemingly simple vehicle. Take this example: ‘Sir Christopher Wren / Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men. / If anybody calls / Say I am designing St Paul’s.’ My interest just now is with call. Bentley meant ‘call at a house’. The default meaning now, I think, is ‘to telephone’, a usage that has largely displaced ring or phone. But call is also very productive of phrasal verbs: call off, call for, call in, call on, call upon or call out.

‘When is physical contact “unacceptable”?’ asked Charles Moore in the Daily Telegraph. He may well ask. Sir Michael Fallon said after his resignation that some things were acceptable ten or 15 years ago that weren’t today. But the panel of Any Questions? last week were invited to say whether inappropriate behaviour wasn’t always unacceptable. It’s not just Westminster. Marseille football fans’ subjection of Patrice Evra to ‘hateful attacks’ was ‘unacceptable behaviour’, the club said, but his response in aiming a kick at a fan’s head was ‘inappropriate’.

John Farquhar of Salisbury writes to say he is irritated. He is not just irritated, he has long been long irritated, which is either a virtue or a vice, depending on the irritant. In his case, the grain of sand in the oyster is the pronunciation ‘by those in the medical fraternity’ of medicine as ‘medcin’. He’d like to know whether this is an affectation — French perhaps — or whether it has some justification. Mr Farquhar’s name may not be irrelevant here. It’s a good Scottish name, pronounced ‘farkar’, deriving from Celtic elements meaning ‘man’ and ‘dear’. Now in Scotland, even 100 years ago, the predominant pronunciation of medicine was as three syllables.

Veronica, who looks at Twitter, told me of an exchange she thought would interest me, about the use of the. She was right. The is one of my favourite words. The exchange concerned Sam Leith’s splendid new book, Write to the Point: How to be Clear, Correct and Persuasive on the Page. He begins one chapter thus: ‘In his The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Joseph Conrad…’. Should he have written that yoking of ‘his The’? A friend of Veronica’s recommended Kingsley Amis on the subject. In (his) The King’s English, Amis is characteristically forthright. ‘Kafka’s The Castle,’ he writes, ‘is the sort of thing that people never say but make no bones about writing.

Before I forget, I was cheered by the letter from Keith Aitken in last week’s issue noting another sense for tube (Mind your language, 7 October). ‘What are ye on about, ya tube?’ people shout as an insult in western Scotland, he says. He derives the term from the idea of their digestive functions dominating their lives, like tube-worms: just one big alimentary canal. I fear, though, that the origin lies in another bodily part. As Joyce wrote in Ulysses: ‘I suppose the people gave him that nickname [Mr de Kock] going about with his tube from one woman to another.’ Yes, tube in this slang sense means nothing other than ‘cock’, ‘prick’ or ‘wiener’.

‘Kiss me mucho,’ sang my husband with a revolting leer, ‘and we’ll soar. And we’ll dance the dance of love forevermore.’ I poured myself a whisky in a vain attempt to catch up, and returned to my task. Not so much was the subject of my researches, and I soon wondered why it had only recently begun to annoy me. It qualifies as a catchphrase, I think, though some dictionaries of slang list it too. Much has been very productive of slang. Ben Jonson had characters exclaiming ‘Much!’ and meaning ‘not much’, 400 years ago. Contrariwise, since the second world war, Not much! has been used to contradict a statement such as ‘I seldom drink’.