Dot Wordsworth

When George Eliot wrote ‘The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative,’ she was not making an observant remark about commuting on the Underground. She was developing a thought she’d had of travellers of the future being ‘shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure from Winchester to Newcastle’. She was writing in 1861, and the world’s first Underground, the Metropolitan Railway, opened in 1863. Two years before her musings (in her introduction to Felix Holt, the Radical), the London Pneumatic Despatch Company was founded to send packages and mailbags from Holborn to Gresham Street. The Central London Railway, from Bank to Shepherd’s Bush opened in 1900.

In 1872, the 27-stone figure of the Tichborne Claimant was insisting he was Sir Roger Tichborne Bt, an heir thought lost at sea as a slim young man. To raise funds he undertook a series of public meetings, and at one in the East End, the cry ‘Three groans for the Attorney-General’ was repeated every five minutes. Dickens describes the classic 19th-century groan in The Pickwick Papers (1836) at the Eatanswill election hustings. When Horatio Fitzkin is proposed, ‘the Fizkinites applauded, and the Slumkeyites groaned, so long, and so loudly, that both he and the seconder might have sung comic songs in lieu of speaking, without anybody’s being a bit the wiser’.

My husband complains that the disposition of teenagers in London is one of mocking hostility. I seem to suffer less from such encounters, and console him by saying it was ever thus. In the 1790s ostlers’ boys would shout ‘Quoz!’ to disconcert an uncertain-looking passer-by. It was a word of doubtful meaning, perhaps connected with quiz. A generation later, young loafers would call out ‘Oh, what a shocking bad hat!’ — enough to instil doubt in the most carefully dressed shopman or clerk. Neither men nor women were seen out in public without a hat.

Piles of black plastic rubbish sacks lie in the streets of Birmingham because, since the end of June, the dustmen have been on strike. That is not quite what the BBC tells us. On its website the corporation says that ‘refuse workers have resumed strike action’. I complained here a year ago that dustcarts were disappearing in favour of bin lorries, and now the very dustmen are returning to the dust — dust and ashes. ‘Memento homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris,’ the priest says, ‘Remember thou art dust and to dust thou shalt return,’ as he marks a cross of ashes on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday. The BBC prefers sex workers to prostitutes and refuse workers to dustmen.

I had always thought that to go ballistic was the same as to go nuclear, metaphorically. But the ballistic figure of speech had a rather different origin. I was glad to learn this before Mr Kim sends the balloon up. I did know, despite being a girl without the advantage of a proper classical education like the males in my family, that the Greek for ‘throw’ is ballein. Ballistic missiles take their name from a Latin derivative, the Roman ballista, an engine like a giant crossbow stretched with cords and thongs, and used to propel heavy bolts and other missiles.

It’s like whipping cream. All of a sudden it goes stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without it falling out. In the same way, a common mistake in speech solidifies and becomes firmly attached to the language. I don’t think bacteria has quite been whipped into a singular shape yet, even though one is always reading thing like ‘bacteria’s ability to evolve its way around antibiotics’. Such mistakes often occur in newspapers, where rush preserves erroneous forms that in oral speech bubble up and burst, to be lost to any record. A word just on the turn is media. The first example of it found by the Oxford English Dictionary, in the sense of ‘means of communication’, was used, or misused, as a singular entity.

I was puzzled by the caption to a picture in the Times Literary Supplement. The picture showed a model of the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The caption said that it had been made in the ‘late 1600s’, but it was clear from other evidence that it dated from the later 17th century. I had supposed that the use of 1600s to mean the whole century was an unlearned usage embraced by people easily confused by being presented with the term 17th century for years beginning with 16, or, on their behalf, by those who talk down to them. In Italy, they manage these things differently, quattrocento referring to the century beginning with 14. In a paper like the TLS I’d expect readers to be able to cope with the 17th century or the quattrocento unaided by explanation.

No, hang on, don’t turn to Dear Mary yet. This is not as dull as it sounds. It’s just that I was mystified by not having heard of the term mechanistic insight when, to my husband, it was a common as an August blackberry on a Sussex hedgerow. ‘Look,’ he said, shaking some printouts from medical journals. ‘Mechanistic insights are two a penny.’ At first I thought it was simply a silly scientistic way of saying ‘How it works’. For example, one paper had the title: ‘Mechanistic insight into how multidrug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii response regulator AdeR recognises an intercistronic region.’ There is no need to know what any of this is about (except Acinetobacter baumannii is a bacterium that does nasty things in hospitals).

Haworth is in a constant simmer of Brontë anniversary fever. It is looking forward to Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday next year. (This year is poor old Branwell’s.) I can’t think of a book title more widely mispronounced than Wuthering Heights. Soft, effete southerners pronounce it with a short u. But the wuthering in the title is a good Yorkshire word and its first vowel must be pronounced like the vowel in good. Yet if you look up wuthering in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary, you’ll find it under whither, the main English form deriving from the Old English hwitha.

‘Remember what the fellow said — it’s not a bally bit of use every prospect pleasing if man is vile,’ Bertie Wooster remarked. (In this case, the man was Aunt Agatha’s second husband.) Now Bertram was quite widely, if not exactly, versed in the gems of English literature, and older readers will, like Wodehouse’s, recognise the most quotable line from Bishop Heber’s celebrated hymn, ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’. Language is not only vocabulary and syntax, but also shared references. Wodehouse’s joke works only if we share Bertie’s acquaintance with Heber’s lines. Heber had written them barely a century earlier, in a few minutes one night in 1819, as a hymn for his parson father to use the next morning.

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported the architectural listing of the Isle of Dogs storm water pumping station. ‘I’d been looking for that,’ I said patiently (I thought). ‘The listing is not the point.’ A reader had sent the paper to me because of the strange language used by John Outram, the architect of the Grade II* building, put up between 1986 and 1988: ‘Decoration is the origin and essence of architecture. It can mediate, in the theatre of a built room or a big city, the epiphany of a meaning. I aimed to invent that “meaning” and confirm those epiphanic techniques.

The Foreword didn’t bode well. This was on the first page of The Taylor Review of Modern Working Practices. It was a ‘Foreword by Mathew’ as though he were some promising infant. In the second sentence he gave thanks ‘for the support and the respect for my independence which has been shown by her [Theresa May’s] team’. Two things — support and respect — should have a plural verb: have. As for support, we would hear it more than 100 further times. Support came thick and fast, more than once per page. Sometimes it meant ‘agree with’: ‘We support the basic principle of a more dynamic, responsive welfare system.

‘Are they all gay too?’ asked my husband, waving the Sunday Telegraph with its headline ‘Pride of Lions’. He had been delayed ​ in traffic in the sun during the Pride in London rally the day before and was still showing signs of confusion. The headline was referring, through a play on words, to the British and Irish Lions’ unexpected draw against the All Blacks. But I was then surprised to discover that pride for a group of lions is ​the resurrection, accomplished in the late 19th century, of a medieval term (deriving from lions as symbols of the sin of pride). It disappeared from English for 400 years, after being listed in the Book of St Albans, a sort of sporting gentlemen’s handbook printed in 1486.

The most tired cliché in English, suggests ​​Orin Hargraves, the American philologist, is at the end of the day. I’ve just read a review in the Times Literary Supplement of his book on ​​clichés, It’s Been Said Before, published not this year, or in 2016, or 2015, but in 2014. This seems an admirable attitude to noticing books. Why not leave a book a generation? Let time separate wheat from chaff, and save the effort of threshing and winnowing. Mr Hargraves m​ay well frighten readers into guiltily examining their worn, off-the-peg language, but he sees the glory of cliché. It provides ‘a stock of dependable formulas for conveying the ordinary’, which sounds as poetic as Homer.

‘Ha, ha!’ said my husband, waving the Spectator letters page in the air. ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ He was overcome by the news that I had mistakenly said MCC stood for Middlesex Cricket Club instead of Marylebone Cricket Club. I did not point out that he had read the column before it was sent in and said nothing at the time. Instead I began to shell some peas at the kitchen table, always a soothing occupation. No tear rolled down the side of my nose. Before I relate my secret consolation, I’d like to mention the chant ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’ that has become so popular of late. It derives, via football chants, from a riff dominating ‘Seven Nation Army’ by the White Stripes (2003).

Laura Kuenssberg was right. Even my husband agreed, and he often throws soiled beermats from an unknown source (which he uses to stop his whisky glass making rings on the furniture) at her — at least, when she is on television. She had just used the word narrative and then felt obliged to say ‘if you want to use that terrible phrase’. I don’t, but a lot of people do. I’m afraid the word has escaped from the jungle of structuralism, post-structuralism and Marxist theory. It is one of those notions that are often employed, in France particularly, as an alternative to cobblestones in the class struggle.

Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip in Great Expectations, while noting how coarse his hands were. Words like the and of are also useful shibboleths to show someone doesn’t belong to our club. ‘No denim’ says the advice for entry to today’s Queen’s Birthday Parade, on pain of entry being refused. It is the occasion of Trooping the Colour. Of course my husband, especially, and I too call it, Trooping the Colour, never interpolating the fatal of. The ceremony is said to go back to Marlborough, but one of the earliest references cited by the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1816, calls it the trooping of the colours.

In My Fair Lady, which came out as a film in 1964, 50 years after Shaw’s Pygmalion, they decided to update Eliza’s exclamation of ‘Walk! Not bloody likely. I am going in a taxi’, which, on the first night in 1914, had ‘brought the house down’ on the lips of Mrs Patrick Campbell, according to the Daily Telegraph review. So at Ascot, Eliza in the film shouts at her favoured horse: ‘Move yer bloomin’ arse.’ In the Pygmalion version, half the joke is saying bloody in a duchess’s accent, but Audrey Hepburn’s Eliza falls out of her trained accent in excitement and shouts in Cockney.

When Dickens wanted to buy a house in 1837, he wrote to Richard Bentley, who had started the magazine in which Oliver Twist was to be serialised, saying he had mentioned his name ‘among those of other references, to testify to my being “sober and honest”.’ Some people seem to think it was this kind of reference that was meant by the remarkable president of Magdalen College, Martin Routh, who stayed in office until his death aged 99 in 1854, shortly before which, on being asked what advice he would give to a young don, said: ‘You will find it a very good practice always to verify your references, sir!’ But he didn’t mean the kind given by a maid — or Dickens — but the references given in footnotes of learned books.

Susie Dent has been trying to make us love Americanisms on Radio 4. Now Miss Dent knows far more about language than she has had much chance to express during her 25 years in Dictionary Corner on Countdown. She is quite aware that there is no such thing as an Americanism tout court (or perhaps one should say ‘an Americanism period’). It is true that British speakers of English are annoyed by hearing their compatriots use an American word for something already covered by a perfectly good British word. A Briton would have to be cracked to use hood for bonnet; sidewalk for pavement; mad for angry; diaper for nappy. But American words for American things are welcome: big business (1905); jazz (1909); commercials (on the radio or television, 1935).