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‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore told us last weekend. As a bonus in this Trollopean tale we learnt that, by Church of England canon law, ‘men born illegitimately were for centuries barred from becoming archbishops’, or indeed bishops.
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‘Why are you filming this?’ ‘For everyone’s safety.’ Those are the last words in a 46-second video that was watched by more than three million people on YouTube last week. The question was asked of the unseen cameraman by a black woman who had been haranguing a white youth at San Francisco State University for wearing dreadlocks (or the best he could manage with his weedy hair). I’ve written about being safe in universities before, but this incident focused on cultural appropriation, which is a new crime discovered by people who think it in fact misappropriation to adopt the cultural expression of another ethnic group. Search me. Of course the wearing of dreadlocks has a meaning, even if few can agree on it.
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Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid to negative electricity. ‘New flannel, if dry and warm, will draw the electric fluid from non-electrics.’ By an electric he meant substances such as glass, and indeed the air. I’m not sure how much we think of electricity as a fluid today. James Thurber’s mother worried that it would run out of the sockets unless one left a plug in them, but she was perhaps unusual. Flann O’Brien put forward the similar theory that darkness was due to the accretion of ‘black air’.
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‘Still I’m called Buttercup —poor little Buttercup,’ sang my husband in an inappropriate and displeasing baritone. Not wishing to encourage him, I simply said: ‘Darling, it’s butterbump.’ A furniture company called Loaf has been advertising ‘butterbump sofas’, supposedly named for their bringing out customers in a cross between goosebumps and butterflies. It doesn’t sound a very agreeable sensation. The sofas in question have buttons deeply indenting the upholstery in a quincunx pattern. I suspect the sofa--marketing department hopes to charm shoppers with the word butterbump, just as some people take pleasure in serendipity and hagrid. But butterbump is no neologism. It exists as an old name for a bittern.
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On the Radio 4 news at 11 o’clock last Saturday morning there was a joky report about roosters in Brisbane. The cocks, it said, were annoying people with their crowing. The news at noon called them not roosters and cocks, but cockerels and fowls. I wrote here in 2005 about the advent of the ‘Year of the Cockerel’ and suggested that cock would soon be unusable because it put everyone in mind of a rude word for penis. Things have got worse since then. Mealy-mouthed folk who say cockerel simply ignore its meaning, which is ‘a young cock’. It’s like calling all cats kittens. Oddly enough, the Oxford English Dictionary says that cockerel is ‘archaic or dialect’.
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There is a nice row of swastikas at head height in Burlington Gardens, behind the Royal Academy. They are carved below a plaque ‘Founded ad MDCCCXXXVI’. (The date refers, not to the Academy, but to the University of London, which had its offices here until 1900.) The architect was James Pennethorne. His swastikas did not derive from India, I think, but from Greek temples he visited in Italy in 1826. Greek buildings often have swastika elements, if only by running together two strips of the key pattern. I was thinking about this because of the news that, in prospect of the Olympic Games in 2020, Japan was planning to change the sign for a temple on tourist maps from swastikas to little pagodas. The Japanese symbol is called manji and derives from Chinese writing.
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‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,’ sang my husband flatly, ‘when he said the world was round.’ I wasn’t going to tell him yet again that George and Ira Gershwin were wrong and everyone knew the world was round when Columbus set off. But there is a connection between Columbus’s name and the leap in the dark that he took in his voyage — and which David Cameron says ‘outers’ want to take today. I’ll stick to language, since this is not a political column. That very English word leap has no affinities in languages outside the Germanic family, unless, some scholars say, it is related in origin to the rather different-looking Greek word kolumbos, meaning ‘diver’.
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‘Special status?’ said my husband. ‘You mean like executioners, butchers and undertakers in Japan?’ I hadn’t suggested that, but had been thinking aloud about the phrase which, according to David Cameron, now describes Britain’s position in Europe: special status. My husband once went to Japan, which, he thinks, makes him an expert. He learnt about the ancient monkey performances given by people called Burakumin, a sort of untouchable. Apart from performing with monkeys, which was banned in the 20th century, they have been associated with unclean trades such as those he mentioned. Special, as I have remarked before, is slippery. The special relationship between Britain and America has at times been highly valued.
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My husband, not surprisingly, finds it extremely annoying. It, in this instance, is the use by women of creaky voice. If you don’t recognise the trend immediately imagine a youngish woman (not me) finishing a sentence with the phrase ‘really shiny leather’ and creaking, like a door, as she says the vowels. The trait is also known as vocal fry, as if it were produced by a chip-fryer. It is a feminine characteristic by a proportion of two to one. Reese Witherspoon was heard doing it to the phrase ‘truly heinous angora sweater’ in the film Legally Blonde as long ago as 2001. Recently I’ve heard Emma Barnett on Woman’s Hour doing it. Why do we women do it? If it’s a fashion, is it smart or downmarket?
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My husband pointed with his stick, which he carries not to steady himself but to cudgel pedestrians out of his way, and said: ‘What am I supposed to do about that?’ His question was in response to a notice posted up on the wall by a platform at Vauxhall Underground station: ‘Due to our works. Beware of noise. Beware of smell.’ It is part of the current conflation of the meanings of be aware and beware. The confusion runs both ways. That Underground notice was intended to make passengers aware that there would be noise and smell (of burning perhaps), so that they would not flee in alarm. A flight response would have been the appropriate one if instead the notice had said: ‘Beware, Minotaur loose.
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Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy. She put a photograph on Twitter of herself pouting, captioning it: ‘Pregnancy lips’. Some Twitter-followers asked: ‘Pregnancy lips? Is that even a thing?’ The Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary has since adopted that example as the locus classicus of the phrase Is that even a thing?, and variants such as Is that a thing? or That’s not a thing. Professor Ben Yagoda of the University of Delaware has poked around on the internet and found, like other people, the phrase being used in 2001, in a television situation comedy called That ’70s Show.
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Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble Mont Blanc. After a few floors, it was finished, and the top of the façade projected like the peak of a baseball cap. I felt cheated. Peak is a vogue word that itself has gone through peak usage. Earlier this month, Steve Howard, Ikea’s chief sustainability officer (yes, the chief one), said in a seminar: ‘In the West we have probably hit peak stuff. We talk about peak oil. I’d say we’ve hit peak red meat, peak sugar, peak stuff, peak home furnishings.’ It was an engaging observation, but poor Mr Howard was mocked as though he were Gerald Ratner.
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There is no chance whatsoever of box set being replaced by the more correct form boxed set. So stop seething about it and causing yourself distress. The form, boxed set has been in use for 125 years or so, but the Oxford English Dictionary has dug up a reference from Wisconsin in 1969 to a ‘box set of tumblers’. Admittedly, binge-watching a set of tumblers for hours on end would be a minority interest. The triumph of box set is partly a matter of phonetics. In ordinary speech the d after the s sound in boxed set is hardly out before the poor old tongue gets round to hissing the initial letter of set. There is an analogy here with sixth. I have heard people complain of news-readers or actors on television mispronouncing sixth. The tendency is to say sicth.
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‘Did you say “fabric”?’ asked my husband when I was telling him about words that have just been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. No, phablet, but I can see why he misheard. It’s a dull portmanteau word meaning ‘half phone, half tablet,’ just as the first citation, from an Australian periodical, explained in 2010. How long will phablets last? A far more interesting item in the OED’s new intake is waybread. It was invented by J.R.R. Tolkien for a tale in 1951, but is better known from The Lord of the Rings (1954). ‘The food was mostly in the form of very thin cakes, made of a meal that was baked a light brown on the outside, and inside was the colour of cream,’ it explains.
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When the much missed Frank Johnson (1943–2006), once editor of The Spectator, wrote in 1980 that ‘the peculiar need for something to be frightened about only seems to affect those of us who are part of the chattering classes’, I think that ‘those of us’ meant himself, and me and you, dear reader. It is true that, as the Oxford English Dictionary remarks, the phrase was ‘freq. derogatory’ of ‘a social group freely given to the articulate, self-assured expression of (esp. liberal) opinions about society, culture, and current events’.
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I couldn’t help laughing when I found that an Australian senator, Cory Bernardi, had deleted all his tweets from Twitter, apart from a single sad survivor: ‘Parliament finishing up for the year.’ Mr Bernardi had earlier in 2015 tweeted a striking quotation: ‘To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticise.’ He attributed it to Voltaire. In fact it is a remark by someone called Kevin Alfred Strom, a neo-Nazi white separatist from Alaska. Quotations in speech often bore. I always thought it odd that John Tregorran in The Archers came out with literary quotations in conversation. No wonder Carol poisoned him. But letters to the press often have a quotation chucked in.
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‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly a penitential time of preparation), nor to accepting a glass of champagne after having earlier accepted a glass of whisky at another house. No, what made him feel sick was the seasonal greeting: ‘God bless, and be safe.’ For once, I agreed with him. It was bad enough to be exhorted to drive safely or even stay safe during periods when terrorists had eased off a bit (after peak IRA, but before 2001). But now, with a fashion for shooting civilians in unexpected places, to be told to be safe makes no more sense than to be told to be rich. Yet safe is the word of 2015.
From our UK edition
‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly a penitential time of preparation), nor to accepting a glass of champagne after having earlier accepted a glass of whisky at another house. No, what made him feel sick was the seasonal greeting: ‘God bless, and be safe.’ For once, I agreed with him. It was bad enough to be exhorted to drive safely or even stay safe during periods when terrorists had eased off a bit (after peak IRA, but before 2001). But now, with a fashion for shooting civilians in unexpected places, to be told to be safe makes no more sense than to be told to be rich. Yet safe is the word of 2015.
From our UK edition
My husband struck out with his stick at an advertisement in the street that said: ‘Commit to winter.’ He doesn’t need a stick to walk with, but he likes threatening to cudgel Christmas shoppers out of his way in this joyful season. I agree with his disapproval of commit used intransitively, not committing oneself or committing anything else. Yet stranger things have happened to the word in the past 600 years. It used to have a rival form commise, also meaning ‘entrust, perpetrate or commission’, which ran out of steam in the 17th century. We do still have commis chefs, but that was re-introduced in the 20th century from French, as indicated by its silent s.
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‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he had learnt to laugh by reading Twitter. ‘Now they’ve got falsies.’ He was waving an article about clip-on man buns. A man bun is that top-knot that some young men began to sport, in proof that there is nothing too absurd for fashion. Now, it seems, false ones are on sale. The colours specified are black, brown and blond, which hardly promises a convincing match. This development reminds me of the chignon, a hump of hair worn over a pad, fashionable at a century’s interval in the 1770s and 1870s. Trollope quickly took against it.
