Dot Wordsworth

I had never heard the Country (Red Dirt) singer Wade Bowen before, although his latest album Hold my Beer (Vol 1) has already sold 14,000 copies. On an earlier album, he provided textbook examples of two constructions that I find increasingly annoying, and one that seems fine. ‘I love it that you’re my girl,’ sang Wade. ‘I love that I’m your man.’ I didn’t care for either of those declarations one bit. ‘I love it when you take my hand,’ he added. I didn’t mind that at all. This business of I love that… is on the rise.

‘What about the moon Tracey?’ asked my husband facetiously when an astronomer on the wireless, talking of Pluto’s moon Charon, pronounced it ‘Sharon’. As usual, things turn out not to be so simple as my husband’s understanding of them. Everyone knows that Pluto was named in 1930 by an 11-year-old girl, Venetia Burney. Her mother, the sister of the quirky belletrist Geoffrey Madan, was the daughter of Falconer Madan, Bodley’s Librarian. Madan mentioned the discovery of the new planet to his granddaughter, who came up with the name Pluto, god of the underworld, which Falconer Madan mentioned to the Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford, who cabled the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

If my husband were an insect it might well be a bug — a squat creature imbibing nutriment in liquid form. I had not taken much notice of bugs in an otherwise full life, and am surprised to learn there are nearly 2,000 species of British bugs. The point I should like to make is that the language that any one person speaks is not up to the job of labelling many things. Only a minority of those 2,000 bugs have common names. Some are named after their food (such as the box bug, which used to live only on Box Hill eating box trees, but has now taken to plums in south-east England). Some are named after their appearance (the bishop’s mitre shield bug from its marking) or behaviour (water boatman). But plenty have only Latin names.

‘A stalker who dressed a pillow “mannequin” in his ex’s nurse’s uniform, then sent her a picture, has been told he is “on the cusp” of jail,’ reported the Scottish edition of the Daily Star. ‘Sheriff Alastair Carmichael told Mark Glass: “I don’t think you understand just how serious this is. You are on the cusp of a custodial sentence.” ’ He’s not the only one on the cusp. Idris Elba is ‘on the cusp of landing the Holy Grail of film-star roles, James Bond,’ reported the Daily Telegraph in a splendidly mixed metaphor, as though the Holy Grail were a kind of giant marlin to land, and a marlin with cusps to boot.

The next Labour leader will have to be able to speak human, said a piece in the Observer. This, it argued, is because Ed Miliband was taunted for always speaking like a policy wonk. What short memories members of the commentariat have. In 2010 Ed Miliband was being praised by supporters on the grounds that he did ‘speak human’, unlike his technocratic brother. ‘Let us be clear: Ed M is not JFK,’ wrote Mehdi Hasan in the New Statesman in that year. ‘But he does have the all-important ability to connect with ordinary people.’ He quoted Neil Kinnock, of all people to prove it. Lord Kinnock said Ed had the ‘X factor’. Sure enough he is now the X-leader. To speak human is a strange sort of virtue to claim.

A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or worse. ‘I use the phrase trigger warning myself,’ wrote Kate Maltby in a Spectator blog the other day, ‘to warn Facebook friends that they may not wish to click on a link because it is likely to automatically “trigger” flashbacks for survivors of trauma.’ That’s kind, and luckily I am not triggered by split infinitives. But she and fellow admirers of the classics are shocked by a demand from four students at Columbia University for tutors to issue trigger warnings before asking for certain authors to be studied.

‘Aa-aah,’ groaned my husband, ‘we fade to grey.’ He had never been much of a Young Romantic, even when Visage was vigorous. I had merely told him that Oxford Dictionaries have added to their online collection the phrase brain fade. In April, when David Cameron said that he supported West Ham, having previously assured the world he followed Aston Villa, he excused himself by saying: ‘I had what Natalie Bennett described as a brain fade.’ What Ms Bennett had said, after a grim radio interview in which she could not explain Green party policies, was: ‘One can have a mental brain fade on these things.

Benidorm has applied for World Heritage status. To achieve this, says Unesco, a site must have ‘outstanding universal value’ in one of ten natural or cultural categories. Perhaps Benidorm is ‘a masterpiece of human creative genius’ — clever to get all those people to go there on holiday. Heritage is overdone now, especially as an adjective. I read something the other day about old buildings that I agreed with, except that the author had consistently called old buildings ‘heritage buildings’. I can understand Waitrose selling ‘heritage’ champagne, but heritage non-vintage? Waitrose offers various lines in heritage apples (Adams Pearmain, Chivers Delight) and tomatoes (Coeur de Boeuf).

I was interested by the widespread annoyance at the use of progressive by the lefty parties before the election. Irritation is not the essence of a love of language (philology), but it is a symptom. The suspicion here was that socialism is so pejorative that a euphemism was being sought. It is true that when Milton wrote of ‘Their wandring course… Progressive, retrograde, or standing still,’ he wasn’t referring to the left, the right and the Lib Dems. He was taking about the apparent motion of the planets relative to the sun and other stars, a science more familiar to learned people of his day and before than today. A synonym for progressive was prograde.

‘No quarter given,’ yelled my husband as he stabbed at a cushion with his stick, spoiling the cavalier effect a little by catching his foot in the loose rug, about which I have told him twice (not the hundred times he likes to claim). He made his inadvertently slapstick attempt at humour because I had reported to him the appearance of a new commercial sign ‘Royal Quarter’ not far from the former Army & Navy Stores in Victoria. Apart from the presence of Buckingham Palace round the corner, there is very little royal about the area, which is identified by its proximity to Victoria station.

‘Ten Norwegian phrases that don’t exist in English but should,’ said the headline. So I had a little look, as the writer on the internet, one Kenneth Haug, intended. Here’s one. Takk for maten. Should it exist in English? It means: ‘Thanks for the food.’ English, being a cousin of Norwegian, also used to employ meat to mean food, and we still run into the archaic sense in such contexts as the Bible. ‘The life is more than meat,’ says the Authorised Version in Luke 12:23, as the equivalent of Anima plus est quam esca. The 10th century gloss in the Lindisfarne Gospels made that ‘Se sauel mara is thon mett’, taking anima as ‘soul’ rather than ‘life’, though it boils down to the same thing.

‘I long for spontaneous passion but I will never get it with my husband because I think he has Asperger syndrome,’ wrote a reader of the Sun to Deidre last week. I noticed this because the leading article in The Spectator earlier this month said that David Cameron needs ‘more passion’. It was right, of course. Deidre’s reply suggested that ‘specific requests could help him, such as “Please give me a cuddle in bed”.’ I don’t know if a similar suggestion has been made to Mr Cameron. But Tony Blair said in his recent speech: ‘I believe passionately that leaving Europe would leave Britain diminished.’ Does believing passionately that something would happen count as having passion?

I’ve been having a lovely time splashing about in the new Fowler. It has been revised by Jeremy Butterfield, an OUP lexicographer. There’s a new usage in it that I want to talk about, but first a word about the title. The title page says Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. In 1996, the previous edition, the third, edited by good old Robert Burchfield, was The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In 1926 H.W. Fowler’s celebrated book had been published as A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. We called it Modern English Usage both before and after 1996, and more often Fowler — a metonym and more, as Jeremy Butterfield points out. So why doesn’t it now say Fowler on the cover, not Fowler’s?