Dot Wordsworth

‘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?

Maureen Finucane of Richmond, Surrey, wonders whether there is any branch of public service not infected by Orwellian Newspeak. In a letter to the editor (Spectator, 28 February), she explained that a museum owed her a refund and that after a fortnight she was told on the telephone: ‘The situation is being reviewed by several managers and once it has been approved will be actioned.’ She asks if I might take this up. I’m not sure I have the strength. I can only suggest that in response Mrs Finucane might assert that she has been impacted negatively by this issue and demand that the situation be escalated as a priority.

‘You must promise to be with us for our silver wedding D.V. which will be in four years,’ wrote Queen Victoria in February 1861 to her daughter Vicky in Prussia, where her husband had just become Crown Prince. But D was not V, and dear Albert was dead before the year was out. I think the German connection is relevant here to the use of silver wedding, for mother and daughter would both have been familiar with the notion of a silberhochzeit. Silver wedding had not long been in English usage, although, in the late 18th century, some people aware of German customs used the phrase silver feast. I was thinking of silver weddings because of something odd that I heard on the wireless. Paddy O’Connell referred to a ‘25-year anniversary’.

‘Heart of Oak are our ships, Jolly Tars are our men,’ shouted my husband unconvincingly. He has taken to doing this every time someone on air says robust, and that is pretty often. On this occasion it was someone from the Arts Council rambling on about business plans and governance being robust enough to ensure that organisations are sustainable. Anything else might have been adjudged robust: Mrs Merkel, examination procedures, animal welfare rules, IT systems. It’s an all-purpose word of approval and thus often on the lips of politicians. The overuse of robust robs their speech of all conviction and drives listeners to distraction, even if few are provoked into singing to William Boyce’s stirring tune, like my husband.

‘I hate Jammie Dodgers,’ said my husband staring disdainfully at a biscuit kindly tucked into his coffee saucer at an after-church gathering. I’m glad only I heard. But the fact is that we British generally admire dodgers. Dickens came up with a fine sobriquet when he gave John Dawkins the nickname the Artful Dodger. As in real life, he was often referred to simply as the Artful. Artful of course meant ‘cunning’ or ‘deceitful’ — high praise. Earlier in the story, Mr Bumble had called Oliver Twist ‘artful and designing’, admittedly not in praise. And in The Pickwick Papers, the novel before Oliver Twist, Sam Weller calls a trick played on them by Job Trotter an ‘artful dodge’.