Dot Wordsworth

There was a marvellous man in Shakespeare’s day known as John Smyth the Sebaptist. ‘In an act so deeply shocking as to be denied by Baptist historians for two and a half centuries,’ Stephen Wright, the expert on separatist clergy wrote, ‘he rebaptised first himself and then his followers, and set out his new views in The Character of the Beast (1610).’ His former confederate Richard Bernard fired a counterblast in that year showing (to his own satisfaction) that ‘the Church of England is Apostolicall, the Separation Schismaticall’. Reading a word like sebaptist we take the prefix se- to indicate a reflexive act, a self-baptism, as we would if reading French or Spanish. But that is not how ancient Romans used se-.

I read C.J. Sansom’s novel Dissolution on the train recently with pleasure. For an historical novel narrated in the 1530s, what was the author to do about language? He eschewed godwottery (which Fowler, in a dated term, called Wardour Street, after the old furniture once sold there). But I did gulp at page 273: ‘I got up, waving my arms and stamping my feet to restore the circulation.’ The what? The word circulatioun is first recorded from 1535 in the sense ‘movement in a circle’. It wasn’t till 1630 that James Primrose published a commentary, De Motu Cordis et Circulatione Sanguinis, on the theories of William Harvey.

It should perhaps be called Yambuku fever, since that was the village in Zaire (as it was then, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where it was identified in 1976 by Peter Piot, a scientist from the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp. He is now director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and went back to Yambuku earlier this year, meeting a survivor of the 1976 outbreak. Professor Piot decided to name it after the river Ebola, 60 miles from Yambuku, because he realised the stigma that would attach to the disease. In that, Yambuku is luckier than the German town of Marburg in Hesse, where seven people died of a haemorrhagic fever identified there in 1967, or Lassa in Borno state, Nigeria, where another haemorrhagic fever was described in 1969.

‘Goosey, goosey gander,’ my husband shouted at the television, like someone from Gogglebox. It’s not so much that he thinks the television real as that he thinks himself an unreal part of the television. The cause of his outburst was something that had caught my attention, too. Someone had said: ‘What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.’ We both thought this a mere garbling of the proverb: ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.’ It is not the benefit of either the goose or the gander that is under consideration but the delectation of their flesh. Certainly, the oldest books of proverbs mention sauce. Chief among these is John Ray’s collection from 1670. What a labour it must have been to compile.

At least I’ve got my husband’s Christmas present sorted out: the Dull Men of Great Britain calendar. It is no doubt intended ironically, as travelling the country photographing old pillar-boxes, for example, does not strike me as being in the least bit dull. I had thought that dull, in reference to people, was a metaphor from dull in the sense of ‘unshiny’. ‘Dieu de batailles!’ as the Constable of France in Henry V exclaims of the English, ‘where have they this mettle?/ Is not their climate foggy, raw and dull?’ But I was quite wrong, as so often. It started off (in the form dol) meaning ‘foolish’. In English almost as old as you could care to have it, the author of The Seafarer declares: Dol bith se the him his dryhten ne ondrædeth; cymeth him se death unthinged.

When I first heard ‘Wonderwall’ being played in a public house, in 1995 I suppose, I thought it was some unreleased Beatles record that had been just been discovered. The song appeared on an album, (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?, which has on the cover a picture showing two men about to pass in a very empty Berwick Street in Soho. It must have been daybreak. In the middle distance a magenta doorway indicates the location of a shop called Reckless Records. It’s a good name for a second-hand record shop. Is Reckless such a good name for an MP? I was surprised by how many people made a little joke about Mark Reckless’s name after he defected to Ukip at the weekend. Do they think he is descended (all paternity being regular) from someone who was reckless and thus earned the name?

I’m puzzled by the dropping of the one part of the name of the Islamic State that seems certain. That it is Islamic, many dispute. That it is a state is just as unclear. But calling it the does not bestow honour upon it, any more than referring to the Third Reich meant agreement with its behaviour. But there’s all the difference between the Queen and Queen. The Islamic State is grammatically like the Irish Free State, the Orange Free State or the Bluegrass State (Kentucky). And yet the BBC commonly speaks of ‘Islamic State’ without the definite article, like Sinn Fein or Sheffield Wednesday. In June I wrote here about the jihadist group’s good fortune in landing the English acronym Isis — easy to pronounce and remember.

‘Pre-diabetes is an artificial category with virtually zero clinical relevance,’ said an American professor in the Times. A friend of mine has even been told by the vet that her little cat is in a pre-diabetic condition, being a little over the norm on the feline body mass index. I began to think that pre-diabetes was like the countryman’s hills: if you can see them it’s going to rain. (If you can’t, it’s raining — you’ve got diabetes.) But then I did something sensible. I looked up the term in the dictionary. It is no neologism. The first example in the OED comes from more than 100 years ago.

I don’t much care for being called Wordsworth. Oh, the name is rather distinguished, though it came from my husband, but I mean that I don’t like to be referred to as ‘Wordsworth’ without the Mrs. It makes me sound like a convicted criminal. I don’t even like Jane Austen being referred to as ‘Austen’. I know it sounds prissy nowadays to call her ‘Miss Austen’, but we don’t hesitate to refer to Mrs Thrale (though she became Mrs Piozzi) or to Mrs Patrick Campbell, though she married George Cornwallis-West in 1914. (After he was divorced from Winston Churchill’s mother in that year, she reverted to ‘Lady Randolph Churchill’, which must have taken some force of character.

My husband is constantly amused by talk of patient autonomy — for people who want to have a limb lopped off to solve their feeling of body dysmorphia and so on. I suppose he is amused because that is his nature, rather than that these things are inherently funny. In any case, as I have told him more than once, he is himself an example of impatient autonomy. There was great talk of autonomy in the debate on Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill. The learned Lord Brennan pointed out that, if it is passed, ‘Litigants will say to the court, “I want to exercise my autonomy and my choice. Why is it restricted to the terminally ill?

‘I am glad to say that I have never seen a toe-rag,’ said my husband, assuming, as unconvincingly as one would expect, the demeanour of Gwendolen from The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.’ I had been mentioning the perverse tendency of the human race to defend their own amateur etymological theories, even when convicted of gross error. A vigorous example at the moment is tow-rag, a catachrestic version of toe-rag, a term of abuse taken from the practice of wrapping rags round the toes. ‘Stockings being unknown,’ wrote J.F.

Labour’s appeal to the cost of living has a rather old-fashioned feel to it: as if the whole nation still heated water with a geyser over the bath and darned (or got me to darn) its socks of an evening. ‘Till recent years the phrase “Cost of Living” was only used loosely by economists when the balance between movements of wages and prices was in question,’ the Encyclopædia Britannica remarked in 1922. ‘In popular parlance it has since become a recognised economic problem.’ That was when Sidney and Beatrice Webb were busy with their blue books and squared paper, before discovering a ‘New Civilisation’ in Soviet Russia. The next big step was the construction of an index to the cost of living.

It’s funny how people hardly know what they are saying. I read recently of diplomats going to Riyadh ‘to diffuse tensions over anti-Islamic stickers’. Did the writer mean defuse? Probably. He was trying to say ‘reduce’ tensions and just reached for the nearest dead metaphor from the shelf. Still, it doesn’t do to be too snooty about origins of words, as I have often told my husband, who responds by becoming narrower, shriller, louder and much snootier. What happens if you bother to look up diffuse in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? You find the first entry quotes from old John Florio’s World of Words from 1598, which spells it defuse.