Dot Wordsworth

‘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.

‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph. For once he was right. It was a letter from the Pagan Federation complaining that the acronym Isis ‘is likely to form an inadvertent association in the minds of hearers between Sunni jihadists and followers of the goddess Isis’. These ‘may be caught up in unintended fallout’. They are not the only ones. Apart from the army of bloodthirsty Islamists, Isis is a centre for scientific research at Harwell, near Oxford; a group of schools teaching English; an ‘end to end’ professional photographic service in Clerkenwell; a private equity investor; and a seven-seater from Toyota.

During the sudden advances of ISIS in Iraq, one visual image stood for their brutality. As the Daily Mail reported it, there was ‘a propaganda video depicting appalling scenes including a businessman being dragged from his car and executed at the roadside with a pistol to the back of his head’. I’ve heard from friends in the press, though not at the Daily Mail, that this description enraged readers. It wasn’t the fact, but the use of the word executed. This, they pointed out, meant the commission of a sentence imposed by a court, which was certainly not the case here. To execute, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it, is ‘to carry into effect ministerially a judicial sentence.

I never dare go with my husband to any restaurant that uses square plates or he will play up the horrors of these ceramic items, huffing and puffing and pretending that he can’t stow his knife and fork without their falling off. When the subject attracted the attention of readers of the Daily Telegraph recently, one of them wrote in to say that square wooden plates were ‘standard issue in ships of the line in Nelson’s day’. Sailors were fed a hot meat meal every day, he pointed out, and ‘the practice led to the expression “a square meal”, meaning a good one’. This is a nice idea, but there is no evidence for it. Even Admiral W.H.

When I asked my husband why paramedical professions were given to remaking the language in strange ways, he replied in a threatening tone ‘Whadya mean?’ I think he was in denial. But it is undeniably true that where two or three trained counsellors or disability campaigners are gathered together, the first victim will be the English language. Who was it, after all, that came up with the phrase ‘issues around’? The latest craze is to urge the need for supporting people to do something, or even into something. So, on the NHS careers website, part of the job of a social worker may be to work  with offenders, ‘supervising them in the community and supporting them to find work’.

The French for tête-à-tête is one-to-one now, according to a new survey of English invaders by Alexandre des Isnards. Actually, only half of the 400 neologisms that M. Isnards has collected for his Dictionnaire du Nouveau Français (Allary Editions) are English, though that’s a high enough level. It seems to me that French and English people are in common cause here, for it is in business-speak that the English neologisms most easily put down their nasty little suckers — an unweeded garden in both languages. Bullet-points now seem as desirable to French business people as to English. Verbs are spawned simply by sticking –er on the end of English words: forwarder, photoshoper (with a single p), rebooter.

‘So there are lots of universes besides ours,’ the ancient atomists concluded, in the brief account by Peter Jones (Ancient and modern, 29 March). ‘Dot Wordsworth,’ he added cheerfully, ‘will tell you that should be a multi-universe, not a multiverse.’ The trouble with language is that no one takes any notice of ‘should’. In Latin, the adjective universus meant ‘whole, entire’ and, as a noun, ‘the whole world, everybody, the whole caboodle’. The English word multiverse is used in two quite different senses. In one sense, invented by William James, the novelist’s brother, the idea was to portray the universe as lacking order or a guiding power.