Dot Wordsworth

What kind of scientists do school inspectors not need to be? ‘Inspectors don’t need to be rocket scientists.’ For what must we make sure that the school inspection regime is fit? ‘We make sure that the school inspection regime is fit for purpose.’ In what manner do we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely.’ Apart from freely, is there another manner in which we need an independent schools regulator to inspect all schools? ‘We need an independent schools regulator that inspects all schools freely and fairly.

‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly know anything if we are deprived of the help of Mr Google and his friends. Last week I was standing outside St Fin Barre’s cathedral (in Cork) and someone was pointing out the angel on the central gable of the west facade, which the architect William Burges had wanted to be a figure of Christ in Judgment, until the good Protestants of the city vetoed it. The angel stands in a pointed oval frame of stone.

My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he has a Nelson Mandela Memorial Freedom Pass, he seldom chooses to join us Morlocks down below. ‘Is this the work of a Chinaman?’ he asked, nodding towards a poster. ‘You mustn’t say “Chinaman”, dear,’ I said firmly. The poster showed people with vertical slits for eyes and no noses. They stood hunched in an Underground carriage, dressed in T-shirts, as if in a scene from some dystopian film like Idiocracy. Above the image, words were arranged in lines: ‘We really don’t mean to chide / But try to move along inside, / So fellow travellers won’t have to face / An invasion of their personal space.

They were talking on the wireless about Brazilians in the flooded areas, or so I thought. Once the kettle had finished boiling, it turned out that they wanted resilience in new houses in floody places. That meant fitting electrical sockets above waist height and not using plasterboard downstairs — things they have been doing in Venice for years. Schoolchildren should have resilience too, according to the MP Tristram Hunt, who, I always have to remind myself, sits on the Labour benches. ‘The teaching of resilience and self-control and character is more and more important,’ he said a couple of weeks ago. You can’t have too much of it these days.

Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question that Charles Moore raised last week about the name of the country if Scotland leaves. My husband, naturally, is all for calling it England. Even the Oxford English Dictionary defines England as ‘The inhabitants of England (sometimes also Britain) regarded collectively.’ The Welsh would certainly be aggrieved, and the Northern Irish up in arms. But we can’t include everyone in the national name. Even now, some of the Cornish are cutting up rough.

I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was using the whining intonation that some seem to think the proper voice in which to recite verse. So I was glad that Bernard O’Donoghue came on, with an accent formed by a childhood in Co. Cork. His poem ‘Gerund’ was about an only child who ‘grew up in a county council cottage by the roadside’ but was allowed to go on to secondary education (as many in Ireland then did not) because of his intelligence. At school, the poem says: ‘When Joe Garvey asked/ “What part of speech is desperandum?”,/ trembling, he volunteered “a gerund”,/ and then translated “what must be despaired of”./ How did he know?

A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen? Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS of a biography of Jack London, commenting on an example of detail in The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘a deceptively lumpen old man who gently tucks a rogue strand of hair behind his wife’s ear’. The English word lumpen derives from Karl Marx’s use of Lumpenproletariat. He first used it in 1850 of the ‘down and outs’ who make no contribution to the workers’ cause.

‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to know what you mean by that,’ I replied, hoping not to encourage him. ‘Being challenging,’ he said, ignoring my implied request. We had been discussing a report in the Daily Telegraph about the impenetrability of the language of the art establishment. Sir Peter Bazalgette had been complaining about this, but the examples given came from a book by Philip Hook called Breakfast at Sotheby’s. In his amusing devil’s dictionary, honest meant ‘inept’, unmediated ‘direct’, challenging ‘obscure’, and difficult one step in obscurity beyond challenging.

The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011, sounded more like a threat than a prediction. No one knows the originator of the slogan, but that is not surprising. It is a commonplace of the struggle. In 2011, for example, a pair of artists called Mikkel Floher and Rasmus Nielsen put on an exhibition called No Justice No Peace at a gallery in Frederiksberg, Denmark. The artists are ‘united by a common sense of injustice and indignation’. They should meet my husband. No justice, no peace has been around since the 1970s among the chanting classes. Some contributors to a moderately intelligent blog called Language Log said that No justice, no peace reminded them of notices in the form: No drinking. No dogs.

Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I recognised the chain reaction from somewhere else. It was from Start the Week on Radio 4, where somebody spoke of pushing back. Before the programme was over, everyone seemed to say push back. They applied push back not to a chair, or even the date of an event (or, as the politicians would say, the rollout of some piece of meddling). No, theirs was a metaphorical usage, of sometimes no precise meaning. It is popular with academics and denizens of the Westminster bubble. I heard a high-flyer from the Department of Energy use it a couple of days later. It is so much in vogue as to be a late bidder as word of the year, overtaking selfie and twerk.

‘Here,’ said my husband, chucking a folded-back copy of the Daily Telegraph to me, ‘this’ll interest you.’ For once he was right. It was a reader’s letter. ‘My distress at the Paul Flowers debacle (I am a Methodist) has been increased by the BBC and others referring to “the Reverend Flowers”,’ wrote Lesley Barnes of Henfield, West Sussex. ‘As your paper, at least, is aware, this man is the Revd Paul Flowers or Mr Flowers, but never Revd Flowers. Even our Eton-educated Prime Minister seems not to know this.’ It distressed me too. Even George Parker of the Financial Times was at it on Radio 4. Where have these people been living, Arkansas? Would they call Dominic Lawson ‘the Honourable Lawson’?

Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other eccentricities) by Rosemary Hannah, I came across this seasonal horror for Stir Up Sunday. In the Greek islands that Bute toured, they laid out grapes to dry as currants. ‘The beds these currants are laid to dry on,’ he wrote, ‘are thickly smeared with dung, not fresh, but the real cess pool business, including, I think, our own aunt as well as that of other animals, in an advanced state of corruption... They say it keeps the currants hot below, and I daresay it does — but it don’t stimulate one’s appetite for plum pudding.

I saw an advertisement for Active Gold Collagen, and I realised I didn’t know what collagen means. My husband just laughed and said, ‘Horse hides,’ but this seemed unfair since the small print on the website of Boots (which sells it) said: ‘Does not contain porcine, bovine or other animal sources.’ I thought that odd, because the Oxford English Dictionary definition of collagen is: ‘A protein which is present in the form of fibres as a major constituent of bone, tendons, and other connective tissue and which yields gelatin on boiling and leather on tanning.’ So where did the makers get the collagen? Further down in the Boots small print it said: ‘This product contains hydrolysed collagen derived from fish.’ Is a fish not an animal?