Dot Wordsworth

‘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?

‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, sounding like George V commenting on an Impressionist painting. ‘Someone in the Telegraph says that the French shouldn’t borrow English words.’ Once I had managed to wrest the paper from his dog-in-the-manger grasp, I found it didn’t quite say that, but rather that foreigners ought not to plaster advertisements and clothing with English words if they didn’t know their meaning. I had been thinking something similar. The example that had been annoying me was the name of a medium-trendy Spanish clothing chain, Pull & Bear, which has been spreading over Spain like Chalara fraxinea in England. At first I thought it was meant to be a pair of invented surnames.

The BBC is to broadcast what is now referred to as the ‘C-word’ in a drama about Dylan Thomas. ‘It was in an actual letter by Dylan Thomas,’ the screenwriter Andrew Davies said at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, ‘and the word was being used in a tender and affectionate way. We won that battle.’ No doubt any word can be used in a tender and affectionate way. A fortnight ago, BBC Radio 4 devoted a whole programme to what the title called the ‘N-word’. The suggestion was made that nigger is offensive even when used by blacks. The poet Dean Atta, who had published a volume of verse called I am Nobody’s Nigger, particularly opposed black rappers using the term.

In his New Year message for 1940, Joseph Goebbels complained that the ‘warmongering cliques in London’ hated the German people because they were ‘hard-working [arbeitsam] and intelligent’. I certainly found it odd that the Conservatives in their party conference should use ‘hardworking’ as their catchphrase. But it was odd not because of Dr Goebbels, but because it had been flogged so hard by Gordon Brown during the Blairite era of errors and distortions. If it was so easily forgotten as a Labour slogan, why deploy it again in the Conservative interest? The Tory conference organisers wrote hardworking as one word.

I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading at all. A paragraph of his in Seven Types of Ambiguity, concerning one line in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare, is called a great example of literary criticism. In the London Review of Books, Jonathan Raban wrote recently about how Empson’s book made him ‘learn to read all over again’ in 1961. As for this paragraph, he had been ‘ravished by its intelligence and simplicity’. The line is ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’. ‘Of course!’ the young Raban exclaimed after reading Empson’s remarks.

One man’s grammatical nicety is another man’s grotesque solecism, I thought, as I perused a report in the Gulf News, where gold prices and prayer times jostle at the masthead. It concerned standards of grammar at schools in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. ‘Our students should be trained on getting the message across,’ said a mathematics teacher. ‘Some sacrifices might have to be done, such as doing away with capital letters, but that should not be a major point of contention.’ Well, I don’t know. We have grown used to capital letters in our writing system, inconsistent as their use may be.

Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a large screen’, a portmanteau word, from phone and tablet) or jorts (‘jean shorts’, another portmanteau word). I can’t see much future in them, nor could I in squee, until I had a conversation with Veronica. Squee is an exclamation of delight, or the related noun or verb. I mentioned to Veronica that it reminded me of Mr Smee, the genial pirate in Peter Pan, ‘a man who stabbed without offence’, as Barrie chillingly puts it. Veronica explained that Squee was a character too, who originally appeared in Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, a darkly misanthropic comic-book series by Jhonen Vasquez that began to appear in 1995.

Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine. Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist clergyman Robert Wild, in a poem on Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, refers to the ‘self-whippings, of the Popish Priests’. He meant the use of the discipline for ascetic motives. This was equally frowned upon by the Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

Even my husband is not old enough to recall the wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville on the day the 1948 Olympics opened in London. Such games came to be organised by the British Paraplegic Sports Society and so were called the Paralympic Games. It was a true portmanteau word, packing together paraplegic and Olympic. But the International Paralympic Committee declares what it must know to be untrue: ‘The word Paralympic derives from the Greek preposition para (beside or alongside) and the word Olympic. Its meaning is that Paralympics are the parallel Games to the Olympics.’ They may well be parallel but that is not the historical origin of the word. The Bucks Advertiser had a place in recording this history, since Stoke Mandeville lies in its area.

There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally as ‘virtually, as good as’ — in other words, the reverse of its established meaning. Pedants were literally up in arms (in the new sense). The funniest thing was that the offending entry in the OED had been inserted in 2011, and the pedants hadn’t noticed for a couple of years. So I thought I ought to see what else the dictionary-makers had been doing on the quiet. I started with hopefully. This word is much deplored when used to mean ‘it is to be hoped’. In that sense, it applies to the whole sentence, and is thus known as a sentence-adverb.

Alexandra Shulman was on Desert Island Discs this summer and one choice was ‘Bongo Bong’. Its words tell a simple story: ‘Mama was queen of the mambo. / Papa was king of the Congo. / Deep down in the jungle / I start bangin’ my first bongo.’ Such were his talents that: ‘Every monkey’d like to be / In my place instead of me / Cause I’m the king of bongo, baby, / I’m the king of bongo bong.’ But when he goes to the big city, ‘They say there is no place for little monkey in this town. / Nobody’d like to be / In my place instead of me.

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack,’ replied my husband unwittily when I asked how he’d feel if shale gas was discovered at the bottom of our garden. But he did illustrate why the word has proved so good for campaigners. Someone at Balcombe had painted a sign saying: ‘Frack off.’ The word enables the debate. Quibbling about hydraulic fracturing would hardly have had the same impact. In this way, fracking serves the same purpose as did bonking in the 1980s, when it purported to supply a non-moralistic term for the act. I am not sure the illusion lasted, for the parallel case of bunga bunga in Italy soon enough suggested dirty old men. However, fracking positively benefits from its taboo associations.

Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able ‘to breathe a second spring’. The phrase second spring was picked up by John Henry Newman, in 1852, to describe the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy under Cardinal Wiseman. This was ‘a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries’, he declared.