Dot Wordsworth

Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all the odder is that some feminists had in the past 30 or 40 years adopted the spelling wimmin because it did not include the element -men. Its pronunciation didn’t include the element ‘men’, but now it is being made to. In origin, woman does not come from womb-man, but from wife-man.

An Iranian on the wireless was complaining that disqualification of presidential candidates had left voters with ‘Hobson’s choice’. No doubt this idiom was learnt from a careful teacher, but I wondered how many English people would use it or even know its meaning. All Spectator readers do, of course. In the original Spectator for 10 October 1712, Richard Steele told how ‘Tobias Hobson’ a carrier of Cambridge, hired out horses but obliged each customer ‘to take the Horse which stood next to the Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike well served according to his Chance, and every Horse ridden with the same Justice’. So Hobson’s choice came to mean ‘this or nothing’.

‘Scatter ye rosebuds while ye may,’ sang my husband, reckless of words and tune, thereby offending the ghosts of Herrick, William Lawes and my good friend standing nonplussed on the hearthrug, who had been seeking a sympathetic ear. I really wonder if these outbursts of disinhibition indicate the onset of dementia. My friend had been complaining that she had sent off her new book to the publisher, and that, when it came back, commas had been scattered throughout the text in a most ludicrous way. Thus when she wrote of ‘a meagre light-industrial estate’, it had been turned into ‘a meagre, light-industrial estate’, as if it might have been another kind of estate entirely and still meagre.

Last August President Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. He repeated the phrase in December: red line. Why should the line be red and what happens if it is crossed? A simple, unhelpful answer is that the metaphor is taken from a safety gauge indicating a maximum speed, for an aeroplane perhaps, or for an engine’s revolutions. The big fat Oxford Dictionary in 20 volumes traces that figurative use back to the 1970s. But it seems at odds with a warning against chemical weapons. If Assad loosed off clouds of deadly gas, Mr Obama wouldn’t shout ‘Hey, slow down!’ Nor is the Obama red line related to the thin red line presented by the British Army to the Russians.

‘One good term deserves another,’ said my husband in his infuriating way of almost making a joke. As he was talking to the wireless, it hardly mattered. His provocation, a serious one, I admit, was someone saying ‘in terms of’ when she meant no such thing. It is happening more and more, and my husband’s response is unvarying. It can’t go on. If any meaning can be ascertained in the misuse of in terms of, perhaps ‘as for’ is the one often intended. Instead of saying: ‘As for a cheap holiday, you’ve left it too late’, people say: ‘In terms of a cheap holiday...’.

Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s rime had his own ideas about care in the community: ‘Get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon,’ he cried, to little enough effect, it must be admitted. But what did he mean by loon? The Ancient Mariner was not being ‘diagnosed with lunacy’, as Coleridge would certainly not have put it.

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending a woman ‘who worked in a grocery store near Eton’. The Americans have been calling a grocer’s a grocery for some time, and a baker’s a bakery. Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, noticed it in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a decade later Dickens wrote of the Americans’ ‘Bakery’, ‘Grocery’, and ‘Bookbindery’.

In the days when we had bottles of milk delivered, some tits discovered how to peck through the foil tops and consume the cream beneath. Suddenly all the tits were at it. This illustrated what the alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance. Something similar has happened over the past days with the phrase game-changing. Trevor Kavanagh, in the Sun, commented: ‘The local elections delivered a ground-breaking, game-changing, seismic political moment.’ In the Independent, Donald Macintyre compared ‘Ukip’s position to that of the game-changing SDP’. Except, in the days of the Gang of Four, the obligatory epithet was not game-changing but breaking the mould. That metaphor was used erroneously almost from the outset.

‘A cab?’ said my husband. ‘Was the Underground out of order?’ I had been telling him about an interesting notice that I’d seen in a taxi, but he’d chosen to focus on thrift — never mind that I’d fought my way back from John Lewis with an extendable paint roller, a tray and 2.5 litres of Dawn Blue eggshell. And guess who’s going to be using it. The interesting notice I’d seen was: ‘Black Cabs just got easier.’ It was an advertisement for the Hailo mobile app, but that wasn’t what interested me. The tense was the thing. It was the simple past, got, where one would expect the perfect have got. Ah, you may say, it is merely that the auxiliary, have, has been omitted.

In the sobriquet Iron Lady, isn’t lady too deferential for a mocking nickname? Its author, Yuri Gavrilov, hardly knew that in current English, lady is a genteelism when used by those who fear that if they say woman it will be taken as an accusation that someone is no lady. This has had the perverse effect that those who normally call women women still call the cleaning woman the cleaning lady. It was in the Red Star newspaper dated 24 January 1976 that Margaret Thatcher, when leader of the opposition, was called zheleznaya dama, ‘iron lady’. The iron part had parallels in the Iron Chancellor Bismarck or the Iron Duke of Wellington.

Ian Hislop mocked Stephen Mangan, when he put in a turn as the man asking the questions on Have I Got News For You last week, for saying ‘masination’ (for machination), but Hislop himself used the unjustified modern pronunciation ‘mashination’. The version with ‘mash-’ is not known for sure until 1961, although a book published in 1931, The BBC’s Recommendations for Pronouncing Difficult Words (which I recommend to Mr Hislop) stipulates the traditional pronunciation (‘makination’). This suggests that people were already going wrong in those days. Pronouncing the first syllable as ‘mash’ came about through the influence of machine. Pronouncing words that we have only seen in print is a problem for us all.

‘French,’ cried my husband. ‘It’s bloody French.’ We were clicking on a computer screen in response to the dear old Telegraph’s invitation to ‘test out your etymological knowledge’. The little game accompanied news of an exhibition in London called The English Effect, mounted by the British Council. I had already got one of the 20 questions wrong, because I didn’t know the origin of honcho and clicked on the option ‘Mexican’ (whatever that means) instead of Japanese. In a way honcho is American, having been ‘brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting’, according to the journal American Speech in 1955, as I discovered later.

Why has behalf so rapidly collapsed into misuse? Everyone says things like ‘On my behalf I don’t want money’, or ‘The car crashed through bad driving on your behalf’. Rather than attributing the action to a vicarious agent, they simply mean ‘for my part’ or ‘on your part’. I should like to see what the Oxford English Dictionary has found out about this usage, but it has not updated its entry for behalf since 1887. Even then, it was bemoaning the ‘loss of an important distinction’ between in behalf of and on behalf of. Someone complained to The Spectator 202 years ago about a line in a play that ‘ought, by no means, to be presented to a chaste and regular audience’.

They were worrying in Canterbury about a clash between the inauguration of the Pope and the enthronisation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a near miss. You might think the word enthronisation sounds like something that George Bush had coined. Yet it has been in use longer than enthronement, which is not known until 1685. Two centuries earlier, Malory was writing of intronyscacyon in the Morte d’Arthur. In the succeeding centuries the word was applied to Archbishops of Canterbury, to the King, the Great Sophi of Persia, the Pope, the Ark of the Covenant and to Satan. Enthronisation is not just a word from distant centuries.

‘Remember snoek?’ asked my husband, as if I were old enough to be his mother. In 1947, ten million tins of this distinctive-tasting fish, Thyrsites atun, were imported from South Africa to take the place of sardines. The Conservatives complained in Parliament that the Labour administration’s austerity diet was damaging the health of British people. It was more likely that people simply felt put upon, developing a dislike of the very name snoek, which had been favoured officially as preferable to the alternative snake mackerel. We tend to identify austerity with Attlee (1945-51), though the word as a political ideal had been introduced under the coalition during the second world war.

My husband made a little joke. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lurch,’ he said, looking up from his Sunday Telegraph. In it, David Cameron had declared: ‘The battle for Britain’s future will not be won in lurching to the right.’ Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally. The word suddenly popped up in the 19th century. No one is known to have used it earlier than Byron in 1819, in Don Juan, where he contrives a Byronic rhyme: ‘A mind diseased no remedy can physic/ (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick).’ Its origins are mysterious but nautical. A clue may be found in the works of William Falconer, who is more or less a one-book man.

A shrouded skull flanked by serpents above a tureen inscribed with the words, ‘There is death in the pot’ (2 Kings 4:40), ornaments the title page of A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food by Frederick Accum (1820). Accum details hair-raising additions to food in the pursuit of profit, not just alum to bread but lead pigments to anchovy sauce and laurel berries to custard (which made three little children in Yorkshire fall insensible for ten hours, and lucky to survive). Alum is a mineral otherwise used as a styptic. Three decades on, Tennyson in Maud wrote: ‘Chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread / And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life.

The centenary of George Barker’s birth was mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement recently. His ‘first two books — one of verse, the other prose — were released in 1933’. Released? Isn’t that what happens to films and Engelbert Humperdinck? Released suddenly seems to have replaced published. Certainly Amazon is reinforcing the trend, because if you order a book that has not yet been published, a message pops up with the date on which ‘this item will be released’. Until then it is available ‘for pre-order’ or, as we used to say ‘to order’.

At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he returned, with a certificate from the mayor of Berwick, many of his friends — 39 of them — refused to pay up on the wagers they had laid. I mention Markham because he is the first person known to have used the term ring fence. Last week George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, aged 41, said he was going to electrify the ring fence. He has not yet made the walk to Berwick.