Dot Wordsworth

‘I’m a vulnerable adult,’ said my husband when I asked him why he was shouting the other morning. He had spilt some water from the hot kettle on his slippered foot. Unlike Achilles, his vulnerability extends beyond the pedal extremities. But I shouldn’t like it to be thought that he was making fun of anyone who is called vulnerable. Their numbers seem to be growing. When that policewoman was jailed last week for talking to the News of the World, the judge said he would have put her down for three years had she not been in the process of adopting a ‘vulnerable child’. I thought all little children were vulnerable, but the judge made it clear that this one had made ‘a disastrous beginning in life’.

The onesie has brought Britain one step nearer fainéant infantilism than the slanket. The slanket, a portmanteau of sleeved and blanket, reached a height of popularity in 2009. It looked like a monk’s habit, except it fastened at the back, like a hospital gown. The slanket’s purpose was cosiness while watching television, which people in Britain, apart from us, dear reader, do for more than four hours a day. I admit that during the recent wintry weather I put on my tweed overcoat one evening at home. Unlike the overcoat, the slanket was not intended to be worn in the street. The onesie has been worn in public by some rich celebrities. I’d expect it to be worn publicly by the sort of people who go out in shellsuits or more recently trackie bottoms.

I don’t know whether people know what belling the cat means now. In an allusive language like ours, some references sink out of sight. But the old tale is that a council of mice resolved to hang a bell round a cat’s neck, to warn them of its approach. Which of them would have the temerity to hang the bell on the cat? The tale pre-dates Langland, who, in Piers Plowman in the 1370s, referred to the plan to get ‘a belle of brasse… And hangen it up-on the cattes hals’. (Hals is just an old word for ‘neck’, related to Latin collum, and our collar.) Langland doesn’t use the word bell as a verb, and nor, the OED says, did anyone until 1762, in James Man’s edition of an old history of Scotland.

In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music hall. This is to suggest that music halls always offered acrobats and performing dogs. But the Liverpool Music Hall, for example, advertised in 1814: ‘Beethoven, The Mount of Olives (“A New Sacred Oratorio”)’. The fortunes of the name music hall are paralleled by coffee house. We hear, from George Sandys’s visit to Constantinople in 1610, of ‘Coffa-houses’ where they sit ‘chatting most of the day, and sippe of a drinke called Coffa’. Pepys went to a coffee house in 1664 ‘to drink Jocolatte’.

Like many, I have just read The Hobbit again, which I hadn’t done since reading it to Veronica as a girl. Even when solemn, Tolkien knows what he is doing with language. It was at his most relaxed that he could be careless, as in the early pages where he too often repeats dreadful (in its modern sense). But he does not employ the ‘Wardour Street’ fake antique that Fowler complained of in others: words like anent, trow, ween, whilom or wot. As a professional philologist he knew the history of every word he used. Some of the words that give a feeling of antiquity to The Hobbit end with –en. This suffix is used in six different ways in English, and I won’t go through them all.

‘Serious fellows, these Americans,’ said my husband, applying stereotypes with a broad, patronising brush. He had a point, though, for Merriam-Webster’s, the dictionary people, announced that their word of the year, 2012, was a dead heat between socialism and capitalism. ‘We saw a huge spike for socialism on election day,’ said one of its editors. ‘Lookups of one word often led to lookups of the other.’ Lookups, eh? Like pressups, cockups and kneesups? These lookups are online clicks. It is odd to think that undecided voters should have been swayed by reading a short definition of socialism. Back in Blighty, Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year was omnishambles, about which I wrote on 28 April.

What tense shall we use? That’s the first question autobiographers must settle. The historic present might convey a sense of immediacy. ‘I’m just one race away from becoming an Olympic champion,’ Victoria Pendleton writes, describing events four years ago in Beijing. ‘My legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, and I pump them effortlessly, hard and fast, up and down, round and round.’ It proved a winning formula. Things hadn’t always been so easy. ‘I am not the same girl who took a Swiss Army knife and used it on herself because the cutting was less hurtful than the darker pain inside,’ we discover on page six of Between the Lines.

‘Have you read it then?’ asked my husband on the afternoon Lord Justice Leveson’s report was published. Of course I had not, and he only asked to annoy. But, then, nor could that strange Mr Miliband have read all 2,000 pages when he urged the world: ‘We should put our trust in Lord Justice Leveson’s recommendations.’ He sounded like the sort of person who ticks the little box saying ‘I agree to the terms and conditions’ only to regret it when the flight is cancelled. Anyway, I am not going to discuss the Leveson report. What did catch my ear, though, were some words of David Cameron in his Commons statement in response to it. He listed the ‘requirements’ of a regulatory system, such as the power to impose million-pound fines.

‘I wandered home ’tween twelve and one,’ sang my husband, waving his head from side to side in the fond belief that it made him look more like Olivia Newton-John, ‘I cried, “My God, what have I done?” ’ I was feeling a little queasy to start with, and this did not help. The occasion, if not excuse, for my husband’s rendition of Banks of the Ohio was my having succumbed to a member of the Norovirus genus. It takes its name from Norwalk (pop. 17,012) in Ohio. Norwalk, Ohio, is named after Norwalk, Connecticut, which the British set on fire in 1779. The householders were compensated with land south of Lake Erie, where the village, later city, of Norwalk, Ohio, grew up.

Pippa Middleton, I learnt from the Daily Telegraph, has a ‘passion’ for writing. Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC said, has a ‘passion for resolving conflict’. The Times, in a piece about entrepreneurs, quoted a lawyer as saying: ‘Passion is very, very important.’ Can any of this be true? Certainly not if passion is meant in the pleasantly old-fashioned sense found in Alice. Tweedledum points at his broken rattle, saying: ‘Do you see THAT?’ in a voice ‘choking with passion’. Humpty Dumpty accuses Alice of listening at doors, ‘breaking into a sudden passion’. It was a nursery emotion 150 years ago, and would not help in resolving conflicts, writing books or starting a business.

On an article in the Times about eating oak moss I saw the headline: ‘I’m lichen it!’ Since I pronounce lichen to rhyme with kitchen, this meant little to me. You may think that I have no business pronouncing lichen in this way. That is the strong opinion of my husband. But to him lichen is Latin (lichen planus, lichen simplex, denoting skin diseases). The Oxford English Dictionary says that the kitchen pronunciation is ‘now rare in educated use’. But by ‘now’ it means 1902. I suspect that readers who would otherwise understand the play on words in the Times headline are given to my ‘uneducated’ version. It is in any case not so simple.

Disease, we hear, will decimate ash trees, as the elms were obliterated, and we will see the spoliation of the landscape. I don’t want to be a schoolma’am about decimate. It has, as R.W. Burchfield pointed out in his edition of Fowler, been used for ‘destroy a large proportion’ for as long as it has meant strictly ‘destroy one in ten’. By chance, Burchfield’s chosen illustration of the disputed meaning was: ‘The forest has largely gone, decimated by a forest industry that is just now assaulting the final remains.’ Ash, by the way, is a suitably ancient word, found in about the year 700 to render the Latin fraxinus.

When I heard on the BBC that an organisation in St Petersburg named after St Basil the Great taught teenagers on probation the art of parkour I didn’t understand what was meant. Parkour is, I learn, a variant of free-running — moving rapidly and freely over or around the obstacles presented by an urban environment by running, jumping and climbing. The word is French, though it doesn’t look it, being a respelling of parcours, ‘course’, here in the sense of ‘obstacle course’. In Romance languages, where k is alien, it has a trendy flavour. Spanish squatters call themselves okupistas instead of ocupistas. Parcours has an amusing history not apparent in current usage.

‘Look at all this bumf,’ said my husband, shaking some ‘guidance’ on how to fill in his tax return and sounding like someone out of Much Binding in the Marsh. I mentioned last week the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves, Cheats, &c (1699), an anonymous work, attributed only to B.E., Gent. The Bodleian Library has republished it in a nice little edition under the title The First English Dictionary of Slang, but you can read it free online. Among its modern-sounding expressions is bumfodder.

The kick-start and the first world war arrived in the same year. Despite talk of a ‘big bazooka’, the former is still currently favoured as the model for stimulating the economy. (A bazooka, by the way, was a second world war anti-tank rocket launcher, the name deriving from a sort of homemade trombone of the 1930s, itself dependent on the bazoo or mouth. In Tennessee in the 1870s, the phrase blowin’ his bazoo meant ‘braggadocchio or gasconade’). The mechanical kick-start got a motorcycle engine going. Yet the metaphor now often sounds as though it meant ‘push-start’, or ‘start a motor-vehicle by sending it downhill’. Kick-start just sounds more dynamic than push-start. Everyone is at it.

‘Old people’, as anyone under 30 calls anyone over 40, apparently suffer from textlexia. The word may be more painful than the condition. The wrong element in dyslexia has been taken to mean something like ‘inability’, and this, Greek in form, has been jammed on to text, which derives from Latin. Let us not be too pious. This is one end of a chain of blunders. The online Urban Dictionary gives an amusing exemplification of textlexia, as from a girl texting her boyfriend: ‘I so sorry 2 txt dump U but if I call U i will cry and start cutting myself again :)’ A little later she sends a correction: ‘I mean :( not :). Stupid textlexia.

My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister. The dilemma matches the two-edged meaning of rhetoric these days. President Obama was said to have got to the White House thanks to his rhetoric, but now his rhetoric is being compared unfavourably with his achievement. Similarly, Iran’s suggestion that Israel should be obliterated is called rhetoric, while Haaretz says: ‘Netanyahu has escalated his rhetoric on Iran.

So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a homogenous group of people all acting for the same reasons.’ There is such a word as homogenous, but it is not the one called for here. Homogenous is a synonym for homogenetic, meaning ‘having a common ancestor’. The riot panel did not intend to discuss whether the rioters had a common ancestry.