Dot Wordsworth

Q. I understand that the man who organised the Debs’ List is no longer with us, so I wonder if you can advise me how I could round up some of the right sort of young for a drinks party? My niece, who has been at school in Los Angeles, is about to fly into London to stay with me here for a gap year but very few of my friends have male offspring of the appropriate age, namely 18-25. Money is no object, and neither is pride. Just tell me: how does one find them these days? — Name withheld, London SW3 A. In the absence of Tatler’s social editor, the late Peter Townend, who compiled the list, you should go straight to the fountainhead of junior civility (and brilliance), namely London’s Bright Young Things Tuition in Yarmouth Place, Mayfair (020 7723 0506).

‘It’s just a fudge-a-rama,’ exclaimed Boris Johnson of the government stance on Heathrow. ‘And it’s just an excuse for a delay,’ he added by way of gloss. I was surprised to find that a fudge-a-rama, or Fudgeorama, already existed: Salerno Fudgeorama Fudge Covered Graham Cookies. They are American, or were till production stopped in 2008 on the death of some members of the Salerno family. A Graham cookie is a biscuit invented in 1829 by a New Jersey clergyman, Sylvester Graham, who thought their consumption helped ward off carnal urges. I don’t suppose adding fudge helps. The -rama suffix has been around for longer than you might think. ‘Visited the Cosmorama,’ wrote Ellen Weeton, a Lancashire governess, in 1824.

In 1911, bakers and dustmen were more likely than most to be called Bill, or at least William, according to one of those family genealogy companies, Ancestry.co.uk, which has been rummaging in the census for that year. My impression 101 years later is that Bills are rarer than Williams, Wills or even Willses. Prince William is certainly not a Bill. Not all Bills were of the burgling classes even a century ago. Bill in P.G. Wodehouse’s song (written in 1917 and reused in Showboat) may be an ‘ordinary man’, but the author also used the name for at least two peers of the realm and a millionaire. He seemed oddly fond of the name. In the fairly early school novel Mike (1909), Wodehouse names the school fast bowler Billy Burgess.

‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New Oxford Style Manual to find out what it is, but whether to use capital letters, perhaps. But even so... The odd thing about this mistake in one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’ is that it has languished there since 2005, when it was last revised. You’d think someone would have told them. Perhaps someone did and they lost the message.

That was all right,’ said my husband after listening to Paul Scofield read the whole of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ on Poetry Please. I hope they are not going to axe Poetry Please as part of Radio 4’s improvements. It’s the sort of thing that happens after 33 years of success. We have grown so used to the verbal innovations of Gerard Manley Hopkins that the surely derivative language of Dylan Thomas sounds merely playful. In Under Milk Wood, Thomas nods in one place to two phrases from ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Hopkins’s ‘the sea flint-flake, black-backed’ and ‘lush-kept plush-capped sloe’ together help to produce Thomas’s ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’.

The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic or Paralympic Games family member visitor’. Since the world is addicted to gangster films, everyone knows that Mafia gangs call themselves ‘the family’. In The Luciano Story (1954), ‘The inside facts on the greatest criminal conspiracy in history and the mastermind behind it – Lucky Luciano’, Sid Feder and Joachim Joesten explained that ‘to Mafiosi, it was never the club or our mob or anything but the family.

Collins dictionaries have invited people to send in a word for inclusion in its English dictionary. ‘If it’s accepted,’ the publishers say, ‘your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded forever.’ Forever (usually written as two words in British English, except in the sense ‘incessantly’) is pitching it a bit strong. Eternity is an over-confident prediction of the internet’s durability, let alone that of Collins dictionaries. It’s all nonsense of course. They just want publicity. The people at Collins do evaluate each word submitted, considering whether it is widespread and ‘how long it is likely to stay around for’.

On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to say: ‘It was given to my husband and I’. Not all adverbs end in –ly. Loud and clear is a well known phrase, made more popular in the 20th century by the wireless response to the enquiry ‘Do you read me?’ But loud as an adverb has a history of more than 1,000 years, fortunately for Keats, who would otherwise have had to write of hearing Chapman ‘speak out loudly and boldy’.

‘I hope you’re not having a go at P.D. James,’ said my husband, looking up from Devices and Desires (1989), which I had just finished. I am certainly not, for I admire and enjoy the author. My article last year about mistakes in Death Comes to Pemberley was intended to raise the question of the responsibility of the publisher of such a successful author. Does Faber not have a duty to correct literal and verbal errors? Thus, in The Lighthouse (2005), we read of a house with ‘a ponderous central tower, so like a battlement that the absence of turrets seemed an architectural aberration’. Obviously, it should be ‘so like a turret that the absence of battlements’.

For a moment I thought it odd that Sam Leith should use the word ballsy of Lillian Hellman in reviewing her biography here a couple of weeks ago. Then I thought, hang on, one never hears the word used of men. Sarah Crompton, writing in the Telegraph recently, noticed something similar, listing other words used only about women: feisty, bubbly, bolshie, hysterical, emotional, irrational and bitchy. In the same paper Ed Cumming added another woman-only adjective in his description of a character in Prisoners’ Wives: ‘blowsy, ballsy Francesca’. Another paper previewed an episode of Silk in which ‘ballsy new QC Martha (Maxine Peake)’ appeared. So it goes on. Earlier this year, India Knight hinted in the Sunday Times that overt ballsiness had its limit.

My husband woke himself up with a snort that sounded like a crocodile seizing the hind limb of a warthog, reached for his whisky glass and said, as if I had accused him of anything: ‘Just chillaxing.’ If this useless portmanteau word struggles through a few more months of life, it will be thanks to David Cameron — or his enemies. Take these words: bromance, mumpreneur, mankle, frape, emberrorist, foodoir. They were talked up last year as new entries into dictionaries, and are supposed to mean: a sexless friendship; a working mother; a man’s ankle; altering a Facebook profile without permission; someone threatening to reveal embarrassing information; and a memoir incorporating recipes.

The other morning on the wireless (Home Service), Stephen Evans, the BBC’s man in Berlin, mentioned Angela Merkel’s favourite Anglicism: Shitstorm. So I suppose it is quite all right to discuss it here, between adults. The word has been voted Anglicism of the year by a jury headed by Professor Dr Anatol Stefanowitsch. It beat Stresstest into second place. Both may be linked to the euro-crisis, but Shitstorm in German has a specific field of usage, referring to the kerfuffle that people stir up on the internet until it reaches a critical mass (to use another metaphor), and something has to be done. An example was the criticism of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, the German minister of defence, who was found to have plagiarised part of his doctoral thesis.

Yell, which publishes Yellow Pages, is changing its name to Hibu, after seeking ‘an identity to tell our story’. It prefers to spell hibu with a small h. It admits that hibu means nothing (though to me it looks like a mis-spelled French owl), but it knows how it is pronounced: high-boo. If it were a real word it would certainly be pronounced hee-boo, for reasons too prosaic to find room for here. Yell is a good enough name. In America it is commonly used instead of shout (‘Quit yelling at me’). Its origins are ancient and go back to the same root that gives us the gale in nightingale. Who’d have thought it? Changing trade names in the hope of prosperity is a fool’s errand.

I heard a man say mayor on the radio recently as though it were mayo (of the kind that one goes easy on) followed by ‘r’. I suspect that this weird pronunciation (which could only be adopted by someone who had never heard Larry the Lamb bleat at ‘Mr Mayor’) was influenced by mayoral. Mayoral is almost always yoked with elections, especially with Boris Johnson around. Indeed mayoral and electoral are mispronounced on the same principle, with the stress on the or. That is no doubt an Americanism, but I think it is more often adopted by speakers who do not remember having heard the words pronounced at all. They see it in print often enough and then decide to make up a likely pronunciation.

‘How do you stand on the the?’ asked my husband. ‘The the?’ ‘Yes, the the.’ We could have gone on all morning, but the phone went, a so-called opinion survey. By the time I had sent them (or him) away with a flea in his ear, my husband had drifted off. The the in question was the one before Albany, the Regency sets of rooms off Piccadilly that the rich, impatient Alan Clark characterised as possessing ‘cold and miserable squalor’. Most people call it ‘the Albany’, despite snobby objections. If it had retained the name Albany House, there would have been no problem. Dickens referred to it as ‘Albany’, but that was in Our Mutual Friend, a novel with a solecism for a title.

Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable as though it were spelled fecked, as in the stressed syllable of effect. Perfect has a long and complicated history, and was never pronounced with the ‘c’ at all in the Middle Ages. The old pronunciation is preserved in the surname Parfitt (an occupational name, for an apprentice who was trained or perfect in his trade, as Chaucer’s knight was parfit in chivalry).

A London gallery had a spot of trouble with the police when someone complained about a picture of Leda and the swan. ‘As the exhibition was already over,’ said a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.’ Ravaging? ‘Thou still unravaged bride of quietness,’ as John Keats might have written, on his own Grecian theme. Perhaps the Vikings first suggested the confusion. J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People wrote of the Danes ‘ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames’. But even if rape went with pillage, they were distinguished even then. We all use one word sometimes when we mean another.

‘Roaster — A green linnet, as this bird was most frequently roasted by the boys at the playroom fire.’ That item comes in a glossary at the back of The History of Sedgley Park School by F.C. Husenbeth, published in 1856. I stumbled across it when looking to see if the book had an index. (It didn’t.) Sedgley Park, founded in 1767 and transformed in 1870 into Cotton College, now defunct, was not, I suppose, worse than most schools. Indeed Husenbeth, there from 1803 to 1814, aged seven to 18, looked back on it with affection. As we remember from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, boys enjoyed an enviable freedom to trap birds, light fires and buy supplementary rations.

I want to add a footnote to the obstetric history of last week’s newborn word omnishambles. But before I forget, I noticed an advertisement on the side of a bus recently which asked: ‘Fed up with buffering?’ I did, by chance, know what the bus meant: buffering is the juddering standstill that internet video can come to. The buffer is, I think, a bit of memory dedicated to sucking up data before displaying it for you. The dictionaries have not caught up with this word yet, but it may prove short-lived, if the problem is resolved. Now, omnishambles.