Dot Wordsworth

If I had neglected to brush my hair, my grandmother would say that I looked like a birch-broom in a fit. Untidy clothing made me look as though I had been pulled through a hedge backwards. If I appeared unhappy she would say that I had a face like a wet week. These similes, exaggerated and invariable, were so familiar that their metaphoric images scarcely registered. You could call them clichés. If so, they were clichés that went with my grandmother’s character, like her powder-compact, rain-mate and the mothball smell of her fur coat. John Rentoul, the political journalist with the Independent on Sunday, has declared war on clichés in a little book called The Banned List (Elliott & Thompson, £8.99).

‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education. I did know where to find out, though, and it comes straight from the Latin gibbus, ‘hunchbacked’, which hardly gets us much further. (The initial hard g in the English word is anomalous.) The related Greek word is kuphos, but this is not the word Homer used in the description of Thersites in the Iliad where William Cowper in his translation wrote: ‘Gibbous shoulders, o’er his breast contracted, pinch’d it.’ Homer’s word is kurto (kurtos, ‘bulging’).

Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are. Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean what their etymological forebears meant. In the reign of Elizabeth I, someone made a punning reference to Caesar as a tyrant, ‘no pretor but predator’. It was not until 1908 that natural historians began to speak of carnivores as predators.

When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek hupomenei. The Wycliffites meant the same as King James’s committees in 1611: to endure. Yet when David Cameron and his disciples speak of a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’ they do not, I hope, mean that we must presume housing is something we must endure, a lasting blot on the landscape. What they do mean is by no means clear. Sustainable development is a hooray term.

Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the names of places or peoples are reputed to be derived’. In writing that definition, the lexicographer no doubt had in mind the dictionary’s earliest illustrative quotation of the word, from 1846: ‘The eponymous personage from whom the community derive their name.’ That was from the immensely influential History of Greece by George Grote (1794-1871).

Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still retains a lively existence. We may be condescending to former centuries for inconsistent spelling, but our spelling of O, which looks simple enough, has slipped in the past 100 years. In 1902, the Oxford English Dictionary commented that, as an interjection, the spelling Oh ‘is now usual only when the exclamation is quite detached from what follows’. So the Edwardians would be expected to exclaim ‘Oh!

‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them. In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to die in 1918) completed the Concise, they did put in fart, cautioning that it was ‘indecent’. My husband’s enquiry, though, had more point than he knew, for the Fowlers’ first joint enterprise, on moving to adjacent cottages in Guernsey in 1903, was a translation of Lucian. As R.W.

Libyan rebels called Colonel Gaddafi a ‘rat’ before he lost power — not because he was in a hole, but just as an all-purpose insult. And he had called them rats too in a similar spirit. Yet the only Arabist I have been able to catch told me that rat is not a usual animal insult in Arabic, dog being the standard strong term, or donkey, which would scarcely occur to an English speaker. English is uneven in its animal insults. Dirtiness seems to be the key. Pigs, which we like to eat, show at Blandings and happily turn into children’s characters, from Pinky and Perky to Peppa, still remain available as a term of abuse. It is just that the strength of the insult depends on the accompanying adjective. ‘You greedy pig’ has often been said affectionately.

I don’t think I pick up tricks of speech from Veronica, but I noticed last week Madonna, who is 53 going on 23, echoing her daughter Lourdes, aged 14. Lourdes was complaining of her mother’s dress sense, as daughters do: ‘Every day, I’ll be like, “Mom, you can’t wear that”.’ Her mother spoke in the same interview (in the Mirror, as it happens) about how busy she was: ‘Every other day, it’s like, “What am I doing? This is insane.” ’ I find this habit annoying, but it can hardly be called ungrammatical. The grammar is clear if of recent origin.

‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as Moriarty. In the past week or so I have been surprised by the widespread strength of feeling against the term criminality. At first I did not see the objection. As soon as he came back from his holidays to the riots, David Cameron spoke of ‘criminality, pure and simple’. He soon afterwards said he had his eye on telephones used for ‘plotting violence, disorder and criminality’.

‘Who,’ I wondered to myself as I folded away my husband’s pyjamas, which he’d left on the hall floor (why the hall floor?), ‘is this woman sprinkling glottal stops like currants into a Welsh pancake mix and between each one inserting a cliché?’ It was Sally Bercow, the cheery wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons. She was on Today only for a minute and a half, so wasted no time in setting the tone by reminding us that Napoleon said the English were a nation of shopkeepers. Then we were told that ‘our high streets are fast approaching their sell-by date’. Do they have sell-by dates?

Most of us have discovered since Anders Behring Breivik killed 78 people on 22 July how well Norwegians speak English. We heard many use the phrase in shock. Two days after the shooting, the Catholic bishop of Olso said: ‘Norway is still in shock.’ The killer’s father some days later said: ‘I am in a state of shock.’ After a week, a woman working near the scene of the crime, said: ‘We are still in a state of shock.’ International Gymnast magazine was told by the veteran gymnast Espen Jansen: ‘We are all in shock.’ To my husband’s generation of medicos, to be in shock was to suffer a serious fall in blood pressure, which can deprive vital organs of oxygen.

‘Ha, ha! Caught you out,’ shouted my husband, holding a copy of The Spectator above his head and twirling beneath the hall light as I came in. He showed me a letter from a man (it is always a man) who suggested I thought noctae was the genitive of nox. In one sense, I was bang to rights, for I had typed the phrase ius primae noctae, which is wrong. But it is interesting what is needed to make a mistake. Fatal to an error is advertence. If someone had asked me, a girl who had not had her brothers’ advantages of a classical education, what the genitive of nox was, I should have answered noctis. It is no excuse, but the termination of primae had acted as a false attraction, like a moving ball of wool to a kitten.

Sorry  ‘She was sorry Doctor Cameron objected to her maternal arrangements,’ wrote Anna Maria Bennett in her seven-volume novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797). It is funny how fame and scandal are soon forgotten, for Mrs Bennett was a smash-hit novelist of her age. The scandal was her living for 17 years with an admiral (by whom she had a daughter, a celebrated actress who herself had a daughter by the Duke of Hamilton and went through a sensational divorce case). All forgotten. By sorry Mrs Bennett meant that Dr Cameron’s objections made her character sad. Her character was not apologising for Dr Cameron. This meaning of sorry is categorised as sense 2b by the Oxford English Dictionary.

Hacking One useful quality of the term phone hacking is its imprecision. Generally it refers to gaining access to voicemail messages, often by guessing the default personal identification. This differs from tapping a telephone conversation. Tapping (a metaphor from tapping drink from a barrel) was already in use in 1869, with reference to electric telegraph wires. Hacking, we think of as breaking into a computer system. But the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that hacker first meant ‘a person with an enthusiasm for programming or using computers as an end in itself’. The earliest example in print is from 1976. Seven years later, Byte magazine gave this account: ‘Hacker seems to have originated at MIT.

Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial activity,’ declared the revolutionary Tom Mann in 1909, ‘forces from the politicians proportionate concessions.’ It was another 62 years before the national press of Britain announced that newspapers would not be published the next day ‘because of industrial action’.

An American soldier just back from Afghanistan said on television that he thought his fellow combatants should not be withdrawn ‘until the country is stable enough that it can stand on its own feet’. What struck me was not the opinion on strategy but the grammar. Instead of saying ‘stable enough that it can’, I’d have said ‘stable enough to stand’. My preference for the accusative and infinitive (‘I request him to shut up’) over a subordinate clause with a subjunctive (‘I request that he shut up’) does not cover every circumstance where the so-called mandative subjunctive is used. I can wish, ask, prefer, command, beg, love or require him to shut up, but I cannot suggest, demand or insist him to shut up.

Until the rain blew over, I sought refuge in a Pret A Manger and drank some ginger beer. For entertainment I read the label. ‘We do not add any weird chemicals,’ it said. No doubt Pret knows better than to say ‘any chemicals’. Water is a chemical, we are told by the know-alls (of the kind who script QI on the television). Yet social attitudes to pure food are closely charted by the history of chemical as recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chemical retains connotations that it possessed on its earliest use, in the 17th century. Then it often meant ‘a medicine’. A chemical was a substance refined from the coarse material of daily life.

Mr Brown’s writing In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility. I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that not very well. But his thick marker-pen marginalia have a rare indecipherability. Like Linear A, some may never be cracked. It is not only that his letters are ill-formed, though they are — so that two scribbled words look like long termum. The U, however, turns out to be I and S, both with much the same shape and joined at the bottom. But Mr Brown’s handwriting also shares something with that of the Revd Dr William Spooner — anticipation.