Dot Wordsworth

A labour of love of the strangest kind, published posthumously, came to me this week. It is The English Wordsmith, by David Andrews (£12.99), which is nothing but 8,000 ‘important, relevant, obscure, difficult, unusual words and phrases’. He doesn’t list Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus, but he does include floccinaucinihilipilification, presumably because of its unusual length, defining it as ‘the action of contemptuously dismissing something, or treating it, as worthless’. I wanted to know more.

So … When I asked him the name of the person who had rung while I was out, my husband enunciated the sound aaaaaaaaaahhh at such length that I wondered whether he wanted his tonsils inspected. In reality he was trying to remember, and so used this non-lexical filler. It can be very annoying when people repeatedly resort to space-fillers, always saying um, er, I mean, you know or like. Some of these are words of a sort and so can only loosely be described as non-lexical, but they may be used as if they were not words but prosodic markers (such as tone or stress). We unconsciously realise someone is finishing a sentence because the tone falls. That is why it is uncomfortable to hear Australians and the young finish statements with a rising tone, as if they were questions.

At dinner parties in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, or Southwark, according to Christina Patterson, the writer for the Independent, you hear people saying things about politics like ‘what we need is a clearer narrative’. I was delighted that she added: ‘I’m still not sure what narrative means.’ I do not go to parties in Haringey or Hackney (not invited), but the demand for narrative has reached even my well padded corner. In the Guardian Madeleine Bunting, from her own family supper table, wrote about the Scottish independence horror, remarking: ‘Scroll through comments on blogs, and what emerges is an unattractive narrative of the English being ignored.’ If narrative just meant ‘telling tales’, I wouldn’t mind.

‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. ‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. I had only asked why everyone was suddenly using the phrase hone in on instead of home in on. It was the second time in a week that I had heard a seemingly important person use the phrase on the television.

A rumour ran round Cern the other day, almost as fast as its accelerated particles, that the Higgs boson had been detected. This little creature, named after Peter Higgs (born, 1929) and the Indian physicist S. N. Bose (1894–1974), is tailor-made for a cosmic theory that calls for its interaction with quarks. For my part, I’d be happy if we could even decide how to pronounce quark. Cern says it is pronounced kwork. After all, you might think its inventor, the American Murray Gell-Mann (also born in 1929) would know, and he said in a letter to the Oxford English Dictionary in 1978: ‘I employed the sound quork [kwork] for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in Finnegans Wake.’ The passage from Joyce reads: ‘Three quarks for Muster Mark!

Someone, so the Times reported, was asked about young people being unemployed. ‘The problem is not the lack of jobs,’ came the reply, ‘but a lack of determination on behalf of young jobseekers.’ What he meant was ‘on the part of young jobseekers’. It was they who lacked determination, not anyone else on their behalf. This strange use of behalf has become so widespread that it is impossible to tell, out of context, what a speaker means. The new sense is ousting the old, just as bad money drives out good, as Gresham’s Law declares. The only difficulty is that perhaps the old money was never quite as good as it seemed. There was a phrase, 100 years ago, in behalf of, meaning ‘in the interest of, for the benefit of’.

In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. But kick off has recently developed a quite different meaning, exemplified in an online discussion that I stumbled across, about community therapy, where one woman mentioned an incident ‘at about the age of 13, when a lot of my mental health problems really began to kick off and become a real problem’.

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things. How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.

I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other initialisms in the big fat Oxford English Dictionary. An initialism is more specific than an abbreviation. Abbreviations include pleasantly obsolescent terms like affly for affectionately. If you read affly aloud, you would say ‘affectionately’, unless you were using oral inverted commas, intending to convey its air of archaism. If you read out a true acronym like Nato, you would say ‘Nato’.

‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘Imagination. Imagination is the highest kite that can fly, according to Lauren Bacall. It says so in the new Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations,’ he said, waving at me the book I had intended to look at after doing the washing-up. There may be much in what Miss Bacall says. The words come from her autobiography of 1979. I have never heard anyone quote them.

While thinking of socks for my husband, I sat up when I read a sentence in the Autobiography of the extraordinary Anne Murray. She, having helped disguise James Duke of York in a woman’s dress (‘very pretty in itt’), for him to escape the Roundheads in 1648, found that she herself had to escape the attentions of the Cromwellian double-agent John Bampfield, who wanted to marry her, swearing his wife was dead, which she began to doubt.

Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below average,’ the agricultural news used to say, when papers ran such items. Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops.

How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the enemy as ‘squares’ to say something like, ‘I am just one cat in a world of cool cats,’ as Norman Mailer did in 1957. With maturity and a change of fashion it would have been impossible in the 1970s to utter with a straight face the word cool in this sense. Now we pick up from our children, like some flu virus, cool meaning ‘OK’. But why should become extinct change to go extinct at the dictate of fashion?

Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them. Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them. They probably wouldn’t get ‘Penny wise, pound foolish’ or ‘Don’t spoil a sheep for a ha’porth of tar’ either. It is in the nature of proverbs to embody archaisms, and antiquarianism is quite alien to the current generation, for all its interest in Timewatch.

The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian of language examining the speeches of politicians to gauge the linguistic habits of the ruling class. Nothing could be more misleading. The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian of language examining the speeches of politicians to gauge the linguistic habits of the ruling class. Nothing could be more misleading. Samuel Johnson would sit in Edmund Cave’s office above that strange medieval survival, St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, making up parliamentary speeches for the Gentleman’s Magazine from notes brought to him by men who’d heard them.

‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost. ‘But we haven’t got a bed-post,’ said my husband captiously when I had shared a confidence between him, me and the bedpost. I left the room to turn down the stock on the gas-stove. With Dickens, I have since discovered, or with Miss La Creevy, the miniature-painter in Nicholas Nickleby, it was ‘between you and me and the post’. That was in 1839. Others have it as gatepost or lamp post. The unhearing, unspeaking reliability of posts is the point, the exception being a listening-post. My real interest is with between. Some people don’t like between to be applied to more than two things.

U and non-U saw their birth in 1954, in volume 55 of Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. A.S.C. Ross’s ‘Linguistic Class-Indicators in Present-Day English’ was presented to the world in the same learned journal that later published the linguistic theories of Noam Chomsky, though much of the world waited in ignorance until 1956, when Ross’s ideas were collected by Nancy Mitford in Noblesse Oblige. Ross’s thesis was that in England, ‘it is solely by its language that the upper class is clearly marked off’. He conceded that some non-linguistic markers remained, such as playing the game real tennis or a dislike of the telephone. Nowadays that might perhaps be mobiles. Ross acknowledged that verbal class-indicators changed over the years.

Now that we are celebrating the 400th anniversary of the Authorised Version of the Bible, I wonder if we can dispense with the notion that it has greatly influenced the shape of the English language. Macaulay once claimed that if every other book perished, the Bible ‘would alone suffice to show the whole extent’ of the beauty and power of English. But, as Gordon Campbell points out in his admirable new book Bible (Oxford, £16.99), one of the glories of Macaulay’s own style, the subordinate clause, is no feature of the Bible in the translation made in King James’s reign. It follows the paratactic structure of Hebrew, with sentences piled up successively instead of involuted clauses, and this rather suits English.

The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. The government is thinking of making restaurants put on the menu the number of calories in dishes. Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, spoke of an ‘obesogenic environment’. I thought he’d made up the word obesogenic. It’s a bastard formation, half-Latin and half-Greek. But my husband tells me it has been around in bariatric circles for decades. ‘Bariatric?’ I said. Yes, he said, bariatrics is a medical specialty spawned in America in the 1960s, in response to a condition brought on by prosperity, but now prevalent among the poor: fatness. Perhaps Mr Lansley should have spoken of a barogenic environment.