Dot Wordsworth

There is an apparently successful book called Here Come the Tickle Bugs! by Uncle Sillyhead III. Its audience is among three-and-a-half-year-olds. ‘When children are silly, no kisses or hugs. Only tickles from the Tickle Bugs!’ At this point the adult reading the story is meant to tickle the child. I can see the attraction, from the child’s point of view. Veronica loved being tickled, for a bit. Sometimes, though, it made her feel sick. My husband says that in 1897 a couple of American psychologists called G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin came up with a distinction between two kinds of tickling, knismesis and gargalesis.

I’ve just been laughing at a television advertisement for ‘snail polish’. I’ve just been laughing at a television advertisement for ‘snail polish’. It turns out to be ‘Sixty Seconds Nail Polish’. Normally when we use ‘sixty second’ adjectivally, it remains in the singular form. BBC 3 television has an item called ‘Sixty Second News’. Perhaps what has happened is that a make-up company, Rimmel, has named a product ‘Sixty Seconds’, and has then been reluctant to adjust the valuable brand-name according to the laws of grammar. Hence the polished snails. It has not all been laughter in my sheltered life of kitchen, church and children, and I shall not even mention the election.

Like a baby that throws its rattle from the pram each time it is handed back, my husband responds to specific stimuli from the television. Every time he hears the phrase next up, he shouts, ‘Shut up!’ This exclamation also serves as a response to first up, and even listen up. English is rich in phrasal verbs, but the prepositions recruited for them seem to have become unruly recently. We are suffering from prepositionitis, and up is getting particularly uppity. Uppity itself is American in origin, not dating from much earlier than Joel Chandler Harris’s ‘Uncle Remus’ stories (1880): ‘Hit wuz wunner deze yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck,’ says the narrator of the tale of the sparrow’s misplaced trust in Brer Fox.

This year may see the extinction of a word, like the last elephant in the Knysna forests of South Africa. The word is might. ‘If they had been wearing lifejackets,’ the radio reporter says, ‘their lives may have been saved.’ But they weren’t and they weren’t, so in our book it should have been: ‘Their lives might have been saved.’ In trying to explain the reason why, people often get into an awful tangle with ‘succession of tenses’. That is not the only problem, as may be seen in glorious detail from the article on the word may in the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just this month been revised. It now runs to 17,500 words. Objection to the misuse of might and may is not new.

It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead. It has always seemed to me that in the lyrics by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner for their song marking the European football championships of 1996 the word hurt enters awkwardly, for the sake of the rhyme: ‘Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming,/ Thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming.’ Perhaps I would say the same if they had reached for the word dirt instead.

London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin. London’s biggest open space, I learn, is the Lee Valley Park, stretching 26 miles from Ware in Hertfordshire, past Stansted, down to the Thames at East India Dock Basin. It is to contain most of the Olympic Games in 2012. I propose it should be twinned with Lyon in France. At the moment I do not think the Lee Valley is twinned with anywhere, but Lyon is twinned with Birmingham — to what advantage the cities are no doubt aware. But Lyon and the Lee possess what boils down to the same name, just as twins should. The Lee side of things is given in the updated edition of A.D.

There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping. There are still the men’s curling finals to look forward to, but I have hardly got over a strange use of language in a commentary on the men’s ski-jumping. ‘That’s a very prolific jump,’ said the excited commentator, more than once. I’m not such a stick in the mud, or snow, as to insist that the word prolific should only be used to mean ‘capable of producing offspring’. We have had childless but prolific authors since the middle of the 18th century. I do not even mind it being used to mean ‘abundant’.

I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop. I could hear my husband in the other room saying, ‘Dee-day, dee-day, dee-day’ and there didn’t seem any reason to think that he would stop. Since he obviously wanted to be asked what he meant, I asked him what he meant. ‘Do you say Wednesday or Wednesdee?’ he asked. The answer is, I think, that it depends how emphatic I’m being. But it is not the last syllable of Wednesday that has been giving me trouble recently. It is the first. When I heard somebody on the wireless pronouncing it Wed-nz-day I began to doubt my own senses. Surely, I thought, everyone says Wenz-day.

On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ On the back of The Inimitable Jeeves (the book with ‘The Great Sermon Handicap’ in it), Stephen Fry says: ‘You don’t analyse such sunlit perfection, you just bask in its warmth and splendour.’ Even so, there is no harm in observing something of the master’s technique, which I contemplated as I enjoyed the book on an aeroplane. In ‘No Wedding Bells for Bingo’, Bertie goes to lunch with Bingo Little’s uncle, a very fat man.

‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband. ‘Kriek?’ shouted my husband. ‘What do you mean, Kriek?’ He was only shouting because he was in the next room and couldn’t be bothered to get up. His question was a good one, for Kriek is one of the latest entries added to the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a far more interesting word than SMS, another new entry, but should it be there at all? It is never easy to know which words should be in an English dictionary. When James Murray, first editor of the OED, was working on the letter A in the 1880s he decided not to include the word African, since it merely derived from a geographical proper name. But when the lexicographers got to Americanise, they realised it must be included, and with it American.

In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. In Malaysia, I read, churches have been firebombed after the High Court there ruled that a Catholic paper could continue to use the word Allah for ‘God’ in its Malay-language editions. Christians in Borneo have used Allah for ‘God’ for hundreds of years, but the idea has got around among Malaysian Muslims that no non-Muslim should use the word to refer to God.    Linguistically it is hard to think the High Court was wrong. I don’t know Arabic but it is easy enough to discover that Allah derives from al-ilah, ‘the god’.

I haven’t been to see Avatar and I don’t suppose I shall, but I have just learnt how to say ‘Hello’ to a Na’vi in his own language. It is Kaltxì. The difficult bit is the consonant spelled tx, which is an ejective. I don’t want to go on about phonetics, because it is fearfully confusing without hearing the sounds. The much-derided Wikipedia has useful little recordings of the sound made by an ejective p, t, k, q and s. Anyway, ejective consonants, pronounced with a closed glottis, are not to be confused with clicks or indeed implosives.

A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular. A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular. It appeals to those who adopt the languages of public policy and business management. An article in the Daily Telegraph about the FSA (the Financial Services Authority, not the Food Standards Agency) said: ‘The regulator would like to see reporting that is sufficiently granular to allow exposures on high-risk instruments.’ As this example suggests, granular often means ‘detailed’. Sometimes it seems not to mean anything.

A triply annoying poster at Victoria Station shouts at passengers: ‘Need the toilet?’ A triply annoying poster at Victoria Station shouts at passengers: ‘Need the toilet?’ It then taunts them with the information that without a 20p piece and a 10p piece (an unlikely combination to find in one’s purse) they will not be able to get into the public lavatory. Annoyance number one. The other two annoyances are socio-linguistic in character. Toilet is bad enough. To hear it upon the lips of their children is worse, for many a mother struggling to educate their daughters, than to find nits in the hair. The collocation of need is the killer. To need the lavatory instead of wanting to go there is as bad as being asked if you need a cup of coffee.