Dot Wordsworth

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.

For once, my husband has backed me up, if on dubious grounds. A friend, of previously good character, astonished us both by insisting that the ‘correct’ form of Welsh rabbit was Welsh rarebit. ‘No, it’s not,’ said my husband. ‘I had one at my club only last week.’ It is difficult to see why rarebit should be accorded stronger explanatory force than rabbit. The lamented Robert Burchfield noted in his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage: ‘This dish of cheese on toast emerged, with rabbit so spelt, in 1725.’ It is also rabbit in Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery, By a Lady.

Dot’s found a funny thing. Here’s a funny thing. The New Oxford American Dictionary (or Noad, for short) has nominated teabagger as the runner-up for ‘word of the year’. The winning word was unfriend, a piece of jargon used by people who drop so-called friends from popular networking sites such as Facebook. As for teabagger, it is said to refer to someone protesting at ‘President Obama’s tax policies and stimulus package, often through local demonstrations known as “Tea Party” protests (in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773)’. In that case, one might think it would be called tea-partying.

The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used. His latest amuse-bouche, The Wonder of Whiffling (Particular Books, £12.99), is a sort of reverse Call My Bluff, which groups the true meaning of English words according to themes. Imaginative appeal still sometimes trumps sense.

Two rather odd pronunciations to have gathered ground this year are of the words women and lieutenant. I think I heard Evan Davies say lootenant the other morning, though it might have been a stumble. My husband does not like the pronunciation lootenant. He thinks it is an Americanism. It certainly is these days; the puzzle is how the f-sound got into it in the first place. The agreeable John Trevisa, a Gloucestershire vicar with connections with the Queen’s College, Oxford, mentions in his translation of Ranulf Higden’s history of the world that the Archbishop of Canterbury was lieutenant to the Pope, and the word is variously spelled in the manuscripts of his book leeftenaunt, lutenant or levetenaunt. That was in 1387, in the decade after the word is first recorded.

Dot is very exercised by Shakespeare.. Every time I see a Shakespeare play, I wonder how many of the words the audience is picking up. It is all very well their getting the drift from the behaviour of the actors, but that makes it like a mime accompanied by unknown utterances. Matters are not helped for the poor children who must study Shakespeare by internet glossaries that mislead. So, in Hamlet, the word gall in the line ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’, is explained on a commonly used website as ‘Bitterness, anything bitter’. The meaning here, though, is not ‘embittered’ but ‘afflicted with a swelling’. The consequence is tenderness to pain.

Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions. Why are Cheshire cats said to grin? The question was posed in 1850 in Notes and Queries, the Victorian periodical that operated on the same principle as Wikipedia, through readers’ contributions. The question, and some answers, are included in an entertaining selection from Notes and Queries made by Justin Lovill under the title Ringing Church Bells to Ward off Thunderstorms (Bunbury Press, £12.99). I gave a copy to my husband to keep him quiet, but he keeps reading out bits from the next room, just out of earshot, while I’m cleaning vegetables.

Pity the poor undergraduate who falls into the clutches of Professor Bernard Lamb. The youths might be wizards at genetics but if their spelling is shaky Professor Lamb will provide strict correction. It’s for their own good. Some undergraduates can’t even spell Hardy-Weinberg! Either they forget the hyphen, he notes, or they make it Weinburg. When I asked my husband who Hardy-Weinberg was, he laughed, a little unkindly I thought. It isn’t a he it is a they: G.H. Hardy and Wilhelm Weinberg, who noticed something interesting about alleles and genotypes. Anyway, a third of British undergraduates failed the Hardy-Weinberg test, whereas only an eighth of foreign undergraduates did.

I’ve been reading a most interesting book. I’ve been reading a most interesting book. It’s all about the books Gladstone read, the way he read them and what he did with the 30,000 books he collected in his long life. Most of the book is written engagingly enough. ‘Until the late 19th century, most books were published without an index, obliging the assiduous reader [like Gladstone] to complete their own.’ That is a clear sentence, even if its use of the plural pronoun their as a gender-neutral singular might annoy some. But the introduction uses an entirely different kind of language, a baffling thicket of unsignalled conjunctions and disjunctions, of clotted noun phrases, and heaped up jargon.

Jack pipped Mohammed as the most popular boy’s name for babies born last year. There were 8,007 Jacks and 7,576 Mohammeds, or similar spellings. To me Jack is a pet-name for John — a hypocorism, as the grammarians rejoice to call babyish versions of names. You wouldn’t baptise anyone Jack. There is no St Jack. (There is, I think, a St Ernest, from Zwiefalten in Germany.) The French name Jacques is their version of James. So, how did Jack become the English familiar byname for John? There are two fierce schools of thought. Some assert that Jack is indeed the same word as the French Jacques. The trouble is that, from its earliest appearance in English in the Middle Ages, Jack has been used as an alternative to John.

Much to my annoyance, and yours, I know, language changes. Thus Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary we celebrate with its author’s 300th birthday this week, defined urinator as ‘a diver; one who searches under water’. Charles II had a urinator of his own, as a letter by Robert Boyle indicates: ‘His majesty’s urinator, Mr Curtis, published in the Gazette, how he had practised.’ That example of changed meaning is given by David Nokes in his new life of Johnson. He took it, with acknowledgments, from the agreeable Henry Hitchings, who wrote Dr Johnson’s Dictionary in 2005. Actually, urinator in that sense was already obsolescent in Johnson’s day.

Taxi-drivers tell you all sorts of myths about history. (‘Yes, Blackheath got its name from the plague pits they dug there in the Black Death). The internet, it strikes me, is like a taxi-drivers’ convention. I’ve just come across this: ‘The phrase “the die is cast” has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead, it refers to a mould (die) which has been cast (made).’ That would have come as a surprise to Suetonius, who recounts that when Caesar crossed the Rubicon he declared alea iacta est. Philemon Holland translated it, ‘The dice be thrown’, which would help modern readers unaware that the singular of dice is die.

Errors stick like burrs. Forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock with a good deal of distortion on his guitar, mostly engendered by feedback. Some people, I learn, refer to this inaccurately as phase distortion. Phase distortion cannot of itself be heard, the physicists tell me. Phase, again, is identified in many minds with faze. Indeed Phaze is a popular trade name for products in fashion, music and photography. Phaze 1 is an alias of the DJ or musician Rupert Parkes, better known as Photek, though not to me. The word faze has in reality no connection with phase. Its true relations are resolutely unfashionable, indeed mostly obsolete. Faze, also spelled feaze, is nothing more than a variant of feeze.

My husband wanted to use the lavatory in London recently, as husbands begin to, and, since all the public conveniences have inconveniently been closed, he popped into the Strutton Arms. I was delighted to find that it had changed its name from Finnegan’s Wake. My objection was not the apostrophe, which, though absent in the name of the book is present in the name of the song. Nor did I want it to revert to the Grafton Arms, a name deriving I think from its former landlord, Jimmy Grafton, in whose back bar the Goon Show was invented. Before that it was called the King’s Arms. It wasn’t the name as much as the fake Irishry that was unwelcome during the Finnegan’s Wake years. I suspect it had ‘Fir’ and ‘Mna’ on the lavatory doors.

Forming part of my husband’s baggage-train en route for another medical ‘conference’, I read a novel by an American. It contained this sentence: ‘It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.’ It could have been worse: it might have employed the subjunctive. I have nothing but affection for the subjunctive. I sing ‘God Save the Queen’ with the best of them. Yet it is odd that the subjunctive has not only undergone a revival over the past 100 years, particularly in the United States, but is pushing out perfectly respectable items of English syntax. It is most commonly found as the so-called mandative subjunctive, in a subordinate clause (usually introduced by that) following an expression of command, suggestion or possibility.

Mr Alan Moore asked my opinion from the Letters column last week on the mother who insisted that swearing meant ‘taking the Name of the Lord in vain’, but using the word f*** was just coarse language. I’m not sure this isn’t a question better directed to Dear Mary, since swearing is as much defined by its effect on social taboo as by dictionaries. The word swear extends even to a kitten as anyone who read The Spectator on 11 April 1896 will remember: ‘When Phyllis was a kitten she had wild fits, tearing round the room and swearing horribly,’ wrote Francis Galton. Since one of Galton’s habits was swapping the blood of rabbits and other domestic animals, it is no surprise that Phyllis should have sworn.

David Cameron innocently said twat on the wireless last week. He pronounced it to rhyme with hat, when it should rhyme with what. He hadn’t realised it was rude. It’s funny which words one can say and which one can’t. Mr Cameron seems to have thought twat was like prat, which seems to be acceptable. Oddly enough, an American dialect meaning for twat is ‘the bottom’, which is the modern meaning of prat. Similarly, the Americans also mean ‘bottom’ by the word fanny, a synonym in England for twat, which can lead to transatlantic misunderstandings. Prat used to mean a buttock, just the one.

Outside a theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue that offers a dubiously amusing entertainment a poster proclaims: ‘Pant-wettingly funny.’ This is interesting, because what one might have the misfortune to wet is not a pant but pants. The grammar, though, is undoubtedly correct. Nouns used as adjectives generally remain in the singular. This rule makes honest nouns with a singular meaning, but a plural form, shrink into singularity once they are deployed adjectivally: trouser-pocket, not trousers pocket. It is not as a simple as that, naturally. Take the rather silly term drug czar (or drug tsar). When in 1982 the United States appointed someone in charge of its policy on drugs, the news agency UPI announced him as the new drug czar.

The eccentric Sir George Sitwell, the father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, had a valet called Henry Moat, who would also have been called eccentric had he not been a plain-speaking Yorkshireman. One evening after lugging a heavy trunk up the stairs of an Italian hotel he opened the door with his elbow and threw the heavy object on to the bed in the darkened room. It was unfortunate that the novelist Hall Caine was attempting to restore his frayed nerves in that very bed.      Hall Caine, the first man in England to sell a million copies of a novel, is also the first recorded man to use a construction that is still controverted.

‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. ‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. He’d learnt the fact from the former, though he might have noticed it in the latter. I’m not sure there has been a bad year for daisies in the past few centuries. In the late 1380s Chaucer wrote: ‘Of al the floures in the mede,/ Thanne love I most these floures white and rede,/ Suche as men called daysyes.