Dot Wordsworth

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.

Like the flying ants that swarm at this time of year, certain tricks of speech seethe in sudden outbursts. I heard the word testament used by mistake for testimony twice during From Our Own Correspondent last week, from different contributors. I was too kind about this usage four years ago when I mentioned it here. My husband, the plump canary in the coal-damp of misused language, has practically pegged out in response to the erroneous use of testament. In 2005, I noted that it had been misused in precisely the modern way 550 years ago, by someone called Sir Gilbert Hay. This only shows that in the 15th century people committed malapropisms avant la lettre. I can bear it once every 550 years, but not twice in half an hour.

Someone at dinner the other day tried to convince us that the origin of the phrase sent to Coventry had something to do with a London livery company expelling members for some misdemeanour, forcing them to practise in Coventry, beyond the territorial limit of livery authority or (according to another version) a free-trade town that took no cognisance of guild controls. I can’t say I was convinced by this explanation and I took an early opportunity to refer to a big fat dictionary. It offered little comfort. Indeed it suggested that readers might care to refer to Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

The Queen has had a vegetable garden laid out behind Buckingham Palace. ‘No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole,’ reported the Sunday Times. This use of chemicals annoys some people, mostly chemists. By chemists, of course, I do not mean pharmacists, whom I normally do call chemists, to their annoyance. Fortunately I can distinguish between physicists and physicians, though I usually call the latter doctors, like my husband, even if many of them hold no doctorate, in medicine or anything else. I mean to suggest by these remarks about chemists and doctors that words do not always mean what we would like them to, or what they once meant. Thus the earlier use of the word chemicals, in the 17th and 18th centuries, often referred to medicines.

‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. ‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. What indeed? It seems that an American company had got up a PR stunt that caught the imagination of the press. As that reliable old linguistician, Professor David Crystal remarked, ‘It is total nonsense. English reached a million words years ago.’ All the more disappointingly, the word chosen by the American publicity people was Web 2.0. This is a vague term for a new generation of phenomena on the World Wide Web.

What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are no longer representing their constituents.’  What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are no longer representing their constituents.’ Quite apart from any political consideration, the grammar is awry. A single MP should not be followed by plural pronouns (they, their). Yet we all do this in speech, partly to avoid the difficulty of a singular pronoun, he, standing for women as well as men.

Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, has offered to stand for parliament against Sir Alan Haselhurst, the MP for Saffron Walden, who claimed £12,000 expenses for gardening. Mr Heffer commented on Sir Alan’s grammar, declaring that ‘the solecism “hopefully this website will also shed light on the parliamentary system” should have been beaten out of him decades ago’. It might have been, when use of hopefully was a shibboleth. Does it remain one? ‘Hopefully the critics will come to their senses,’ writes Patricia O’Connor in her new book Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language. She is American, and I came across her verdict in The New York Times Book Review last month.

I was struck by Neil Tennant’s story (Diary, 23 May) about a message in a séance spelling out to a group of teenagers ‘My dear children, you are so young. Do not make my mistake. — Oscar Wilde.’ It reminded me of that passage in G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, where, having fallen into a period of dark nihilism at the Slade School of Art, he too had experimented with the planchette, which spelled out in its deceptive banality: ‘Orriblerevelationsinighlife’. For two or three weeks now we have been reading orrible revelations in the Daily Telegraph. Should these be denominated revelations, disclosures or exposés? The Telegraph’s chosen tag is ‘The Expenses Files’.

William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time: I come along where wide-horn’d cows, ’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs, Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls. The milking time in which MPs have now been detected has already spawned two words, one of them being flip. It is quite distant in meaning from the action of Barnes’s cows’ tails. In the 17th century, 200 years before Barnes’s time, flip had appeared from nowhere as an alternative to fillip, meaning ‘a flick with finger and thumb’.

A heads-up is one of those slangy terms that are disreputable not from their semantic content but from the company they keep. It is a cliché in the mouths of dull management types. The meaning has changed in its short life. Currently it means ‘an informal briefing’: ‘I’ll just give you a heads-up on the development of the budget compliance procedure.’ It used to mean ‘an advance warning’. As with most clichés, the origin of the dead metaphor is unknown to its users. It seems to be from aeronautics. A head-up visual display was one by which a pilot could read his instruments without averting his eyes from the course of the aircraft. The term has been in use since at least 1960. By the 1970s, motorcar manufacturers were using it.

My husband tapped the notice on the wall of the train noisily with his stick. Such behaviour would be embarrassing, if I let it. ‘Ramping!’ he said. ‘Pure ramping.’ Ramping in my husband’s private language means ratcheting things up, usually in an assertive and hostile way to cow the opposition. As usual, we were the opposition, in this case of those who had put up the notice in the train. ‘Be aware,’ it said, ‘that you may be prosecuted if you are not in possession of a valid ticket.’ The ramping in this example was the use of the words be aware as if they meant ‘beware’. Perhaps some people think they do. They seem to figure increasingly in public notices of a minatory nature.

In the Guardian Paul MacInnes last week suggested casting Russell Crowe as Derek Draper in the film McBride of Satan. The subject would of course be the filthy emails from Number 10, or Smeargate as the press has called the scandal. This means that two gates have been swinging open and shut simultaneously in the papers, the other being Liegate, an incomprehensible saga of Formula 1 motor-racing. The lame formulae Smeargate and Liegate show the lack of imagination of journalists, and the surprising vigour of the suffix –gate nearly 37 years after the incident that spawned it.

Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks ‘trying to convince the banks to renegotiate the structure of the loans’. This encroachment by convince on to the territory of persuade has been going on for most of my life. It happens all the time now, but I do not feel moved to frighten the dog each time I detect it. My husband, I am sorry to say, has adopted the attitude of Betsey Trotwood to donkeys’ trespassing on the piece of green outside her house. Instead of crying, ‘Janet!

What do you call today, the day before Easter? It is increasingly called Easter Saturday. That is what the BBC calls it in its programme guides. Robin Hood and Casualty await us as an alternative to the Easter Vigil. But Easter Monday is the Monday after Easter, and Easter Tuesday the day after that, and so on. The OED refers to these as ‘obvious combinations’, and after Easter Tuesday puts ‘etc’, noting that ‘in ordinary language Easter is often applied to the entire week commencing with Easter Sunday’. Certainly the week beginning on Easter day is Easter week, yet I do not feel in my heart that anyone would now call the Saturday after Easter Easter Saturday. If they did, they would be open to misunderstanding.

My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. Anyone would have thought I’d asked him the meaning of rimming or some such word with which if one lacked familiarity it would be better not to make an acquaintance. I had been perusing the LGA’s list of 200 items of jargon we should do without.

The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past that now. An advertisement that Veronica showed me on the internet offers T-shirts with the words: ‘Quieres tomar un café?’ The English-language website explains that this means: ‘Do you want to get a coffee?’ It is not that I think ‘Can I get?’ is particularly rude. It’s just that it does not convey the thought I have when I want to buy a cup of coffee. The ‘No problem’ response is more complicated.

‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’ Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with the body politic. Even by the time he published Humphrey Clinker, in 1771, the year of his death, he had not vanquished his habit of presenting bodily distress as an object of humour. In the novel, a trick is played on a fat, high-living magistrate called Frogmore, whose drink is doctored.

The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables, stressed on the second, and pronounced cn-JEER-i-eez. That is logical, considering that it comes directly from Latin congeries, ‘a heap or pile’. Its connotation of heterogeneity is often suggested by a preceding qualification, ‘mere’.