Dot Wordsworth

‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. ‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. That was more than I knew, but he is almost right. There is a Barak who features in a stirring adventure in the book of Judges. He takes ten thousand men of the children of Naphtali and of the children of Zebulun, at the command of the prophetess Deborah and defeats Sisera’s nine hundred chariots of iron.

I am not going to go on about the word Paki, though it has an interesting enough history. But when I used the word Spaniard recently, my husband asked: ‘Are you allowed to say that these days?’ I wondered, until I heard a Spaniard use it himself on Radio 4. So it must be all right. A cause for unease at this designation of Spanish people is the connotation of the suffix -ard. Consider these examples: bastard, coward, drunkard, laggard, sluggard, braggard, stinkard. Neither mallard nor wizard are very strong counter-examples, the first coming from the word male (though female ducks of this kind exist too), and the second being once as pejorative as witch.

When my husband can’t put his chair-side whisky glass on the old familiar mat, he gets quite agitated. It seems like Asperger’s disorder. My own irritation is more rationally provoked, I hope. A recent irritant was the foolish philology that I came across in the Daily Mail: ‘Politicians and the Catholic Church have warned that singing The Hokey Cokey could land you in prison.’ The objection is to Rangers supporters offending Catholics by chanting to the tune at football matches. What annoyed me was the baseless claim that the song ‘originated from Puritans in this country before being taken to America by 18th-century religious refugees’, as the Mail said.

When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by word of mouth or email.) One viral which appealed to me was an entry in February 2008 in a Bulgarian television pop music talent competition. Valentina Hasan sang, in the manner of Mariah Carey, a song that she called Ken Lee. The judges suggested it might be Without You. Miss Hasan, knowing little English, had learnt it from a recording. ‘No one ken to ken to sivmen,’ she began, ‘Nor yon clees toju maliveh.

One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. A likely story, I thought.

What new word has dominated 2008? Nonebrity, perhaps? No, I have never used it either. It is a portmanteau term for a ‘celebrity nonentity’ and is one suggestion for words of the year proposed by Susie Dent, who appears on Countdown, a programme that anyone claiming incapacity benefit is obliged to watch on pain of disqualification. Miss Dent popularises philology for the Oxford University Press and, in her recent book Words of the Year, she plays with neologisms such as moofer (‘mobile out-of-office worker’), scuppie (‘socially conscious, upwardly-mobile person’) and funt (‘financially untouchable’). I do not think they are anything but vogue terms. Even if some people understand them today, they’ll be forgotten soon.

Dot Wordsworth wades through clichés Clichés gather on the tide and stick on the shingle of daily life like tarred bladder-wrack. A curious species of cliché sets a stereotyped pattern, into which words may be fitted to taste. A particularly annoying example, because it has pretensions to humour, is exemplified by: ‘The words door, horse and bolted spring to mind.’ Or, in an online discussion of US relations with Venezuela that I have just stumbled across, ‘The words pot, kettle and black spring to mind.’ This is a sort of double cliché, because it incorporates in its unvarying mould some already well-worn proverbial remark. I’d be interested in any information about its origins, but I fear they are irrecoverable.

‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. ‘What?’ said my husband, coherently, thrashing with his stick at a blackboard on the pavement. It said: ‘Quarter chicken with two regular sides, £5.90.’ This was no geometrical chicken. Here sides simply meant ‘vegetables’, a usage grabbed from America by restaurateurs, because it often enables them to charge separately for meat and two veg.   Side is a word that leads a double life, at once fashionable and subterranean. When I was a girl I pondered what could be meant by: ‘He has absolutely no side.

Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone: ‘He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.’ Queen Victoria complained of Gladstone: ‘He speaks to Me as if I was a public meeting.’ At least, she said so according to G.W.E. Russell (1853-1919), who wrote biographies not only of Gladstone but also of Sydney Smith, E.B. Pusey and H.P. Liddon. It’s a good line, cleverly used by Jeremy Butterfield in Damp Squid (Oxford, £9.99), his new book about changes in the English language. ‘The quote from Queen Victoria,’ he writes, ‘suggests that even she may not have lived up to the standards set by some purists.’ In saying that, he introduces two more red rags to some purists: quote for quotation and may for might.

My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading the very good new biography of the young G.K. Chesterton by William Oddie. My husband, having found my book more interesting than his, looked up from it and said: ‘What does he mean by pessimism?’ Certainly, a revolt against pessimism was the central event of Chesterton’s life. In 1894, when he was 20, he went through a crisis at the Slade school of art.

‘I hate jokes,’ said my husband affably, and added: ‘Hwumph!’ The latter was an oral marker as he heaved his body from his armchair to the sideboard where the contents of the whisky bottle needed adjusting. With the former remark, I concurred, for he meant formalised jokes (‘Have you heard the one…?) that emerge from the ether like a flu virus. The internet has changed the dissemination of these, as it has changed the way quotations arrive in waves.

It is a curious misapprehension of many otherwise intelligent and well-informed people to think that a writer who is the earliest to be quoted in the dictionary as having used a word actually invented it. The lofty Oxonian Geoffrey Madan (1895-1947), who as the son of Bodley’s librarian should have known better, left in his Notebooks a list of words under the names of the people who ‘invented them’ (if the published transcript may be relied on). So he attributes insecurity to the invention of Sir Thomas Browne. The OED does indeed quote the old physician as using the word in 1646 but, later in its entry, quotes Jeremy Taylor using insecurities, in 1649.

I had not realised that T.S. Eliot was a Sherlock Holmes fan until I thought to look up the word grimpen, which occurs in ‘East Coker’, in the Four Quartets: ‘On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold.’ We take grimpen to mean ‘a bog’. The OED undogmatically gives the meaning as ‘marshy area’, and the etymology as ‘uncertain’. This is no surprise since the word, it appears, was made up by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Watson is on Dartmoor with Stapleton the naturalist. ‘“That is the great Grimpen Mire,” said he. “A false step yonder means death to man or beast.

Dot Wordsworth on sex and séances In 1885 W.T. Stead bought a 13-year-old girl for £5 as part of his campaign to get the age of consent raised to 16. He was the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, an evening paper. Stead’s allies included Bramwell Booth, the son of the founder of the Salvation Army, Cardinal Manning, the Earl of Shaftesbury and Frederick Temple, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. The scandalous publicity Stead achieved helped to bring in a Bill by which the age of consent was indeed raised to 16. Stead did not mention in print that he had chloroformed the poor girl he had bought, and had her inspected at a hotel before she was whisked off to France. This came out at his trial, and he served three months in Holloway.

Dot Wordsworth on fashions in language There is no reason to disallow the phrase aside from (instead of apart from), but I know I shall never use it. Hearing it, with slight annoyance, set me wondering why people admit new terms for old in their personal speech. We hear politicians and football commentators saying aside from on the wireless and television. If the phrase filled a gap in the language, I could see the point of picking it up. But there seems to be no new meaning or connotation in aside from that is not conveyed by apart from. Both phrases have the separate meanings of ‘in addition to’ (‘Quite apart from his shoes, his cuffs were filthy’) and ‘except for’ (‘Apart from his lisp, his pronunciation was clear’).

‘Not really,’ replied my husband when I asked if he thought it would be nice for us to have the Gibsons over for supper. If you knew the Gibsons (not their real name), you’d see the force of his answer. Real is a slippery word. I laughed when reading, in Timothy Brittain-Catlin’s new book on parsonages, about mid-19th-century disapproval of stucco for making a building less real. Alfred Bartholomew (1801-1845), a translator of the Psalms and the architect of the Finsbury Savings Bank in Clerkenwell, prefaced his Specifications for Practical Architecture (1840) with a text in Hebrew, from the prophet Ezekiel: ‘One built up a wall, and, lo, others daubed it with untempered mortar. Say unto them which daub it with untempered mortar, that it shall fall.

The Earl of Cottenham’s surname is Pepys. He doesn’t pronounce it peeps, like the diarist, but peppiss, stressed on the first syllable. It’s almost impossible to know how to pronounce English family names. The former deputy editor of this magazine, Andrew Gimson, pronounces his with a soft g. Jeffrey Bernard stressed the second syllable of his. James Michie, the late Jaspistos, rhymed with sticky. Christopher Fildes’s name rhymes with wilds. The BBC booklets on pronunciation published in the 1930s, about which I have been writing this month, had reached number seven by 1939, ‘Recommendations to Announcers Regarding the Pronunciation of some British Family Names and Titles’, still edited by Arthur Lloyd James.

‘What are all these letters?’ asked my husband, unhelpfully stirring the pile on the doormat with his foot, looking without success for any addressed to him. They were about the BBC recommendations to announcers, published in 1928, that I wrote about last week. To entertain you further, I’ve been rummaging in a successor booklet, from 1930, on the pronunciation of English place-names. By then, George Bernard Shaw had taken over from Robert Bridges as chairman of the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English (in existence from 1926 to 1940). I’m not sure how that trimmed the vessel.

Dot Wordsworth compares the pronounciation of words in 1928 and in the present day Do you pronounce the ‘l’ in falcon? That civilised Kentish man Mr Eric Brown has sent me an entertaining newspaper cutting kept for 18 years. It is from the Times’s ‘On this day’ column, with news from 27 July 1928, of the first published booklet on BBC pronunciation for the guidance of broadcasters. It cannot have been easy for the pronunciation committee, appointed in 1926, to agree. Its members included the learned phonetician Daniel Jones and the opinionated playwright George Bernard Shaw, whose ideas about language were not always soundly based. Jones was the basis for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion.