Dot Wordsworth

My husband went to a medical conference, paid for by a pharmaceutical company, in Padua, where the university has been teaching medicine since the 14th century. So I went too and popped over to Venice, taking with me Mrs Ruskin. I mean Effie, who, poor thing, ran away from John Ruskin in 1854 after six years of marriage when he had still not steeled himself to do the deed. Nothing wrong with her. She had eight children after she married Millais. Her letters Effie in Venice, edited by Mary Lutyens, were, I found, just the companion to a few days in that irresistible city. Effie refers to a visit to the Borromean Islands, the property of the rich old family to which the sympathetic saint Charles Borromeo belonged.

During the martyrdom by the press of Dr Rowan Williams, the Sun carried as its front-page splash headline ‘Bash the bishop’. I was surprised that a sentence of which the demotic meaning must have been familiar to the supposedly ill-educated readers of that paper was completely unknown to a brilliant and highly educated friend of mine engaged in periodical journalism. There are two unreliable but useful lexicons of improper slang easily available on the internet. One is ‘Roger’s Profanisaurus’, based on the foul-mouthed inventiveness of a character (Roger Melly, the Man on the Telly) in Viz, the amusing comic for childish adults. It gives as synonyms for bash the bishop: burp the worm or bank with Barclays.

In my husband’s coat pocket when I took it to the cleaner’s I found a piece of paper that he had brought home from the dentist’s. It contained remarks about the word merry, for his dentist is a well-read man of letters. I should have written about this before Christmas, but it was still hidden in the pocket. ‘Merry is a spectrum word,’ the notes say. ‘At one end is the old northern meaning of “strong” or “brave”; at the other end is the southern meaning of “jolly”, “happy”.’ The northern meaning he says is in the dialect dictionary. I can’t find it in this sense in Joseph Wright’s Dialect Dictionary or in the 10-volume Scottish National Dictionary. No matter.

Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect  See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect phonetically. In fact it is a product of the Scottish Parliament. The Parliament lists ‘Scottish citizen languages’ as ‘Arabic, Bengali, British Sign Language, Chinese, Gaelic, Punjabi, Scots and Urdu’. Polish does not get a look-in. The delusion under which the Parliament labours is that Scots is a different language from English. In reality it is a dialect, no more different from standard English than the dialects of Northumberland or Devon.

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliché. It is generally a deal or settlement that is brokered, according to correspondents on radio and television. The cliché is not unconnected with the need for an ‘honest broker’. Yet there is a perfectly good word to broke, literally and metaphorically, which has served for hundreds of years. Originally a broker was one who dealt in wine au broc, in other words from a broached barrel, as a tapster. Both broker and broach come from Latin broccus, via the unrecorded form brocca, ‘a spike’.

It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like avian influenza’, but my husband tells me that bird flu is a virus and viruses don’t grow in petri dishes.) One of them is the construction exemplified thus: ‘It is to his own benefit that he [should] understand how to mend the car.’ The word should does not always occur, and the general supposition is that understand is a subjunctive.

I caught my husband perusing a menswear catalogue. I don’t know where he got it. It can’t have been sent to him. It was the kind that leans towards nightshirts and Barathea blazers. The language used was extraordinary. The ‘striking set of gentleman’s pure silk-club ties’ — ones with thin stripes — would be, it assured the purchaser, ‘sure to receive the nod from the doorman’. If by chance it matched the real tie of the club in question, perhaps more than a nod. Can men really think they’ll be taken for clubmen and gents by sending a cheque for £30?

An advertisement for birdfood said: ‘To differentiate between the imported niger oilseed, used to feed wild birds, and thistle — as well as to eliminate any possibility of offensively mispronouncing the word “niger” — the Wild Bird Feeding Industry trademarked the name Nyjer in 1998.’ They might have done, if an industry can, but I’ve seen a packet of seed bearing the name of the British Trust for Ornithology, on sale at a garden centre, labelled ‘Nyger’ in big letters, which is neither one thing nor the other. There is also a standard blurb that birdseed merchants copy on to their websites, both in Britain and America.

Those who indulge in the ‘infuriating genteelism’ of saying Christmas lunch must be castigated, a reader from Leicester, Mr Clifford Dunkley, tells me. Castigate them, do. But they won’t stay castigated. Yet it must be Christmas dinner, for the phrase is fossilised, as much as ‘God save the Queen’ is fossilised in preserving the subjunctive. Christmas dinner is unusual because the thing is fossilised as well as the name. The new online Oxford English Dictionary preserves the definition of dinner that it gave in June 1896: ‘The chief meal of the day, eaten originally, and still by the majority of people, about the middle of the day (cf. Ger. Mittagsessen), but now, by the professional and fashionable classes, usually in the evening.

Some years ago The Spectator was sued for libel. It was a silly case, but it went to court and, early on, the counsel for the defence explained that The Spectator had no connection with the periodical of that name founded by Addison and Steele in 1711. But in the summing up the judge said, ‘And here we have a respectable magazine, founded by Addison and Steele . . . ’ I was reminded of this absurd incident by a reader, Mr Lawrence Brewer, who spotted the zeugma in Boris Johnson’s tribute to the late James Michie (Jaspistos), where he wrote of his ‘sitting with a glass of wine and a half-smile’. Mr Brewer goes on in his letter to discuss what might be called zeugmatic similes. An example is ‘camp as a row of tents’.

He’s the man who gave us The Meaning of Tingo, full of words that look funny in English (bum, Arabic for ‘owl’) or encapsulate an idea that it takes a sentence in English to explain. Very amusing it was too. My husband kept reading bits out while I was peeling the potatoes. Then doubts crept in. Could tingo, a word from Easter Island, really mean ‘to borrow things from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left’? Mr Jacot de Boinod’s definition came from They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, by Howard Rheingold (1988).

Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf or into anything too energetic, such as a hare. There are strong hints in the poem that Beowulf is a shape-shifter or skin-changer too. They’ve made a film of Beowulf, which is strange, because hardly anyone finds the poem of any interest whatsoever. And one gets the feeling that whatever good things there are hidden in the poem do not make it to the screen. For all its computer effects, the film does not bring out the shape-shifting aspect.

Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out of him. ‘I fear that the Prime Minister now cuts a rather sad figure,’ he began. ‘He was introduced to us a few months ago by his predecessor as the great clunking fist, but the boxing story has gone completely awry.’ But Dr Cable pronounced awry as OR-ee. Fellow MPs, like so many schoolboys, mocked him by calling out ‘Or-ee’ as the good doctor attempted to go on.

Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC. One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too, and has been for the past 800 years. Poor old BBC. People say all sorts of things on air, and many of them annoy me and you. But this is our laboratory. We listen to these locutions as samples of how the language is changing, and what is going wrong. The BBC still has a pronunciation unit and thanks to its labours the OUP has brought out the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99, but £10.49 on Amazon).

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case. The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English words were written as a gloss between the lines a couple of hundred years later.

‘Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt’, read an advertisement for toddlers’ T-shirts that Veronica showed me. In British English, tyke means ‘bitch, cur’ or ‘Yorkshireman’. In American English it is often used innocently enough for ‘child’. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me: pimp my ride. It sounded pretty rude to me, with unplumbed sexual connotations. Not suitable for toddlers. But Veronica explained that there is a popular programme on the MTV channel that goes by this name. It is all about tarting up cars.

When the postal strike was in full spate we heard quite a bit about ‘Spanish practices’, or at least we did sometimes. On one morning the BBC referred to ‘Spanish practices’ in the nine o’clock news and merely to ‘practices’ in its later bulletins, presumably for fear of offending any Spaniards who were listening in. ‘It used to be old Spanish customs in my day,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair like a badger on a sunny winter’s day. But he was right about the grey years when unions would come out over the slightest disagreement over demarcation. They stayed true to old Spanish customs. To be sure, practices is well enough established in a pejorative sense, having been in use for the past 500 years.

A mondegreen is a term for a misheard word or phrase from a poem, song or piece of prose. It derives from a couplet in an old ballad, ‘They hae slain the Earl Murray/ And laid him on the green’, with the last line misheard as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreen was coined in Harper’s Magazine by Sylvia Wright in 1954. I’ve just been leafing through a collection of mondegreens and malapropisms by Martin Toseland in The Ants Are My Friends (Portico Books, £9.99) The title refers to a mishearing of the Bob Dylan lyric ‘the answer my friend’ (is blowing in the wind). Mr Toseland also includes eggcorns.

I was having lunch with friends last week in a fairly swanky gastropub, and the menu promised a ballontine of quail. The waiter told me that ballontine meant that the quail had been deboned, then stuffed. It was quite nice to eat, but I have only just discovered what the menu intended to say, which is ballotine. I was put right by an amusing little book on French words in English with the not fantastically funny title of French Letters and the English Canon (Timewell Press, £9.99). It is by Mark Daniel. Actually, Mr Daniel says that the correct spelling is ballottine. He has seen it on menus even as balantine. I can’t find the word in my Littré, though he has ballotin, from ballot, a bundle.

I have stumbled across a translation of Shakespeare into English on a website called No Fear Shakespeare. Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy goes: ‘The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles by simply putting an end to them once and for all?’ The double is is certainly a modern touch. Nobler is a surprising survival, considering how much else was jettisoned. I’m not sure about nasty. If it does not have a babyish tone, then it connotes dirtiness, as in that resolution for ‘When I come to be old’ by Jonathan Swift: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.