Dot Wordsworth

Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy Day. (There is such a thing.) ‘The most popular so far,’ said someone involved, ‘are those associated with positive aspirations, like peace, love, and serendipity.’ Yet serendipity is in a different category from peace or love. People might like peace and love, but it’s the sound of serendipity they like. It is like Boris Johnson’s choice: carminative.

English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines with the Russian for a barn (in which soldiers might well be billeted), calling it a capau (whereas the Russian would be transliterated saraj). This I discovered from a new book on slang from the war called Fubar by Gordon L. Rottman (Osprey, £9.99). Unusually, in addition to two sections on British Commonwealth and American slang, he devotes 70 pages to German slang. Naturally, German servicemen exhibited some of the same weary humour as British soldiers or schoolboys.

A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. Very pretty. They have posted up some examples from famous writers free at www.optimumcomms.co.uk. ‘Surviving words from Old English have a special power to communicate,’ says their introductory blurb. ‘Great writers, especially poets, have always understood this.’ By Optimum’s analysis, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four takes 74.

Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang. Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.

I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. It did not bring sleep, for on page 80 I stumbled across ‘Top ten complaints about pronunciations’, from viewers and listeners that is. The ten were: clostridium difficile, controversy, Davos, the letter H, harass, kilometre, Kuwait, New Orleans and schedule.

The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. Ordinarily you may speak of Dr Foster’s middle but not the night’s middle, or England’s middle or even my nose’s middle. It is not the end of the world (or the world’s end), and numberless counter-examples may be cited, some from long ago. But the established idiom is undoubtedly shifting.

After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ I’m not sure that the significance of knighthoods is better understood in Iran than the title ayatollah is in Britain. This Grand Ayatollah likes grand statements.

‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone. I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors, the news kept referring to specialties, and I itched for specialities. Fowler’s Modern English Usage confirms that specialty is used especially in North America, but also in Britain, in the two chief senses of ‘a special pursuit’ and ‘a special feature or skill’.

‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. ‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. It was the memorial to the 202 people killed in the Bali bombing in 2002. London has acquired a sprinkling of memorials recently — to the women of the second world war in Whitehall, to animals in war in Park Lane, to the Battle of Britain on the Embankment. The Bali memorial has been there since last autumn, although my husband has only just noticed.

The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895). Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian, was 61, and dead within a year. I think the joke is still funny, and so is one from seven years earlier, of the couple on a park bench, next to an old gent reading his paper: Edwin (suddenly, after a long pause): ‘Darling!’ Angelina: ‘Yes, darling!?’ Edwin: ‘Nothing, darling. Only darling, darling!’ [Bilious Old Gentleman feels quite sick.

I heard someone on the wireless, in talking about the Freedom of Information Act, refer to the ‘information-requesting community’, as if they all lived together and had much in common. You could, though, legitimately refer to me as a member of the annoyed community. I do have something in common with thousands of readers and listeners, even if I have never met them, who are enraged by stupid, empty, clichéd and erroneous language. Now I have read an entertaining little book called She Literally Exploded: The Daily Telegraph Infuriating Phrasebook (Constable, £5.99). It is by Christopher Howse, who used to work for The Spectator, and Richard Preston. It includes turns of phrase that I had not noticed, such as ‘Can I get a coffee?

We have enjoyed, or not, a certain amount of hoo-ha about whether Scotland should be independent. But independent from what? What is this country called? In 1604 James VI of Scotland was proclaimed ‘King of Great Britain’, as well as of France and Ireland. The geographical term ‘Great Britain’ thereupon assumed a political unity, although two kingdoms continued to exist. The proclamation also spoke of England and Scotland as ‘nations’. According to the Act of Union passed in England in January 1707, ‘the Two Kingdoms of Scotland and England, shall upon the 1st May next ensuing the date hereof, and forever after, be United into One Kingdom by the Name of GREAT BRITAIN’.

Whoever said, ‘Don’t give me problems, give me solutions’, was asking for it. Everyone seems to be claiming solutions now. I went past a children’s nursery the other day with a sign on the wall reading: Bright Horizons Family Solutions. ‘Bright Horizons Family Solutions,’ the company tells the world, ‘is the nation’s leading provider of work-site child care, early education, and work-life consulting services.’ It has got some competitors, such as Family Solutions Collaborative, the Centre for Family Solutions, Family Solution Inc, Trillium Family Solutions, the Family Solutions Institute, Systemic Family Solutions and Total Family Solutions. That terrible phrase ‘the Final Solution’ makes all this sound rather creepy.

The curious case of the cup has been gripping traditionally minded Catholics for a few years now. I mention the question because a secret text of the new translation of the Mass has been bouncing about the internet for a few weeks now. People who seldom go to church often get more annoyed about the banality of the language of the prayers than regulars do. As for the word cup, its use in the English version of Mass, instead of the word chalice, did not please Cardinal Jorge Medina Estevez, head of the curia’s congregation for divine worship, one bit. ‘The translators avoid the use of specifically sacral terminology, and use words commonly employed in the vernacular for kitchenware,’ he complained. But Cardinal Estevez retired and still the cup/chalice debate raged.

The unbeatable duo of Judas Iscariot and Jeffrey Archer have teamed up to bring the world The Gospel According to Judas, published this week at a mere £9.99. The scholastic midwife to this monstrous birth is a previously respectable biblical professor called Francis J. Moloney. He must have copied out the bits from the gospels which provide the narrative links holding this novella together. They are printed in red type. Lord Archer is credited with the bits in black. He has chosen a strange register of English in which to work. I am glad it was not an elevated pseudo-Jacobean style. Instead it is a sort of Woman’s Realm novelese. You know how on television news bulletins deaths are always dignified with the adjective tragic? Well, so they are here.

I wonder how much of our hatred of certain words and phrases is really a hatred of people. My husband, no mean hater, is given to self-defeating outbursts in response to some triggers. I’ve known him slam down the telephone when the person at the other end says, ‘Bear with me,’ even though he has waited ages to get through in the first place. I was pondering such hatred during the recent flash-flood of remarks about language on the Letters page of the Daily Telegraph. Many readers of that newspaper seem to hate the sinner more than the linguistic sin. So, some people reach for their revolvers every time they hear someone say haitch, instead of aitch.

I was baffled when I heard last month that British troops in Iraq would be ‘drawn down’. Byron’s Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, but he didn’t need to be drawn down. To me, as to George Herbert, being drawn down is the sort of thing we worry we might do to God’s wrath. Unprompted, one might assume that drawing down troops would be like drawing down fire, perhaps calling upon extra reserves. But this did not fit the Prime Minister’s drift. ‘Over time,’ he told the House of Commons, ‘we will be able to draw down further, possibly to below 5,000.’ Within a few hours people began to think draw down meant ‘withdraw’, and that a drawdown meant ‘a retreat’.

If 2006 was the year of issues, when the word problem gave way to ‘issues around’ things, then 2007 looks as if it will be the year of challenge. Dreary management-speak types have long invited workers to see negative problems as positive challenges. All that this has meant is that the new word challenge has taken on the connotations of the old word problem, just as lavatory air-fresheners take on the unpleasant associations of the smells they replace. Challenge was a word ripe for exploitation in this way. It derives perhaps surprisingly from the Latin calumnia, meaning ‘trickery, misrepresentation, false accusation’.

A reader wrote in to share his triumph at thwarting an attempt by an organisation to which he belongs to change the title ‘chairman’ to ‘chair’. The current chairman happens to be a woman. ‘It is ridiculous,’ our reader writes, ‘what person has four legs and is made of wood? The syllable man does not mean masculine only.’ Well, it is one thing to argue that man can refer to a woman, another to argue that chair cannot. The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary were perfectly familiar with the use of chair to mean ‘the occupant of the chair, as invested with its dignity (as the throne is for the sovereign), e.g., in the cry “Chair! Chair!” when the authority of the chairman is appealed to’.

Every now and then, I come across a way of using language that is so divergent from the norm that I wonder how anyone can have adopted it. This seems to have happened to spectrum. Ofcom declared in 2005, ‘One of Ofcom’s primary statutory duties is to ensure the optimal use of the radio spectrum in the interests of citizens and consumers.’ Whether one likes that or not, at least it is English. Ofcom then refers to ‘spectrum management’ and ‘spectrum trading’. This too is English. The noun spectrum is there being used attributively, with an adjectival force, qualifying another noun, as with dog biscuit or brain fever.