Dot Wordsworth

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.

Casket looks as if it will be an early victor in 2007 as a triumphant Americanism. In 2006 it was train station. A letter to the Daily Telegraph noted that even English Heritage had entitled a snowy scene of a Victorian railway station on its website as ‘Train Station’. Even before the New Year, casket began to show its face. Reporting the death of the soul singer James Brown, the Sun said that he ‘remained a showman yesterday even in death — wearing a blue silk suit in a gold casket’. Then, in the Independent, it was over to Washington, where ‘a steady stream of mourners walked slowly past the casket of former president Gerald Ford in the Capitol’. Both these examples came in American contexts.

With the intention of making us healthy they sell us meat now with no fat. What is the point? If you cook it, it shrivels into dry toughness. During the period we have just survived, when cooking large birds is customary, I was amused to come across this sentence from Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘When I bid them lard a Fowl, if I should bid them lard with large Lardoons, they would not know what I meant: But when I say they must lard with little Pieces of Bacon, they know what I mean.’ Lard in Old French meant bacon, hence lardoons. I have a larder at home, but I keep the bacon in the fridge. Some people call their larder a pantry, but that has nothing to do with pans.

Conversation is an art in which we all prefer to think we excel, and Stephen Miller has written a whole book on the subject (Conversation, Yale, £15), which turns out to be mostly about Samuel Johnson and David Hume, who never did meet and talk. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comes into it too, and Mr Miller has this to say of her in relation to Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury: ‘Lady Mary did not think highly of Bishop Burnet. “I knew him in my very early Youth and his condescension in directing a Girl in her studies is an Obligation I can never forget.”’ I am puzzled by this judgment. Mr Miller is at home in the 18th century and must know that the ordinary meaning of condescension in those days was laudatory.

A word hound from Leeds has sent me a basketful of unconsidered truffles. ‘Are you aware of the increasing use of the word über,’ asks Mr Donald Adams, ‘with or without the umlaut which it should have in German?’ Well, I had come across it, but I had not quite realised what an infestation it had become.

A lovely framed photograph of some rhubarb, which Veronica took, hangs on the kitchen wall as I write — white where it has been pulled from the root, and then juicy red in the stalk against the fresh green leaves. So it was quite interesting to discover that when Thackeray wrote of a ‘rhubarb-coloured coat’ he meant one that was yellowish-brown. The rhubarb that Thackeray had in mind was the medicinal sort made from the root. This was the stock-in-trade of the old Jewish rhubarb-seller from Mogador interviewed in the mid-19th century by Henry Mayhew for his London Labour and the London Poor. The rhubarb-seller, in the speech represented by Mayhew, remembered a ‘very old Arabian in de streets wen I first come; dey call him Sole; he been 40 year at de same business.

My husband has been trying to interest me in the architecture of the stations on the Jubilee line on the London Underground. Some of them — Westminster and Canary Wharf — are indeed impressive in an overpowering way. The line, before its extension eastward from Green Park, was named after the celebration of the Queen’s 25th anniversary on the throne, and I had, I suppose, always thought jubilees were something to do with jubilation. But, as with all misapprehensions, only when it was pointed out to me was this one exploded. John Ayto set off the explosives in Word Origins (A&C Black, £12.99), his excellent ramble through unlikely etymologies.

The words in which Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, expressed his historic opinion about withdrawing British forces from Iraq were of some interest. ‘We should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem.’ Or was it, as many papers reported ‘sometime soon’? Aurally there is no distinction between some time and sometime, and while it is the accepted convention to spell it as one word in the slightly pompous usage of ‘sometime mayor of Eastbourne’, I have been a little annoyed lately by the running together otherwise of some and time. A glance at the historically arranged Oxford English Dictionary shows that some time has been written indifferently as one or two words for centuries.

Mr George Osborne was criticised for calling Mr Gordon Brown autistic. Osborne had mentioned in a public meeting that his brothers nicknamed him Knowledge as a boy. Miss Mary Ann Sieghart, of the Times, suggested he might have been ‘faintly autistic’. Mr Osborne remarked, ‘We’re not getting on to Gordon Brown yet.’ A psychiatrist friend of my husband’s asked innocently why, if autistic was recognised as offensive, it was all right for people to call each other ‘obsessive’, ‘paranoid’ or even ‘schizophrenic’. He might well ask. After all, autism has a good image at the moment.

A reader (whose name I would be able to tell you if my husband had not put her letter in the recycling skip, along with the television licence demand and that leaflet from the Post Office about the confusing new postal rates) asks if people are not over-pronouncing words such as little. It is not easy to discuss pronunciation without using a phonetic transcription, and that is generally unfamiliar. But the usual objection to the pronunciation of little, bottle or bitten is the substitution of a glottal stop for the ‘t’ sound. This is often regarded as lazy, though it is just as energetic to make a glottal stop as to use a ‘t’ The disapproval of the glottal stop is chiefly motivated by social considerations — dislike of many of the people who employ it.

Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not mean ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as the parents suggested, but was a designation of the Lord Krishna in Hindi. Now I’ve caught up with the name that Nelly Furtado has given her own little daughter. Nelly Furtado, aged 27, is, as you must know, today’s most successful Portuguese–Canadian singer. She was named after Nellie Kim, the Soviet gymnast who rivalled Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics.

The sort of people who humorously say ‘Eat your heart out’ are also likely to say ‘To die for!’ as if they had just coined either phrase. ‘Eat your heart out’ has adjusted its meaning since the Oxford English Dictionary was redacted — 1893 for the letter E, edited by Henry Bradley. Then the definition was, ‘To suffer from silent grief or vexation’. Now an element of jealousy is added. The OED quotes Spenser from the 1590s, but there is a celebrated passage in the contemporary Essays of Francis Bacon, warning how bad it is not to have a confidant.

There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English. A contrary rumour was, I think, put about by enemies of the conservative approach taken, after Vatican intervention, by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. Its chairman is an Englishman, the Bishop of Leeds, Arthur Roche. My husband tells me he is not a baddy but wears a white hat. The text of the Latin Mass is one long crux for translators. The temptation to use deign comes in the Canon: ‘Nobis quoque peccatoribus famulis tuis … partem aliquam et societatem donare digneris cum tuis sanctis Apostolis et Martyribus.’ How to render digneris?

Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai sword at police (what a lot of people possess samurai swords; not a recommendation of character, I’d have thought), but had ‘aspirations to become a landscape gardener and is now attending drink counselling off his own back’. Back should, of course, be bat. This is a typically mangled example of a dead metaphor, a cliché if you like, or, more respectably, an idiom.

The play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot was Our American Cousin. Its English author, Tom Taylor (1817–80), reached the height of his great popularity with The Ticket-of-Leave Man, staged two years earlier, in 1863. I noticed a belittling reference to it in Stevenson the other day, so I decided to read it. He’s right, it isn’t very good, though if you like ‘relevance’, it does deal with a criminal on probation. Taylor sprinkles his dialogue with slang. A neddy is a life-preserver or cudgel, and flimp is, in his usage, to steal. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes sources suggesting that flimping is robbery with violence, either with one man pushing the victim in the back while his accomplice steals his watch, or simply by garrotting.

My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-of-season ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears in the Pyrenees. Well I wasn’t eaten by a bear, but I did get an appetising sample of a language that I hardly knew existed. I don’t mean Basque, which is a language that does not belong to the Indo–European group. This one does, and it is called Aranese (Aranes by its speakers). It is spoken in the valley of Aran, which had no proper road into it until a tunnel was completed.

Are we now more ignorant than Bertie Wooster? Orwell, in his essay defending P.G. Wodehouse, noted that when ‘he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology’. Orwell characterised such references as deriving from a ‘traditional education’. I’ve been looking at the Ukridge novel, Love Among the Chickens (revised 1921), with the help of the indefatigable Trevor Mordue’s internet source notes. Bertie had, of course, as a boy won the Scripture Knowledge prize, and, even though his biblical references are not recherché, few of the friends I’ve tried can place them.