Dot Wordsworth

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.

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?