Dot Wordsworth

I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside Starbucks a sign declared: ‘The holiday icons you’ve been waiting for are back!’ The icons were things like gingerbread latte, indicating that holiday meant ‘Christmas’, an unpleasant usage from America, where holidays are rare and they have invented one called Kwanzaa in case anyone feels left out. It just happens to be at Christmas. Besides being a religious image, icon now means a symbol on a computer screen. I dislike the attempt to make it mean ‘star’, as in a ‘gay icon’. 11.

‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har- without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One can’t exactly say that to do so is incorrect. Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary (1974) gives it with the t silent; but then The Place-Names of Hertfordshire (1938) gives it with the t pronounced. In My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison, singing after a fashion The Rain in Spain, sounds the t. But what did he know?

John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one disapproved, was that punch an act of infamy? I saw the same adverb used recently of Liam Byrne, the chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010, who ‘infamously wrote the “I’m afraid there is no money” note’. Admittedly he has since said that the act ‘was not just stupid. It was offensive.’ To me it was humorous, and true. But the meaning of infamously has shifted recently.

I’ve heard people using back-to-back housing to mean terraces separated by back yards. But strictly, back-to-back houses are built against a party wall and face opposite ways. Byelaws after the passing of the Public Health Act 1875 prevented their continued construction. In Birmingham, four of the city’s former thousands of back-to-backs are preserved by the National Trust off Hurst Street, which runs through the middle of what this year was officially designated Chinatown. I was surprised by the renaming because parallel designations are regarded as offensive. ‘Formerly often with negative connotations of criminality,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary of Chinatown, ‘but now typically used with more positive connotations.’ So that’s all right.

An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery. Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to strip off the hide’. Generally, present-day meanings need not be those of the etymological originals, but in these two cases many writers are aware of the ancestry and think of sparkling behind coruscating and flaying behind excoriating. Yet a large proportion of uses of coruscate are clearly meant to mean ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ – a figurative sense of excoriate.

‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass. I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive voice (“nestled in the rolling Cotswold landscape” etc), perhaps I could persuade you to inveigh against this widespread abuse.’ I began by asking my husband why he found the usage so shocking. He said something about it resembling sat as in ‘sat in the corner, the child surveyed the room’. But nestled has long been established even as an attributive adjective: Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in 1856 of ‘little naked feet drawn up the way/ Of nestled birdlings’.

‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team sometimes gives him a ‘bit of tummy ache’. There is even an outfit called the Happy Tummy Co, which bakes bread that is said to be easily digestible. It is not as though stomach was particularly indelicate. Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury was happy to claim ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, though she might have hesitated to refer to her bottom (coming in at that time as a less forthright term than arse). Tum and tummy both appeared in the 1860s. W.S.

‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner turned into a little police station. I felt one ahead on this, as I had since been up the arch, for the sake of the view, mostly. I remembered from an exhibition there that the name of the police station cat had been Snooks. With Snooks in mind, I jumped a little when I read in the paper about ‘Germany cocking a snoot at Brussels’. A snoot? Could that be right?

Virginia Woolf submitted an article to Tit-Bits at the age of eight. It was rejected. The experience might have hurt her. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she had built an imaginary world in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, modelled upon Tit-Bits. Writing as an adult about George Eliot she said: ‘She is as easy to read as Tit-Bits.’ In Flush, her imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, she used the common noun: ‘They tempted him with caresses; they offered him titbits; but it was useless.’ There was nothing rude about Tit-Bits (beginning in 1881 as Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books and Newspapers of the World, and becoming the unhyphenated Titbits only in 1973 and closing in 1984), or about the common word titbits.

Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans and a blazer. Those grey shoes, if ever fashionable, were out of fashion by then, like referring to young women as birds. But his writerly disposition once encouraged him to call an intimate acquaintance who had a Candida infection ‘a black bird with thrush’. In A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), Orwell describes a ruffianly retailer of trousers who ‘kept a sharp eye open for the “birds”, as he called them’, with ‘lecherous’ intent. But a Brisbane newspaper reported from London in 1964: ‘You haven’t really been given top-of-the-pops praise by your boyfriend unless he has called you a Dolly Bird.

‘Did she mean youth clubs?’ asked my husband when I said how annoying I found the promise made by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to provide ‘new youth hubs to steer young people away from violence’. No, she definitely said ‘hubs’. Everyone has to have a hub now. Sophy Ridge has one on television at seven o’clock every evening. A hub was an almost magical thing when Gordon Brown as prime minister introduced one to Downing Street. It was credited with being inspired by one at the Daily Telegraph. ‘Mr Brown has decided to spend some of his time working in Downing Street surrounded by his closest aides,’ reported Rosa Prince in 2008. ‘The Telegraph operates a unique “hub-and-spoke” office at its headquarters.

Becky Sharp, you’ll remember, near the beginning of Vanity Fair, throws the school gift of a Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window of the coach. She responds to Amelia Sedley’s horror by saying with a laugh: ‘Do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black-hole?’ This is not the £22 billion black hole that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, teases us with. I’m surprised she has persevered with it, especially as it employed black pejoratively. As I mentioned last year, UK Finance, a banking trade body, declared that black market should be replaced with illegal market lest it suggest racial bias. Black hole, in Becky Sharp’s sense, has more obvious racial connections.

In Florence there was a stone on which Dante sat in the evenings, pondering and talking to acquaintances. One asked him: ‘Dante, what is your favourite food?’ He replied: ‘Eggs.’ The following year, the same celebrity-hunter found him in the same place and asked: ‘With what?’ Dante replied: ‘With salt.’ In the Piazza delle Pallottole in Florence skulks a lump of stone bearing a label declaring it the genuine Stone of Dante. It doesn’t look very comfortable but at least it explains the line in Browning’s ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ where he says: ‘This time we’ll shoot better game and bag ’em hot – / No mere display at the stone of Dante, / But a kind of sober Witenagemot.

‘Very tasty,’ said my husband. ‘Very sweet.’ In a catchphrase from 1940 that must surely predate even his long tale of years, he had found an echo for one that has in recent days attracted millions on TikTok. The difference is that today it is called a meme. ‘You see how I do my make-up for work?’ says Jools Lebron in a video. ‘Very demure. Very mindful.’ It is funny, if it is funny, because the deadpan cosmetics tutorial is delivered by Jools Lebron, a great fat trans woman. The audience is addressed as ‘divas’. They are told: ‘I don’t come to work with a green-cut crease. I don’t look like a clown when I go to work.’ I didn’t understand ‘green-cut crease’, but it’s to do with how eyeshadow is applied.

Freddie Flintoff recently called the Maidan ‘the home of cricket’. For supporters of Ukraine’s independence, the Maidan saw continual demonstrations a decade ago. The outline of the Hippodrome of Constantinople is marked out on the Maidan. Quite a place, then. Or rather, places. Our tacking ‘the’ on to Maidan, indicates its use as ‘a square’. Indeed, foreign places that we call ‘Square’ are often called Maidan in their own country. (Cairo’s Tahrir Square is Maydan at-Tahrir.) The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded at its own Maidan. The Young Zoroastrians still play at the Maidan in Mumbai, where Parsis founded the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848. Like Parsis, the word maidan came from Persia.

Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us humans as a species’: ‘Someone always shags a monkey.’ Now an outbreak of new, improved monkeypox is upon us, and the first thought has been to avoid stigmatising monkeys. It has been renamed mpox. The Oxford English Dictionary, a vasty hoard where words can lie undisturbed for more than a century, was quick to comment: ‘Mpox was originally named monkeypox because it was first seen in laboratory monkeys. It was later identified in rodents and other small mammals, various wild primates, and humans.

My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it. I wonder if the book explains the title: A Voyage Around the Queen. I see the idea, glimpses of the late Queen from many points of view, a speciality in which the author excels. The title reminded me of John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father, on which Rupert Everett toured last autumn. An East Midlands theatre site announced it as A Voyage Around My Father, but it is Round. Mortimer’s title echoed Xavier de Maistre’s book Voyage autour de ma chambre, published in 1794 as by ‘M. Le Chev X’.

In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket when he found him in the cloakroom at Victoria station – the Brighton line. When told, Lady Bracknell exclaimed: ‘The line is immaterial!’ This turns out not to be true, since it emerges that Miss Prism left a baby at the cloakroom of the Brighton line. Was it immaterial that Mr Cardew (whose Christian name – ‘James, or Thomas’ – Lady Bracknell also assumes is immaterial) had a first-class ticket? Not at all, for his wealth made his granddaughter an eligible bride for Jack.

The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than he perhaps knew. ‘I won’t shy away from calling it what it is – far-right thuggery.’ Thuggery throve in India, was suppressed by imperial authorities and has been revived in a different form in the gangsta culture of black America. A thug was, the OED tells us, ‘a member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims’. The word was first noted in English usage in 1810.

The singer Charli XCX (or ‘Ninety Ten’ as my husband insists on pronouncing it) has endorsed Kamala Harris, in a way. ‘Kamala is brat,’ she tweeted. Since the slippery meaning of brat includes elements of dirtiness, drunkenness and hedonism, it might not define all that Americans want in a president. Not that Charli is American. She was born in Cambridge (England, not Massachusetts), given the names Charlotte Emma and went to a private school in Bishop’s Stortford. Her album brat came out in June, with a lime-green cover and the name in fuzzy type. She has characterised brat as ‘trashy… a pack of cigs, a Bic lighter and a strappy white top with no bra’.