Dot Wordsworth

I thought my husband had fallen unconscious on the doormat, for I could not push the front door open. But I was mistaken. It was a huge drift of post complaining that I had used the word quick as an adverb.

‘Veronica,’ I said when she was taking her Wellingtons off outside the back door and couldn’t run away, ‘what does cotching mean?’ ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I thought you were Mrs Language.’ But cotching is meant to be young person’s slang, and, although Veronica has taken her degree, she still seems a young person to me. I’d found cotching in the Sun in an article about slang likely to be used by Jade Goody, an ordinary girl from south London who’d once been on Big Brother on television. The Sun said it meant ‘hanging out at a friend’s house to relax’.

I’m stuck in a fine old barney with Prof Michael McCarthy, the co-author of the new Cambridge Grammar of English. This grammar calmly notes that like can be used to introduce direct speech, instead of said, as in ‘I was like, “Wow!” He was like, “Come off it”.’ I can’t abide this construction, which is hardly grammar at all, more oral punctuation. People who use it, often the would-be young, are annoying. But Prof McCarthy thinks me an ignorant old housewife stamping her foot at historical inevitability. It is, he says, ‘an unequal battle between a columnist and a robust, living organism that has weathered hundreds of such onslaughts’ — not himself, but the English language.

My husband lives almost entirely in the past, generally finding it a more agreeable place to make his habitation as, often, do we. To sustain him, the television has recently screened a number of dramatic reconstructions of the last days of Harold Wilson, and on some other channel a retrospective of the Thatcher years under the would-be witty title Tory, Tory, Tory. A snatch of film of Margaret Thatcher showed her, after her victory in the general election of 1979, standing in Downing Street saying, ‘Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. Where there is despair, may we bring hope.

‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity. In a publication like The Spectator, conventions have to be adopted to keep the herbaceous borders of language neat. It is house style to use a singular verb with collective nouns such as government, BBC, nation. If in British English it is normal to regard a company as plural (‘British Leyland are defunct’), that convention extends in colloquial usage to the word denoting its line of business.

A semantic challenge of the genuine kind comes to me from the distinguished geographer Professor Alice Coleman. She has been responsible for a survey of the whole country’s land use, or utilisation as her project called it, though that distinction is not the semantic question under discussion. She is also the author of more than 300 academic papers (not that she told me this, being politely modest) and this is connected to her challenge. Professor Coleman has a high concept of research as the discovery of something previously unknown, or ‘putting one’s hand out into the dark and bringing in a fistful of light, or — since the unknown might not co-operate — risking only a fistful of continuing darkness’.

My husband has discovered ‘organic’ dried apricots, which lack the traffic-light glow of their coloured cousins and the concomitant taste of sulphur. He chews them while watching rugby on telly, then complains that he has lost his appetite for dinner. The apricot seems a fruit straight from the Arabian Nights. One is so used to coming across words that we borrowed from Arabic that there is a tendency to forget that the Arabs borrowed some words from Indo–European languages in the first place. And the apricot first received its name from the Romans. Apricot is related nominally to dementia praecox, for in Latin the apricot was labelled as a fruit (malum) that ripened early — malum praecocum.

A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light. My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as invisible as ever. I don’t know if it’s more extraordinary how many words we know the origins of, or the commonness of the words of which we remain ignorant — bun, bird and pig, for example. For dogs, hound is the word we once used, as hunting folk do now, but suddenly in the 11th century dog popped up. At first it was used of a particularly fierce kind of creature. In about 1225 the eremitical author of the Ancrene Rule, who I seem to remember kept a cat, likens the very devil to a dog.

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies: do not leave handbags on the seat while receiving Holy Communion.’ It is no simple matter to catch the thieves that make the warning necessary. At the same time, I have been told that pick-pockets like to hang around signs that warn, ‘Pick-pockets known to operate in this area,’ because when people see the signs they reach into their handbags or pat their pockets where their purses and wallets are. Most signs are useless.

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine. I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and made it beringela (which is also whence brinjal comes, an Indian English name for the vegetable). But the Arabs borrowed the word from Persian, an Indo-European language like our own. In Sanskrit the aubergine was called vatinganah. The compilers of that enjoyable but unreliable dictionary called Hobson-Jobson attribute to the Sanskrit word the meaning ‘the plant of Bengal’.

In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers — that’s another old Borewich saying you’ll not have heard, I dare say. Come and meet my wife. A right Borewich lass. Garn thrixen. Better a troust ner a thoutch, eh?

The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a few minutes’ rooting around. Deeper spadework showed how wrong I was. The Greek sukophantes, literally ‘fig-revealer’, had a picturesque derivation thrust upon it, sceptically retailed by Plutarch in his life of Solon.

The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel Foote, the actor and satirist (1721–77). It came in a piece of nonsense that he invented to test a claim by the actor Charles Macklin (1699–1797) that he could repeat anything after once hearing it. Behind the challenge was a feud that Foote had begun with Macklin in December 1754. Macklin, who had been Foote’s teacher, had set up a school of oratory, and Foote visited it to heckle him.

In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen ... 15/-’). It was from its function of separating shillings (solidi) from pence (denarii) that the sign acquired its name of solidus. In the Middle Ages the same sign had been used in manuscripts in much the same way that we use a comma, and in this function it was called a virgula in Latin, because it looked like a rod or stick. The English version virgule is dated only to the 19th century by the Oxford English Dictionary.

You know how you can tell a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard in a crowd without hearing them speak a word? Well, a friend of my husband’s who is interested in anthropology refers to that bundle of cultural characteristics as the jizz. It was not a word with which I was familiar outside a fairly grubby slang meaning familiar to Veronica’s generation. But I gather that it is widely used in ornithological practice, with reference to recognition of a species in action by its special behaviour and appearance. The word appeared no earlier than 1922, in the work of T.A. Coward (1867–1933).

I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of Venice, the film with Al Pacino as Shylock. At the end of Act Three, Scene Two, Bassanio reads out a letter, part of which says, ‘All debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death.’ At first Dr Schofield put it down to some American mangling, but then, in an act of scholarship, the learned doctor looked it up in the handy Shakespeare without which no consulting room is complete.

More on treacle, thanks to Mr Christopher Couchman of Bath, who sends a lovely recipe for Venice treacle, taken from the English Dispensatory of John Quincy (who died in 1722). My husband, before going off on some pharmaceutically funded freebie, said he remembered the book but hadn’t used it recently. I love strange lists, but have no room for all the contents of this ‘capital alexipharmic’.

I think that, like a hosepipe ban, we might just be spared the permanent establishment of the term 7/7. After all, some people were inexplicably fond of the phrase Y2K, meaning 2000, and it seems as ridiculous now as platform soles for men. I find 7/7 distasteful. It is non-native, and it makes claims for an event that unfortunately are unlikely to persist. The bombs of 7 July were certainly not as important as the atrocities of 11 September 2001, nor will they remain as memorable. It is only by a fluke that 7/7 is as transparent to British English-speakers as to American, for they put their days and months round the wrong way. It is this habit that momentarily makes me think every now and then that the attacks of 9/11 occurred on 9 November.

To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’ Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was the Golden Syrup tin. The declaration about vipers came from the Natural History (1693) of Sir Thomas Blount, Bt, whose wife bore him five sons and nine daughters before he died, aged 47. I stumbled across that in following up something Sir John wrote about the ‘strong’ in the Golden Syrup motto having a subsidiary reference to a ‘wild beast’, from the Greek for which the English word treacle derives.