Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday was the first day of Lent, Ash Wednesday, and it was also the Chinese New Year, the first day of the ‘Year of the Cockerel — Year 4702 in the Chinese calendar’ as a site on the Internet had it. The cockerel? What’s wrong with the cock? The answer is obvious, and so obvious, it seems, that the word can no longer be used. A cockerel is a young cock, but it does not serve a double life as a rude word. An alternative to cockerel is rooster, an Americanism (though this name for the cock was once usual in Kent). The London Chinatown Chinese Association calls this year the Year of the Rooster, and so does the BBC website and the Mayor of London.

Radio Four had a trailer programme for a series it will run in August called Word 4 Word. (Yes, it is a bit silly to have a visual pun on the wireless.) It is intended to contribute to Leeds University’s new dialect map of the United Kingdom, a splendid project. I am not sure how much Radio Four’s findings are contributing so far to the Leeds survey, since the programme encouraged interviewees to come up with what were in effect nonce-terms and jocular slang coinages. An example was five-finger disco for shoplifting — not a lexical item that is likely to find a long-lived place on the nation’s verbal atlas.

Do I, asks Mr Peter Andrews, who lives romantically at the New River Head, know the origin of the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’? Does anyone know, really? One can judge its vintage from the fossilised word omnibus; one would never say ‘man on the Clapham bus’. I had thought that it was coined by Edmund Yates (1831–96), the rackety (brought up above the Adelphi Theatre, bankrupt, four months for criminal libel, died after an attack at the Garrick Theatre) journalist.

I’ve just come back from the Army and Navy Stores, only it is not the Army and Navy Stores any more. They have changed the name, which was about the only thing that wasn’t wrong with it. It joins the Public Record Office, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Railtrack, although in the last case neither the thing nor the name was good. Now that Christmas is distant and reduced, let me prepare you for next year. An intelligent publisher told me last week that the origin of the term Boxing Day was unknown. I told him I would look it up in the dictionary, which he thought was cheating. But I wish more people did so. The OED is garrulous on the subject.

It might seem a little early to say so, but if there’s one word this year can do without, it is edgy. It has become a cliché and people seem to use it without any discernible meaning. Both characteristics no doubt go together. I was brought up to take edgy as meaning ‘irritable, on edge, nervous’. Those are the latest of the established meanings, it having escaped the attention of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, though the supplements later supplied a sample from the 1830s. A sense in which I have never used edgy is ‘having the outlines too hard’, with reference to a painting. ‘There were two Holbeins, flat, shadowless, edgy compositions.

From 1 January 1888 ‘all substances, whether compound or otherwise, prepared in imitation of butter’ had to be offered for sale under the name of margarine. I can’t pretend that this date is exactly a round number, but it seems more admirable than some of the anniversaries trotted out over the past week. Is this Act still in force, does anyone know? If it is, the supermarket shelves require rearrangement. The Act was a triumph for the margarinists over the butterinists, for the latter, represented by grocers’ wholesalers, wanted to continue calling such spreadables butterine, especially when they had been churned up with perhaps 10 per cent of milk.

I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the opposite of the paulo-post-future.) There was a good example on the television receiver after the collapse of the panda-like mating ritual between Mr Gerry Adams and the Revd Ian Paisley. ‘There were always going to be recriminations after the failure of the deal,’ said the reporter. Were there, indeed? That rather supposes the inevitability of what has happened. If the deal had not failed, where would the ‘always going to’ be? For this reason the tense might be called the Hindsight Future.

John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: ‘Verbs can refresh a sentence any time they are needed — but not if they earned their crust as nouns in an earlier life.’ ‘When and why did “progress” become a verb, as in “Let’s progress this development”?’ he wonders. ‘Probably about the same time as “impact”.’ But it is not difficult to discover that this speculation is wrong.

A reader tells me that he had always thought ‘one-horse town’ must have derived from a 1940s film script in which John Wayne pushes open the swing doors of a saloon, gets his whisky, then inquires, ‘Whadda they call this one-horse town?’ But my correspondent finds Trollopean connections for the phrase. He does not say which biography he is drawing on, but he sets the scene in 1855, when Trollope had to appear before a parliamentary committee at the instigation of some Irish MPs. It is certainly the case that in 1854 Trollope had returned to Ireland, where he had made a new life in the 1840s. In the hot July of 1855, I am told, he answered 1,672 questions from the committee about Irish postal arrangements.

‘Lord Rutherford,’ said my husband, looking up from the Telegraph and taking a glug of whisky. He might as well communicate by flags, because ‘Lord Rutherford’ means a letter to the editor from a reader who knows no more about a subject than he does about atomic physics. This time it was marmalade. ‘I was told by the French owner of a well-known brand of jam,’ wrote the reader, ‘that the origin of the word marmalade is in fact the English mispronunciation of the French phrase ‘‘maladie de Marie’’. Mary, Queen of Scots, would visit her close ally the French king by sea from Scotland rather than risk the wrath of Elizabeth I by travelling through England. Mary suffered awful sea-sickness during the often choppy crossing.

BBC television is devoting a frenzied week to a children’s knockout spelling competition. Goodness knows, spelling needs attention, if Veronica’s vagaries are anything to go by. But even where words are spelt correctly, there is the difficulty of their pronunciation. ‘What about Julia?’ said my husband, trying to be ‘helpful’. I couldn’t think there was much doubt about the name’s pronunciation, but it turned out that he was talking about Herrick’s poem, with its couplet, ‘Then, then (methinks) how sweetly flows/ That liquefaction of her clothes.’ The OED, 100 years ago, described that pronunciation of clothes, without sounding the th, as careless or vulgar.

‘Whodunnit?’ asked my husband mildly as I threw The Da Vinci Code into the cardboard box intended for kindling, next to the hearth. ‘Whyreadit? That’s the question.’ The Da Vinci Code, which follows so many of the clichés of pulp thrillers, also employs the airport school’s convention for titling, which applies to films too. It entails the adjectival use of a proper noun attributively with some common noun that sounds possibly interesting. You know, The Shawshank Redemption, The Thomas Crown Affair, The China Syndrome. I should like to know who started it.

The suburbs are perhaps not so despised as they were in my youth, now that every house costs £1 million. And I was delighted to learn that my friend and columnar neighbour Christopher Fildes is next month publishing a selection from his City and Suburban pages under the title A City Spectator (£12.99). ‘City and Suburban’ comes from Milton, or almost so, for in Paradise Regained the poet writes of ‘Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts / And eloquence, native to famous wits / Or hospitable, in her sweet recess, / City or suburban, studious walks and shades.’ John Betjeman used the phrase for his column in The Spectator in the 1950s; I’m glad it has been preserved.

‘Foxes’ tails are just like ladies,’ says Felix Graham, riding to a meet in Trollope’s Orley Farm. The spirited Miss Staveley replies, ‘Thank you, Mr Graham. I’ve heard you make some pretty compliments, and that is about the prettiest.’ ‘A faint heart will never win either the one or the other, Miss Staveley.’ ‘Oh, ah, yes. That will do very well. Under these circumstances I will accept the comparison.’ No doubt compliments to young women will soon be criminalised, but Trollope commits another crime in the eyes of some by writing ‘under the circumstances’. To object to the phrase was, in Henry Fowler’s eyes, ‘puerile’, but that didn’t stop its enemies.

The ‘execution’ of captives, instead of their ‘murder’, is a longstanding gripe of Mr Don Barton of Powntley Copse in Hampshire, who wrote to me before the current round of deadly abductions in Iraq. I’m just wondering about the derivation of Powntley, and I’ll have to make further investigations. The point for now is misuse of language. I mean that doubly: catachrestic usage that is not justified by precedent, and distortion of language for political motives. Mr Barton is quite right, historically. Execute has been around in English since the time of Chaucer, 600 years ago, first in the sense of ‘put into effect’. That usage has survived. On some computer keyboards there is a key that says ‘execute’, which makes things happen.

In the glorious new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which came out on Thursday, the article on Colin Welch says that the Daily Telegraph in his day was for the lumpenbourgeoisie. At first I thought that was merely an ignorant error. The word Lumpen in German means ‘a rag’. Lump means ‘ragamuffin’. Karl Marx is the originator of the term Lumpenproletariat, which he applied to the ‘lowest and most degraded section of the proletariat; the “down and outs” who make no contribution to the workers’ cause’, as the Oxford English Dictionary neatly puts it. Marx did not share Mother Teresa’s regard for the poorest of the poor.

‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number. ‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What does Gresham’s Law mean?’ my husband has said, ‘Ah, you don’t understand.’ That is surely what I had admitted by asking the question in the first place. I knew Gresham’s Law said: ‘Bad money drives out good.’ But what that meant or how it could happen were blanks to me.

‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played a larger part in the folk consciousness of England than the rabbit. The rabbit, or coney as it was called, was introduced by the Romans perhaps, but was popularised as a reserve of meat and fur by the Normans. I rather think the Anglo-Saxons, before they settled on the British mainland, were familiar with hares.

New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us neglect, or lump with Australian English. Oxford University Press has published a dictionary of New Zealand English and one of its slang, but popularly we still tend to conflate the two.

The term ‘Middle England’ has been drifting a bit in the last few years, but never so far, so fast as under the impulsion of Mr David Miliband, a young minister in the Department for Education. He said last week that educational ‘improvements have released the potential of Middle England’. This sudden reference to ‘Middle England’ — in recent years the misty lost domain of the Daily Mail — baffled Mr Ed Stourton on Today one morning, and it puzzled the Daily Telegraph, for which Middle England was ‘mortgagers in Cheshire with a Renault Espace in the drive’. According to interpreters of his own private language, Mr Miliband merely meant a socio-economic lower-middle-class division.