Dot Wordsworth

A recent cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a punkish teenager saying to a more conventional youth, ‘I’m bored. Can I shave your head?’ Ho, ho. But then the paper published a letter from ‘Merrill’ from Nova Scotia saying, ‘Would you please explain why nobody here knows the difference between can and may? In Nova Scotia, our teacher would not let us out of grade three if we didn’t know the difference.’ In reply the paper said, ‘Cartoon creators want their characters to be believable, so they have them speak in a way that would be typical for the characters.’ Then it went further: ‘In our country, so many people use can instead of may that many dictionaries now show that it has come to mean the same thing.

‘Have you noticed,’ asked Kim Fletcher, a man, at a party to launch his brilliant new Journalist’s Handbook, ‘how people say testament when they mean testimony?’ I couldn’t quite say I had, yet a nagging feeling in my brain suggested he was on to something, so I looked through the newspapers to examine their testimony. Testimony is straightforwardly used in the ordinary courtroom way for ‘giving evidence’. This can be extended to a solemn statement such as a ‘series of miracle “testimonies”’ mentioned by the Scottish Daily Record recently. Testimonial usually refers to football matches that raise money for superannuated players and the like, as benefit nights once did for the stagebound thespian.

I have been enjoying in a way a book my husband gave me for my birthday called Shop Horror (Fourth Estate, £10). This compilation by Guy Swillingham of colour photographs of the ‘best of the worst in British shop names’ shares something of the spirit of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards, which were, of course, not boring at all. For some reason, hairdressers are particularly given to adopting painful puns. There is Ali Barber’s at Leyland, Herr Kutz at Warsash, Hants, Barber Blacksheep in Brighton, Director’s Cut at Wombwell, Best Little Hair House in Hereford (in Hereford). These are lopsided puns, for there is no necessity for the shops to be run by Ali or a German, or a black sheep of the family, or a cineaste or a retired madame.

An unquiet correspondent sends a ‘breath of rage’ all the way from Burrum Heads, Queensland. ‘I do wish you could manage to educate some of your fellow columnists,’ barks Mr Geoff Baker, adding a few paragraphs about ‘ignorance’, ‘solecisms, ‘disappointment’, ‘Bad English’, ‘after-hours adult education’. Goodness! What have we done? Why, we’ve used ‘or not’ after ‘whether’. Mr Barker’s gripe is that this introduces a culpable redundancy. That, however, is not the way the community of English-speakers has seen it over the past few hundred years.

This week: the mystery of the missing banister. But first an example of equable temperament, compared with many inquirers into language, from Dr Sylvia Moody. She mildly wonders why we sometimes say ‘a friend of the family’ and sometimes ‘a friend of the family’s’. The latter construction (like ‘a habit of mine’, ‘a play of Shakespeare’s’) is discussed briefly by the late Robert Burchfield, in his revised Fowler’s Modern English Usage, under the heading ‘double possessive’. It is called ‘post-genitive’ in the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language edited by Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik.

‘What does SIM mean?’ asked my husband, looking up like a sulky sunset from a mobile-phone instruction booklet. Well, I knew what it was, but not what the acronym stood for. This independence of word and significand allows the tiresome multiplication of new labels for new technological gadgets, but it also teaches old words to learn new tricks. The Queen Mary 2 still sails saillessly. And though I hate train station instead of railway station, at least the train part was used in the 15th century for the trailing part of a dress (as now), and in a bundle of connected senses of things pulled, extending to the retinue of a magnate. The oldest sense (from the 14th century, now obsolete) means ‘delay’ — a familiar concomitant of the mechanised transport.

I was surprised by the number of people who disliked the Daily Telegraph’s headline on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy: ‘“God’s rottweiler” is the new pope’. I don’t think it was meant to be as rude as many thought. But what puzzled me was that I had never heard anyone refer to Ratzinger as ‘God’s rottweiler’. It seems to be a common failure of the whole press to assert that people are ‘known as’ some catchy nickname, when no one ever uses it. One might call it the Dubbing Fallacy. Dub, since the 12th century has signified the conferring of a knighthood, and by the 16th century had been extended to mean ‘to give a nickname’.

‘He has just had a lunch of eels and is in good spirits,’ wrote Mr Alistair McKay of Mr George Melly, in the Scotsman. ‘If he finds it tiresome to talk about himself, he does a fine job of disguising it. But the stories are worth waiting for and the louche music of his voice is compelling. He talks somewhat like a man blowing smoke rings from a rusty trumpet.’ It was the word louche that worries Mr Cecil Gysin from Farnham. He fears that writers do not appreciate its true meaning. ‘The Shorter Oxford gives us “oblique, not straightforward” and directs us to the French, where I find “squinting, dubious, ambiguous, equivocal, suspicious, shady”.’ Certainly one or more of those meanings might suit Mr Melly, and others not.

Usher, who is no relation of Poe’s unfortunate family, has, I hear, decreed that jeans and trainers are not enough. Usher is an African-American singer, with a new interest in gentility. He is shocked by people not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and he is disgusted by ‘profanity’. Profanity in this context is language of the kind used after 9 p.m. on the television. It means rude words that are not necessarily blasphemous — you know the f-word, and mother, though Americans, even of a gangsta disposition, seem less given to the c-word. Profanity is not literally ungodly, but then nor is swearing, for to say f—– is no more swearing a false oath than it is taking the name of God in vain.

What is the difference between a cad and a bounder? It depends on your dictionary. ‘A man who behaves dishonourably, especially towards women,’ says the New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) of cad, and of bounder, ‘a dishonourable man.’ Both words are marked ‘dated’. The origin given for cad is: ‘Late 18th century, denoting a passenger picked up by a horse-drawn coach for personal profit.’ This demonstrates the difference between etymology and explanation. Certainly that was the meaning of the word in the late 18th century, but the appeal that the former denotation makes to the imagination does not explain the current meaning of the word. This passenger was not regarded as caddish, to women or anyone else.

While I was trying to puzzle out the Hebrew for ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye my people’ last week my husband was moved to begin a series of Christmas carols from the shelter of his armchair, occasionally waving a little mat soiled with the glass-rings of ages in time to the music. Lovely. There was method, or at least a tenuous anchorhold on reality, in his madness, for he began with ‘God rest ye merry gentlemen’. He tried it out alternately with ‘God rest you’, and seemed equally happy with either. The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has it as ‘God rest you merry, gentlemen’, the version given in the Oxford Book of Carols. It is anonymous. The first thing is that merry is not an adjectival qualification of gentlemen.

I enjoyed the book Long Live Latin rather more than the Spectator reviewer (5 February) seems to have done, and its author, John Gray, has put his finger on a misleading passage in Lynne Truss’s famous book, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. (I’m not sure I wouldn’t have hyphenated ‘Zero-Tolerance Approach’, but no matter.) Mr Gray takes a sentence from the prophet Isaiah (xxxx 1): Consolamini consolamini populus meus dicit Deus vester. This is translated in the Authorised Version (which Americans and people who say ‘toilet’ call the King James Bible) as, ‘Comfort ye, comfort ye, my people, saith your God.

What a terrible injustice Angela Cannings went through, being wrongly accused of killing her baby son, after having lost two previously, and then imprisoned. I heard her on Woman’s Hour and felt great sympathy for her and not a little anger at her persecutors. I do not mean to trivialise her sufferings by latching on to two words she used on the wireless, inmate and soulmate. She spoke of ‘fellow inmates’ in prison, and this is the way the word is used today, as a synonym for ‘detainee’, in a prison, asylum or institution. Originally it meant a fellow lodger, so ‘fellow inmate’ would be a pleonasm. The Oxford English Dictionary leans to the idea that it derives from inn, meaning a place to stay, rather than in, the preposition.

‘Chalk’n’cheese, hole in one, salt’n’pepper, three-in-one oil, sheep’n’goats, eyeless in Gaza, Swan’n’Edgar,’ said my husband, not pausing for breath, so that nature took over, and a sharp inhalation whisked some whisky into his trachea, bringing on a fit of coughing that turned him a plum colour. I hadn’t heard anyone say ‘Swan and Edgar’ for some time. It is the only familiar coupling from those lines in Princess Ida: ‘Let Swan secede from Edgar — Gask from Gask;/ Sewell from Cross — Lewis from Allenby!

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.