Dot Wordsworth

The film Around the World in Eighty Days, though identified as a turkey by the taxonomists of the critics’ circle, took more money in Britain last week than any film but one, with incalculable effects on the English language. But before I drone on about that, let me mention a satisfying sighting of well reported by Mr Robin Taylor of Blackburn. It is from Thomas Hardy’s poem on the loss of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Mr Taylor mentions it as an example of Hardy incorporating everyday speech, but I was surprised by the proportion of elevated ‘poetic diction’ in the composition, even if Hardy knew what he was at.

The summer flowers are blowing, and I was reminded yesterday of a slightly outlandish-sounding line in the summery poem Pearl which speaks of the plants ‘gilofre, gyngure & gromylyoun’. I am still not sure what gromylyoun is. I know it’s gromwell, but I haven’t got any in the garden, and my husband has never had occasion to use it, despite its medicinal reputation in the Middle Ages. I thought I knew what gillyflower was, though — the wallflower, with its candy popcorn scent. But Michael Quinion has disabused me. He is the author of an excellent new book called Port Out, Starboard Home and Other Myths (Penguin, £12.99), which explodes erroneous etymologies.

I had just looked up a phenomenon that a sharp-eared reader had heard on the wireless — the remarkable ‘double is’ — in Robert Burchfield’s New Fowler’s, when the telephone rang and I heard that he was dead. Dr Burchfield was a New Zealander, born in 1923, who developed a fascination for language in Trieste where he was serving during the second world war. As a Rhodes Scholar he read English at Magdalen, Oxford, where C.S. Lewis was a Fellow. Lewis was a mediaevalist, but it was J.R.R. Tolkien, the Merton Professor of English Language, who proved to be the ‘fisherman who drew me into his philological net’, Burchfield recalled. He worked with C.T.

As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying ‘well’, especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation. With conversation as its habitat, it naturally occurs frequently on programmes such as Today on Radio 4. I did see it the other day in a headline in the Daily Telegraph: ‘Champagne (well, English sparkling) for the men about to wreck Brussels’ — a reference to the UK Independence Party. In the Telegraph sense, well is what Dr Svartvik calls ‘an editing marker for self-correction’.

‘What, what, what,’ said my husband, as if he had bought up a job lot of whats and wanted to use them up before the hot weather spoilt them. He was provoked by my having read out a sentence by W.W. Skeat: ‘Argosy is not really of Slavonic origin.’ Skeat (1835–1912) had meant to go into the Church, but an affliction of the throat cut that short. A lectureship in mathematics at Christ’s College, Cambridge ‘left him ample leisure’. He edited Langland and Chaucer in several volumes and made an etymological dictionary. In analysing a difficult word, he allowed three hours: ‘During that time I made the best I could of it and then let it go.

I heard the other day that the late Lord Hartwell, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, had once exclaimed that when he was at Eton he had been taught never to begin a sentence with the word but. He then found to his slight mortification that his chance remark had been set as an iron rule for the newspaper’s stylebook. God knows what material their stylebook is made of now. Something spongy, I think. Now Professor Canon J.R. Porter has written to me about a related question: beginning sentences with and. I had mentioned that sentence after sentence in the so-called Authorised Version of the Bible begins with and. The Revd Prof. points out in the politest way that this ‘has no bearing on what should be correct, idiomatic English usage.

On The South Bank Show in January 2000 a contributor said excitedly, ‘Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language.’ Rubbish. I found that reference, and its refutation, in a new book by the indefatigable Professor David Crystal, The Stories of English (Allen Lane, £25). First, he asks, how big is an Englishman’s vocabulary? Dr Crystal says he has lost count of the times he has been told that the Sun uses a vocabulary of 500 words. His reckons an average issue contains 6,000 different words (or ‘lexemes’, i.e., words stripped of bolt-on features). Academics, by inviting respondents to look through a slice of dictionary, say that an average English speaker uses 50,000 words actively and understands a quarter more. Shakespeare uses just over 29,000.

‘High street stalwart Marks & Spencer is preparing to go head-to-head with the likes of Topshop,’ said a news report the other day. Never mind ‘going head-to-head’, a metaphor presumably taken from the life of the caribou or elk, and enthusiastically seized upon by people who like to speak of going ‘belly up’ or ‘pear-shaped’, or being ‘dead in the water’ or, more unpleasantly, ‘twisting in the wind’. It’s ‘the likes of’ that I find curious. It has in recent generations borne a derogatory sense.

To pronounce when reading aloud an entirely different word from the one written on the page might seem a more than Mandarin complication, or perhaps be reminiscent of the Hebrews’ reverence for the Name that prompted them to substitute ‘Adonai’ orally for the word represented by the tetragrammaton. Yet we do just such a thing with Mrs. Once it stood for mistress. Quite when the spoken realisation became missis is not easy to tell. ‘The contracted pronunciation, which in other applications of the word has never been more than a vulgarism,’ comments the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘became for the prefixed title, first a permitted colloquial licence, and ultimately the only allowable pronunciation.

‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later. But the occasion for my original remark was that someone on the wireless had just said, ‘That’s a post facto justification.’ I had merely observed that it isn’t post facto but post factum, since ‘post’ takes the accusative, not the ablative. The reason it is so often wrong is because of a confusion with the phrase ex post facto, used by our learned friends in the phrase ‘ex post facto law’, implying retrospective force.

Well, the Poles are in the European Union, and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Already Tesco and Carrefour are flogging the poor things centrally distributed comestibles with sell-by dates on them. From my archives (a bundle of post extracted from a pile of unread medical magazines to which my husband subscribes as part of his ‘ongoing education’), I retrieve an interesting letter from Mr Peter Kassler of Haslemere. ‘We noticed recently,’ he writes, ‘in a Carrefour supermarket in southern France that a lack of mineral water on the shelves was explained by a printed card as a result of “mouvements sociaux à notre plateforme de distribution”.

‘A light, pleasant, and digestible food,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition: the best). ‘Come off it,’ said my husband, and for once I agreed with him. The food in question was tapioca, which is a starchy derivative from the cassava plant. The word is Brazilian, the thing is disgusting. The frogspawn particles are agglomerations that formed when it was dried. This knowledge will, I hope, remain academic, but a related and more practical question arose while I was tucking in to some couscous with a friend. She asked if couscous was the same as semolina, and I didn’t know. I eat but don’t cook couscous and do neither to semolina. But my ignorance is not, I think, unusual.

Here’s a modish metaphor that is dead but hasn’t stopped breeding: ‘If I had taken cannabis, I would be transparent about it,’ said Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. ‘I want a transparent, non-variable law on drugs.’ And here’s another specimen caught in the verbal butterfly net of Mr Francis Radcliffe of York, who sent it in, chloroformed and set on a pin: ‘We need a transparent set of vocational qualifications,’ says Mr Mike Tomlinson, the educationist. First, let us admit that Shakespeare used it. ‘Transparent Helena, nature shewes art,/That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart,’ we find in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

‘It’s all Greek to me,’ said my husband, putting down his whisky glass, which was not wet but might have been, on the cover of Liddell and Scott. ‘Oh, darling,’ I said, snatching it up and restoring it to a ‘Guinness is good for you’ mat next to his chair. ‘Don’t pretend to be stupid. There’s no need.’ I had been rummaging around perichoresis, which has suddenly become voguish in English among the sort of people who speak of the ‘anthropic principle’. Not that it is a new word. Gregory of Nazianzus was happily using it in the 4th century. But he spoke Greek. What does it mean? It is something to do with the Trinity.

The Metropolitan Police have put up big posters on the Underground telling people what to do if they see a bag without an owner. ‘Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999,’ it says. You might think that I am being captious in thinking this reads badly. If the word don’t governs all the subsequent imperatives, then the doubting passenger ends up doing nothing. The ambiguity is not helped by the conjunction or. The Met’s message in conventional prose would have the first two words as a separate sentence: ‘Don’t touch. Check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999.’ (I don’t much care for the Americanism call.

I was listening to Radio Four’s serialisation of the Palliser novels while doing the washing-up after Sunday lunch, and I heard Mr Wharton saying that he preferred Arthur Fletcher to Ferdinand Lopez because he had a ‘proper job’. (We’re in The Prime Minister; it does rattle along, somewhat to the detriment of the characterisation.) That’s funny, I thought, it doesn’t sound like Trollope. Blow me if a few minutes later we didn’t get the Duke of Omnium complaining that being prime minister was turning out not to be a ‘proper job’ like being chancellor of the exchequer. So as soon as I had finished chasing the teaspoon that got away round the sink, I dried my hands and went to check.

Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish word chaval, meaning not ‘a pikey’ but ‘a bloke’, comes from the same source. And so it does, I find on inquiry. Corominas’s six-volume Spanish etymological dictionary confirms this, though it quotes among its supplementary authorities George Borrow. Now Borrow was a brave linguist, but he was neither exact nor comprehensive in his linguistic analyses of Romany. In any case, the Spanish took to their hearts this Gitano word chaval.

According to that very annoying programme Woman’s Hour (one minute being militantly gynaecological, the next giving recipes for butternut-squash soup), a mother complained to a school that allowed her son to say toilet instead of lavatory. A vox pop discovered more people in the street were at home with toilet than with lavatory, which one respondent identified as a word used only by those unfamiliar with English. Then they got on to napkin against serviette. Here, I think, one cannot ignore the fact that most people do not use table napkins. Perhaps there is an idea that serviette more properly applies to insubstantial paper objects. Certainly in Spain every bar has its dispenser of little paper servilletas.

I blushed to learn I had been wrong all my life. ‘Though Sir William Golding consistently pronounced the word as contsh in a lecture that he gave on The Lord of the Flies at the University of Oxford in 1990,’ says Professor Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler’s, ‘the more usual standard pronunciation is conk.’ I cannot think that I have ever heard anyone pronounce conch as conk. William Golding, a man interested in language, might have been expected to know, especially since the shell played a notable part in his novel. Etymologically there is some sense in the conk sound, since the word comes from Greek konche; I should make clear that the letter transliterated as ch here is the chi, as in Christ, and undoubtedly a hard sound.

‘We need closure,’ said Mr Greg Dyke after resigning as director-general of the BBC. ‘Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there.’ Over the past couple of months the newspapers have reported the closure of more than one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, of mother-and-baby units, of factories, railway stations and motorways. Some of these closures were more welcome than others. But Mr Dyke was not proposing the closure of the BBC — a truly radical idea; he was using a metaphor, or, if you prefer, borrowing a bit of psychobabble. He meant much the same by his phrase as Mr Blair meant by ‘drawing a line’ under events. There is a meaning of closure in computing which I do not quite understand.