Dot Wordsworth

There are some things I shall never say. I don't just mean toilet or cool. I mean things like train station and lifestyle. They are not part of my parole or idiolect. On lifestyle I have just discovered an historical oddity, but in passing I should like to remark that the previous default meaning (I take the metaphor from computing) for station was 'railway station' (unless the context suggested the rarer power station, station in life or station of the Cross). It was like tie, which ordinarily meant 'necktie'. Thus any other kind of station (bus station) or tie (rail-tie, family tie, cup tie) had to be specified. The decay of the default meaning for station is a mystery, albeit of American origin.

My husband, when asked to buy some French beans once, came home with a tin of broad beans produced in France. So I was delighted when he got me a reprint from the Ohio State Law Journal 1964, vol. 25 no. 1, as requested, from the medical school library. The question was the spelling of Daniel M'Naghten's name. M'Naghten killed Edward Drummond in 1843 in mistake for Sir Robert Peel. He pleaded insanity and was acquitted, and the unsatisfactory rules on madness and responsibility drawn up after inquiries by the Lord Chancellor now bear his name. But what was his name? The OED lists McNaghten, MacNaughton, Macnaughton before adding an 'etc.' and plumping for M'Naghten. The apostrophe was in the 19th century often reversed, or at least an opening inverted comma was used.

Many people think a runcible spoon is a sort of pickle-fork with a serrated edge. If that is what they call it, then that is the word for it, but it is not the same word that Edward Lear used when he wrote of a runcible spoon in 1871. He also wrote of a runcible hat and a runcible cat, neither much use for eating pickles. The new meaning of runcible can be traced no further back than 1926, when someone wrote to Notes and Queries with the suggestion. The correspondent gave its origin as a ‘jocose allusion to the battle of Roncevaux because it has a cutting edge.’ A likely story. I mention all this because good old Mr Richard Rose writes to share gleanings from Thomas Tusser (to whom I referred when rambling on about prim and privet).

I can't say that I care for the outbreak of 'Mumbai' that has been pouring from the telly since those terrible bombs in Bombay. Why should we suddenly call it Mumbai any more than we should now call Burma Myanmar? Twenty years ago there was a passing vogue for calling Cambodia Kampuchea. The dictionary that I referred to said that Mumbai should be pronounced 'Moom-buy', and that is usually what folk say. The funny thing is when broadcasters want to be more ethnic than the Indians and say 'Poon-jab', when every Punjabi pronounces the first vowel as in punch (or a little more towards the vowel 'a', but in the same phonemic slot). Indeed the words are famously related, the Punjab being the land of the five rivers and punch apparently having five ingredients.

Some people who didn't exist have entries in the Dictionary of National Biography and some words that don't exist have entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. One such is primet, which was 'erroneously stated by Prior to occur in the Grete Herball as the name of the primrose, and used by him to suggest an etymology for privet. No such word is there found.' That Prior was Richard Prior, author of Popular Names of British Plants (1863). Some of this worries Mr Noel Petty, the great competition winner. He has sent me a couplet from a madrigal, 'Trust not too much, fair youth, unto thy feature', by Orlando Gibbons: Sweet violets are gathered in their spring,White primit falls without enpitying. What are we to make of that, if primet is a Loch Ness Logomenon?

'Phwuh, this is a bit scatological,' said my husband, looking up from last week's column, his brow glistening with recycled Black Bush. From a man who is seldom ten yards from a sigmoidoscope, that was pretty rich. But in an interesting development on the great lasagne chase, Dr Peter Emery writes from hot Oman to say his Arabic dictionary gives lawzinaj as a loan-word from the Persian lawzina, 'sweetmeats resembling qatayif combined with oil of almond'. Qatayif, Dr Emery explains helpfully, are small triangular doughnuts fried in melted butter and served with honey accompanied by qamar ad-deen (an apricot-based drink) during the evenings of Ramadan in Cairo and other cities of the Arab world. They sound delicious, but not much like lasagne.

It is by no means clear to me which words are acceptable in what social circumstances. I mean words from bloody southward. It was, 20 years ago, the case that in the grown-up surroundings of The Spectator it was all right to use for good reason strong language that the BBC could not abide. Now, on the stroke of 9 p.m., television makes fuck the most common of lexical choices. My husband doesn't give a damn, but is shocked on my behalf. It doesn't have to be 9 p.m. Shortly after 10 the other morning a rather sincere young person on Woman's Hour was advocating our women's standing up to verbal harassment by telling off the perpetrators. 'It isn't just "Show us your tits",' said the young person.

I was looking for an obscure work by Richarde Weste (fl.

Those trained train staff have come up with a new one. Until now it has been 'Peterborough is the next station stop with this train.' That is a Babylonish dialect, to be sure. But today it was: 'We shall shortly be arriving into Peterborough.' Arriving into? As it happens, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall in a sermon for Palm Sunday 1539 used the phrase 'into what howse or place so ever ye shall arrive', but I can scarcely suppose that this homiletic obiter dictum influenced the choice of preposition adopted by the conductor or train captain of the 16.32 (delayed). If it comes to that, arrive used to be a transitive verb for landing a ship or its passengers. In a narrative of Becket from about 1300 we read, if we care to, of how St Thomas 'at Sandwyche aryved was'.

Britain invented lasagne, according to a front-page report in the Daily Telegraph. The claim came from organisers of a mediaeval banquet at Berkeley Castle. They appealed to 'the world's oldest recipe book', The Forme of Cury, compiled under Richard II in 1390. It seems the Berkeley banqueteers meant that not just the food but the word itself were English, for the dish concerned was called loseyns. At this point I smelled a rat. To me loseyns looked like a medieval form of lozenge, and so the OED confirmed it to be. Under the word lozen, 'a thin cake of pastry', it actually quotes The Forme of Cury. Part of the recipe in the Telegraph ran: 'Take flour of paynedemayns and make erof past with water.' That sounds like pasta, sure enough, but what is that funny word erof?

On one of those discussion programmes, not about books but about buying books, Mariella Frostrup has just said, ‘We shall be discussing that momentarily.’ If only that had been true. Now what I really want to write about is a grammatical solecism I have been convicted of. In the politest possible way, Andrew Wilton, a reader from email land, points out that in the following sentence the grammar is all wrong for the sense: ‘Veronica is behaving like one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn’t got a big enough run....’ Mr Wilton acknowledges that such constructions have been used by reputable writers for a century or more but seem catachrestic. Is there any justification for them in theory?

I was just looking up malarkey when my husband called out in the tones of a man who has found a glass eye in his porridge. 'Looks like yours,' he said, fishing a bit of paper out of the first volume of Phineas Finn as if with tongs. He was not wrong, it had my writing on it, and I wish I had found the note before, when Sir Ned Sherrin wrote about morning meaning 'afternoon'. For here in chapter four Trollope writes, 'He called at Portman Square at about half-past two on the Sunday morning. Yes, – Lady Laura was in the drawing-room. The hall-porter admitted as much, but evidently seemed to think that he had been disturbed from his dinner before his time.

Mr John Ross, a reader from Derbyshire, was struck by the strange juxtaposition of two phrases of different flavours in the second chapter of Scott's Kenilworth. On the same page the host says 'I wot not' and another character, Mr Goldthread the mercer, says in answer to a question, 'That I have, old boy.' Mr Russ associates old boy with public schools, not with the England of Elizabeth I. Scott is a far from reliable authority on the historic use of language. He was writing fiction, after all, and he sprinkled the page with god wots and forsooths on a suggestive rather than an accurate principle. His magpie antiquarianism sometimes tempted him into error, though never in such a spectacular way as Browning with his celebrated misapprehension of the meaning of twat as 'a nun's headdress'.

A kind-hearted reader wondered whether Chinaman might not be a derogatory term. I used it the other week. If you believe the Encarta dictionary, it is not just derogatory – it is offensive. But then, the (mainly Zulu) Encarta (as I like to think of it, in memory of the BBC World Service's invariable phrase each time it mentions the homophonic South African party Inkatha) opines that Montezuma's revenge is offensive, to the shade of Montezuma for all I know. The thing itself can certainly offend. It is hard to know why Chinaman should be offensive. There seems to be a general reluctance to call foreigners by anything too concrete. Thus Spaniard sounds a bit rude, and so does Jew. 'A Spanish person' or 'a Jewish person' is much more refined.

Veronica has been playing Hail to the Thief, I won't say non-stop, but as obsessively as one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn't got a big enough run and keeps pecking at its reflection in its water-can. She is revising simultaneously. I'd have thought she was too old for this sort of thing, but apparently Radiohead yokes the generations in a sort of spirit of the Blitz. Far be it from me to criticise the music of Thom Yorke and his chums, but what of the lyrics? Remember when Bob Dylan was compared to Keats. Absurd; Keats is a feeble lyricist – fancy using been as a rhyme-word in the first quatrain of 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'.

'If you dial 1471,' writes Dr Roger James, a reader, naturally, 'you are likely to be told by a recorded female voice that "The caller withheld their number." This is an example of the difficulties that our language gets into because it lacks a word that means "his" or "her". Years ago, she would have said, "The caller withheld his number," but political correctness has taboo'd that way out. What should the recorded operator say?' What, indeed? I think I prefer 'The caller withheld their number' to 'The number you have dialled knows you are waiting', which is not true literally or figuratively. The loss of he as a sexually neutral pronoun is certainly a nuisance, more often awkward than the loss of man in the sense 'anthropos' or 'homo'.

'Of course Gladstone was 20 times cleverer than you,' said my husband. 'Much more, most likely. Why should anyone think different?' '"Differently", darling. Anyway, they don't mind my saying "cleverer than you". It's "cleverer than me" they don't like.' My husband is easily defeated and went back to his Famous Grouse and his Herwig's Art of Curing Sympathetically. Some chance. Yes, I had written 'cleverer than me' (5 April), not of conscious purpose, but because the construction must have entered my mental syntax replication machinery. It all hinges on whether than is a conjunction or a preposition. If it can be the latter, I'm in the clear. It did not take me long to find an eminent ally in Dr Robert Burchfield, the editor of New Fowler's Modern English Usage.

My husband has just been to a professional conference in La Rioja. Why do doctors feel they confer better in places renowned for wine? I was allowed along for the ride, although it meant that even when we had a delicious dinner (those bream with gold-painted noses and bits of animals that would make Digby Anderson's heart glow) it was to the accompaniment of conversation about ventilation and macabre things done with butterflies. There was a poor Chinaman at a neighbouring table with never a grain of rice to be had unsteeped in milk and cinnamon, and I began to experience the sense of the alien that he must have felt when we ventured into the nearby Basque country. Wales I can cope with; one soon learns that tacsi means 'taxi'.

Sir Ned Sherrin is beautifully vindicated by Mrs Beeton. He had wondered (Mind your language, 15 March) whether 'morning performances' of plays mightn't, like other morning social activities of the mid-19th century, have been undertaken in the afternoon. His particular interest was the matinée performances staged by Squire Bancroft at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, which he took over in 1865. This theatre, later named the Scala, was in Tottenham Street, near Tottenham Court Road, London, and was in the later 1860s the sharp end of new, realistic drama by playwrights such as Tom Robertson.

I was trying the other day to find out who first came up with the term moral equivalence, and so I turned to Twentieth Century Words, edited by John Ayto (Oxford). He doesn't list it, though he has Moral Rearmament (1938) and Moral Majority (1979). Dr Ayto arranges his words by decade, and gives the first year in which each word is recorded. In most cases examples might still turn up from slightly earlier years. One of the mistakes people make in using dictionaries is not to realise that when the Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest citation a word used by Milton, say, it is not suggesting that he invented the word. Even the intelligent Geoffrey Madan, I think, made this mistake in his Notebooks. Anyway I soon found myself lost in the 1940s.