Dot Wordsworth

I am excited by a letter from Kensington, but before that let me notice a fearful symmetry between Martin Bashir's interview with Michael Jackson and the advertisements that punctuated it. These were intended to appeal to young people. One, for the Disney rehash of Treasure Island called Treasure Planet, has the animated Jim Hawkins saying, 'How cool is that?' - not a sentence of Stevenson's. I mentioned this phrase a fortnight ago, and so I was bound to notice it all over the place. But I didn't expect it to be quite so ubiquitous, for, immediately after the commercial break, we heard poor old Jacko remark, 'How ignorant is that?' about people who accused him of having plastic surgery or spending the night with children or something.

'Are you interested in penises, darling?' I asked my husband. 'Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?' The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by a tired old joke resorted to with ever-increasing frequency by journalists, often in headlines. It is to write 'Size does matter' or some variant in an article that is not about sexual performance. Oddly enough, the Guardian, which one might think would be sensitive to silly sexist sniggering, is given to this sort of thing.

I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer calves (which must be grown-up by now) using this word because it is pretty and because she was prompted by a nursery rhyme in a Victorian book: Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk And I will give you a gown of silk; A gown of silk and a silver key If you will let down your milk for me. Iona and Peter Opie in their admirable Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes record this rhyme from as early as 1805. The version they give has tee for key, and tee is a 'cow tie'.

The vogue word of the year so far is extreme. It has been around for centuries, deriving from the Latin superlative extremus, 'outermost'. But for the English word recently a flavour of danger and convention-breaking has developed. 'Extreme' sports are those like mountaineering or paragliding that offer physical risks. Now extreme is taking on a life of its own. Soon one will not ask 'Extremely what?' People will exclaim 'Extreme!' as they do 'Gross!' Indeed, extreme as a noun has already acquired this connotation: 'It does give lovers of arthouse extreme something to get their teeth into,' said the Scottish Daily Record of some dreadful American movie. Telly enjoys extreme sport and there is money to be made.

'These yours?' asked my husband with his back to me, his head ostrichised in a cardboard box and a sheaf of envelopes in his upraised hand. They were, indeed, a bundle of letters from 1999 caught up in his circulars from cricket clubs and rubbish from pharmaceutical companies. He was tidying up four years late. One of the letters came from Mr James Fairbairn who wondered what had happened to -ize as a suffix. He found it was authorized on his American spellcheck, but anathematised on his UK English spellcheck. Looking through the Guardian, Radio Times, Strathearn Herald and Perthshire Advertiser for 1971 (a touch of my husband there, to have those about the house), he found no verbs ending -ize, but in his Penguin English Dictionary (1969) found plenty. Dr R.W.

I lapped up Liza Picard's Dr Johnson's London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas. In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as dictionaries. The first is 'hoping to cure himself with the hair of the dog that bit him', said of a man with a hangover going to the bottle again. This was in Dr Willis's Oxford Casebook, she says. Is that Dr Thomas Willis (1621-75)? No doubt it was in use in his time, for John Heywood, writing in 1546, has: 'I praie the leat me and my felowe have a heare of the dog that bote us last nyght.' (I like bote as the past tense of bite.

People seem to lose the use of their native wit when they consider the origins of words. That idiot's sorting office, the Internet, has a well-intentioned site (at io.com/gibbonsb/words.words.words.html) edited by Gibbons Burke that discusses nautical terms used by Patrick O'Brian, who, Mr Burke remarks, uses expressions 'in a way that allows the reader to make the connection between a familiar phrase in everyday language with its marine heritage'. But when I read Patrick O'Brian's books three or four years ago, I was struck by how often his etymologies are wrong.

'Is having personal demons like having a personal trainer?' asked my husband, casting aside a newspaper magazine to the peril of his glass of whisky. (It survived, briefly.) He might well ask, for these 'personal demons' have been having quite an outing in the newspapers recently. Anne Diamond, according to a so-called friend quoted in the Daily Mirror, 'like most people has her demons - if she has issues with work or family, she eats and drinks'. Indeed, she 'balloons'. I like, or rather don't like, 'has issues with'. According to the same newspaper, Robin Williams 'has been tortured by personal demons' including cocaine, which he wittily remarked was God's way of telling you you've got too much money.

I was last in Zaragoza when my husband was bribed by a drugs company to make the sacrifice of attending a conference in a luxury hotel. I was on my own. It was hot and dusty, the dustier for the demolition of a neighbourhood of a seedy but engaging character around 'El Tubo' (east of Calle Alfonso I, if you know it). So I stopped to ease a blister on my foot and take a glass of horchata, a drink I've mentioned before. It wasn't quite as relaxing as it might have been because in the heladeria was a lunatic at a table shouting threateningly at anyone near, or even at anyone who wasn't.

Mr Iain Duncan Smith, with his calm, Japanese face, introduced an American note into his 'unite or die' speech last week. He quoted Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), or almost did, when he said, 'We must hang together or we shall hang apart.' People were uncharacteristically kind in not mentioning that the joke does not work like that. Franklin was reported to have said, at the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, 'We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.' Talking of errors, Mrs David Beckham has been taking legal action against Peterborough football club for using the word Posh commercially. Peterborough has had it as its nickname for 80 years, it says; Mrs Beckham has only borne it since she joined the Spice Girls.

'That's telling 'em,' said my husband, rubbing his hands. He is something of a connoisseur of angular language and enjoyed an inscription in an old book I showed him. It was in Ninety-six Sermons by Lancelot Andrewes, the fifth edition, of 1661. On the fly-leaf it says, 'R. Bathe Semper eadem. This booke is not only my gift to Randale Payton but wth all my Command to him that he be daylly conversant here-in, wch will not only advantage him selfe; but lik-wise be very Benifficiall to all his Auditors when God shall soe blesse him wth a part of his flock to feede. 1739/40.' I suppose it was not quite so bad, since Payton had yet to secure a benefice, but it hardly showed confidence in his preaching abilities.

Mr Roger Broad, a reader who lives in an area of London I would call Westbourne Park, though he might disagree, writes to tell me that a friend of his, born in Istanbul of varied extraction, does not mind being called a Levantine. Mr Broad thought that it might have derogatory connotations, although he admits this might be merely attributable to an overdose of Bulldog Drummond. I can't find that the dictionaries have detected such a negative sense. The Levant is what the Crusaders called Outremer. (Or, in Spain, it is the east coast of the Iberian peninsula, the Valencian territories. But then, in Spain, a slightly old-fashioned word for groceries is ultramarinos, brought, as it were, from Outremer to the domestic Levant.

I've just got round to reading Liza Picard's Dr Johnson's London, which I enjoyed very much. She says, 'As I read my way through contemporary writers, a few words caught my eye.' Among them is kick the bucket. I wish Mrs Picard had mentioned where she saw it, for the earliest citation in the dictionary is merely from Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785), and he may well have read the phrase earlier. Grose (c. 1731-91) was known as 'a sort of antiquarian Falstaff. Immensely corpulent and jolly, he drank and joked his way round the British Isles, attracting a 'rather coarse' epigram from Burns, as the Dictionary of National Biography says. My copy of Burns gives this version, which doesn't seem all that coarse.

'I could have told you that,' said my husband, as if this were the general state of reality. Normally if I ask him any question about his native tongue, he says, 'Don't ask me, you're the expert.' The thing he could have told me was the meaning of 'son of Attenborough', about which I had asked in the issue of 21 September. The phrase occurs in a novel by Barry Pain (1864-1928), a humorous writer. I read some of his books ages ago, and they are all right. One of his characters is a ridiculous suburban clerk, and I feel he borrowed from George and Weedon Grossmith's Charles Pooter, and managed the creation less well. Pain thrived in the days when the Cornhill magazine was going strong. He first wrote for Granta, which seems to have been founded by a relation by (later) marriage.

Mind your language 'Coo, coo, coo,' said my husband. 'Like a pigeon.' This was not, fortunately, a command, though, heaven knows, it might have been. He was merely giving his opinion, fairly strongly, on how the first syllable of cupola should be pronounced. The next two, he said, should sound like 'po' and 'la'. It might seem strange that two long-grown-up people should have any doubt about the pronunciation of an ordinary word. Perhaps it reflects a literate society where words may be used freely without ever being said aloud. Why, only this morning, I heard on the wireless an educated and entertaining former servant of the Crown use the word enroach. He said it twice. I do not say there is no such word, but I cannot find it in the dictionary. I reckon he meant encroach.

A 14-year-old man, as I learn I should call a Wykehamist, Benjamin Nicholls, has written to me about a suggestion by his 12-year-old sister. She thought that, as the word intelligent means 'clever', there should be a word telligent, meaning 'stupid'. The sister was aware that the prefix in- signifies negation or privation. She is right in that. Indeed it is related to the Greek a- or an- and the common Teutonic un-, which is where English gets un- from. (In speech the other day I found myself contrasting the pious with people like Samuel Pepys, whom I called unpious, and in the next sentence impious.) Latin, as Mr Nicholls points out, with the example of inimicus, makes free use of this negative prefix, as with utilis, inutilis; nocens, innocens (hence English innocent).