Dot Wordsworth

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).