Dot Wordsworth

Why do people say: ‘You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment’? Are they using it as they would a Shakespearean quotation such as: ‘The lady doth protest too much’? Or do they think that by speaking the line made famous by Ian Richardson in House of Cards, they generate wit anew so that some rubs off on them and cheers the conversation? I wondered whether I was encountering second-hand humour from some television series when I began to notice the phrase Wait. What? It tends to be used archly, as though for an invisible audience. My husband finds it used on X, that social media platform for the elderly. Sometimes it is accompanied by a gif of a kitten or someone from Friends emoting scepticism. It is the verbal equivalent of a double take.

The Financial Times seeks applicants for the Sir Samuel Brittan fellowship. Announcing this, the paper refers to him as Sir Samuel, which is correct. It also quotes its obituary of him where he is called simply Brittan. That is also correct for a dead man, as we might say Churchill, not Sir Winston. It would have been wrong, though, to call Brittan Sir Brittan. That is a rule of the English language. Yet the FT has taken to referring to peers by their first names and titles, with Lord tacked on before: Lord David Cameron, Lord David Alton. That is as wrong as to say Sir Brittan. The FT style depends on the theory that everyone has two names and the first name distinguishes them from others with the same surname. So the paper would refer to Lord Conrad Black and Lord Guy Black.

‘Is this legacy beetroot?’ asked my husband, poking a yellowish slice on his plate in a restaurant. He meant heritage beetroot, a ludicrous enough phrase. But legacy has been extending the hedges round its semantic field, so his question may sound normal in a few years’ time. A report in the Telegraph the other day referred to apprentice stonemasons as entering a legacy trade. This edges into the territory of heritage. Historic England is the government’s statutory adviser on the landscape and built heritage. From 1984 to 2015 it operated as English Heritage. But English Heritage remains as a charity that looks after national monuments, such as Stonehenge. Perhaps Historic England or English Heritage will one day change its name to Legacy England.

My husband devotes his decreasing hours of daytime wakefulness to looking at Twitter, as he still calls it. He shouted out, ‘Look at this’, just as I was putting the potatoes in the oven to roast. It was a post criticising the ENO for saying 2021 was ‘a year spent slowly returning to normalcy’. The author said, ‘Brits don’t use the word normalcy’. Is that true? In 1899, on leaving Eton at the age of 17, Evelyn Wrench was well on his way to making a fortune from selling picture postcards at tourist spots. Then he overstretched himself and went bust in 1904. Instead he turned his energies to promoting the British Empire. In 1922 he began writing for The Spectator, becoming its editor from 1925.

A new television wildlife series called Queens (the ruling kind, not the screaming kind) shows competition among hyenas that involves infanticide. ‘I want it to feel that you see yourself, your family and your friends in these stories, that they’re relatable,’ the writer of the series told the Daily Mail. Well, Veronica has reached adulthood without my murdering her, though I recognise the temptation. Anyway, everything has to be relatable now, so much so that the word has almost been emptied of meaning. Yet I find curiously alien things fascinating, such as conditions on other planets. And I have not entirely given up trying to understand what people mean by quantum physics. Such matters have no immediate connection with my life or experiences.

A brand new ‘robust’ framework was being woven and nailed together, so the Prime Minister announced at the end of last week. It’s barely a year since he presented the UK with a similar kind of structure, which he called the Windsor Framework. I imagined it to resemble in some way a Windsor chair. In 1766, the newspaper Jackson’s Oxford Journal (which still had more than a century of success ahead of it) declared that ‘the Bodleian Library has most confessedly been very much improved by the Introduction of Windsor-Chairs, so admirably calculated for Ornament and Repose’. The Windsor framework didn’t prove quite so reposeful. There is no agreement on what a framework should look like.

‘Would you believe, looking down at your phone can put about 60lb of force on your neck,’ wrote Dr Miriam Stoppard in the Mirror. ‘Lift your phone up to eye level to avoid text neck.’ I didn’t quite understand about the 60lb, but my husband tells me there are other text ailments, notably text claw, a pain in the hand and wrist from too much tippety-tapping with the thumb. Apparently rolling cigars can have the same effect. I wonder if Carmen suffered from it. But another pain from texting comes from the formation of the past tense. ‘I text you yesterday but I never heard back,’ people say. It ‘sounds right’ to them, because text resembles other past tenses such as vexed, boxed, axed.

They were talking about the origins of the Bramley apple on The Kitchen Cabinet on the wireless last week, and naturally they spoke of Southwell, that agreeable minster town in Nottinghamshire. I was surprised, almost let down, when a local man pronounced the place-name to rhyme with mouthw’ll. I had long been careful to pronounce the -outh- like the -oth- in mother. I needn’t have been so shocked. The careful work of Klaus Forster published in 1981, A Pronouncing Dictionary of English Place-Names, includes a version of Southwell rhyming South- with mouth. Indeed it was the version, he tells us, listed in Broadcast English: Recommendations to announcers regarding the pronunciation of same English place-names (1936).

In March 1847 the world first read of Mr Toots saying: ‘It’s of no consequence.’ He went on saying it for the next 13 months until the last number of Dickens’s Dombey and Son had been published. His embarrassed sallies into affairs of the heart had gained a catchphrase. Mr Toots’s remark meant ostensibly, ‘It doesn’t matter,’ but I was reminded of it by the warning that the United States issued after the killing of three of its service people in Jordan. It promised a ‘very consequential response’. To me consequential suggested a different knot of meanings, about causal effect. The insurance world thinks of consequential loss not as an immediate result but one further down the chain of causality.

I read in the New Yorker about people who make sound effects ‘in a large, retrofitted barn, painted baby blue’. It made me wonder again how people imagine retrofitting works. It seems to be the work of time-travellers. Do they think that refitting a barn now implies that a photo taken of it 50 years ago would show the new fittings? Retro- signifies ‘backwards’. I am quite retro. I like looking at the past. My husband is almost entirely so. He lives in it. Six centuries ago a child of ten was expected to understand what the retrograde movement of a planet entailed. A planet such as Mars appears to pause in its motion eastwards and loop in a contrary direction before resuming its eastward course. Today we like to think the planets orbit the sun.

There is a place in Westmorland called Wordsworth’s Well, but I must tell you that it is not named after me. A field in Westmorland is called Wordy Dolt, and I am glad to tell you that it is not named after me either. Here wordy (like -worthy elsewhere) means ‘enclosure’, not ‘voluble’ nor indeed ‘valuable’, and dolt means ‘share of the common field’, not ‘idiot’. I discovered this from the glorious English Place-Name Society. I call it glorious because it has been going for 100 years and is still pegging away at a survey recording and analysing historically all the place-names of England. So far 91 volumes have been published, yet some counties remain to be surveyed.

When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other way. Back home, dunking a ginger nut seemed less criminal. Now I hear people using dunk and dump indifferently. Can this be right? After all, words of similar pronunciation, such as bought and brought, are often misused, one for the other, though the meaning is very different. I’m not sure what word people used before dunk turned up, which was little more than 100 years ago. Did they say sod, seethe, soak? I was surprised to find that dunk is a borrowing from Pennsylvania German. This is often called Pennsylvania Dutch, but is a form of Palatine or southern German.

Sir Ed Davey, who leads the Lib Dems, declared last week: ‘Squatter Sunak is holed up in Downing Street, desperately clinging on to power.’ It was odd of him to remind voters of the origin of this little joke about squatting. On 8 May 2010, two days after Labour’s defeat in the general election, the Sun ran a big headline: ‘Squatter holed up in No. 10.’ A subheading read: ‘Man, 59, refuses to leave Downing Street.’ That was Gordon Brown, of course, but anyone who remembers those uncertain days will know that he was waiting to see whether the Tories and the Lib Dems would form a coalition or whether he had a chance with the Lib Dems himself.

I grabbed my husband by the lapel outside Waitrose and he leapt – if not like a young deer, then like a deer in retirement that had spent a long time grazing undisturbed in a bean field. ‘Sorry, darling,’ he exclaimed. ‘I didn’t recognise you.’ It was not as though I was wearing a balaclava. Recognition can say as much about the recogniser as the recognised. It’s particularly true of recognising a ‘characterisation’, a fancy word for a description. When the PM was asked in a Commons committee before Christmas whether he recognised the characterisation of ‘a Blob wandering down Whitehall thwarting the ambitions of ministers’, he replied ‘No.’ He’s not the only one.

‘Macmillan,’ said my husband with rare succinctness. Someone on the wireless had just asked who it was who said: ‘Events, dear boy.’ I agreed with my husband, as in moments of weakness I do. But what is the source of the quotation? The first rule is that most common quotations were not said by the people to whom they are attributed. The second rule is like unto it: a few big names – Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde – attract quotations as magnets attract iron-filings. So, talking of iron, Churchill’s phrase the iron curtain had been used before him. It secured attention, though, when he used it in a speech at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946: ‘From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.

The Prime Minister mentioned mayoral elections the other day and he pronounced them as though they were conducted by mouth in the month of May: May-oral. There is no doubt that this is an American pronunciation, though some Americans prefer MAY-uhr-uhl to may-OR-uhl. In British English it’s MAIR-uhl. The funny pronunciation has spread to electoral, which on both sides of the Atlantic was uh-LECK-tuh-ruhl. Now broadcasters sometimes say uh-leck-TOR-ruhl. It is as if the word were somehow difficult to pronounce and might be easier if it was more like the word tutorial. Unless everyone pulls themselves together, which is unlikely, it will be impossible to resist the slide. No one can tell such words’ pronunciation merely from their spelling.

There’s a street in the City of London called Sherborne Lane. In the Middle Ages it was known as Shitteborwelane [Shitborough Lane] or Shitheburnlane. We philologists are accustomed to discussing vocabulary that is taboo because of its sexual or scatological references, and this place name is not rare in depending on a word that ‘is not generally acceptable in more formal contexts’, according to the OED. The House of Commons is a context more formal than most. But last week James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, was accused of calling out, ‘Because it’s a shithole’ in answer to Alex Cunningham, the Labour MP for Stockton North, who had asked why 34 per cent of children in his constituency were living in poverty.

‘She’ll be telling us next how lovely the word petrichor is,’ replied my husband. I had told him that the redoubtable word-collector Susie Dent had said: ‘Probably my favourite winter-word of all, apricity, is the warmth of the sun on a chilly day.’ She has been saying this every winter for years, and why not? But I agree with my husband that petrichor is overdone. It was invented in 1964 by two contributors to the science journal Nature, and signifies the smell from rain falling on dry ground. The trouble is that petr- reminds me of petrol, and ichor, the ethereal fluid supposed to flow in the veins of the gods, also means acrid discharge issuing from certain wounds.