Dot Wordsworth

‘Hang on,’ said my husband. ‘That’s not right. I’ve read that book.’ He had too, the book being The Hooligan Nights. It purported to be an account of a young hooligan from Lambeth called Alf, and was published in 1899, a year after the feared and anathematised youths came to prominence in the press. The frontispiece was a drawing by William Nicholson showing the type: long-headed with a forelock over the low brow; wearing the check muffler fashionable among the gangs. The Daily Telegraph reported in August 1898 that the hooligan’s ‘crop-and-fly-flap’ haircut cost sixpence, when an ordinary haircut was only twopence.

I used to avoid paying tax. I opened an Isa for my pitiful savings, for example, to avoid tax on the interest. But now I daren’t say I avoid tax because HMRC is encouraging people to report me for it. ‘Report tax fraud or avoidance,’ is the headline on a public-service government website. ‘Report a person or business you think is not paying enough tax or is committing another type of fraud,’ it urges. In the past, it seemed clear. The Oxford English Dictionary says: ‘tax avoidance n. the arrangement of financial affairs so as to reduce tax liability within the law. tax evasion n. the reduction of tax payments by misstatement of income or other illegal means.

The Chinese emporium where I buy balloons for my husband thinks I am a laughing-gas addict, I buy so many. My husband blows a few up and pops one each time he hears a chosen phrase on the radio. This week it is lived experience. From the kitchen, his explosions sound like a shooting party. He thinks it’s funny. I am his only audience. I’ve found a written source to draw on without any balloon popping. It is from Inclusive Minds, which is credited with helping the publishers of Roald Dahl, who have been rewriting his children’s books. It has a ‘network of Inclusion Ambassadors’ – ‘young people with many different lived experiences who are willing to share their insight’. ‘They are not sensitivity readers.’ No.

‘You rocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,’ exclaimed my husband, misquoting Shakespeare as though it were an improvement. In English a rock is different from a stone and it can be annoying when news reports, especially on radio and television, speak of crowds throwing rocks. This Americanism has not yet ousted stones in British English. ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the dialect of the people in the westernmost states, to call small stones rocks,’ wrote the Revd Samuel Parker in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838). My husband had been set off by a report from France. During the disorder there, the offices in Nice of the leader of the Républicains, Eric Ciotti, were attacked.

‘Can you read Dickens’s handwriting?’ asked a blogger. Underneath was a picture of his manuscript for chapter 23 of Oliver Twist. It looked easy enough to read: ‘If the village had been beautiful at first it was now in the full slow and luxuriance of its richness.’  No, slow couldn’t be right. Must be flow. But no. The published text tells me it is ‘full glow and luxuriance’. I should have seen it the first time, for even in one paragraph of Dickens’s writing, it is obvious that he made his gs like a descending s or a barless f. When a g was joined to the preceding letter, he would carry the stroke up and into a tight anticlockwise loop, then plunge down to make the tail.

‘The Royal Pavilion in Brighton is a palace on a Steine,’ said my husband in a dislocated response to learning that East Palestine, Ohio, is pronounced ‘palace-steen’. We’d never heard of the place, pop. 4,761, before a train crashed there, letting out fumes. Its name sounded like a claim to be further east than the original Palestine, but it turns out that when the village changed its name from Mechanicsburg in 1875, the post office added the label East to distinguish it from an existing Palestine in Ohio (pop. today 180).

Listeners to Today last week were fascinated by an item about foreign words with no equivalent in English that must be translated by a whole sentence. If brunch is an example of a portmanteau word, these are, I think, examples of holdall words, packed full of meaning. Merriam-Webster, the dictionary people, had asked for examples and hundreds came in. One mentioned last week by Susie Dent, for 30 years the denizen of Dictionary Corner on Countdown, was ranço, from Brazilian Portuguese, with the apparent meaning ‘an irrational dislike of someone innocuous’. But, Brazilian or not, ranço means ‘rancidity’. It comes from Latin rancidus, which already meant ‘offensive’ in addition to the literally rancid. From the Latin rancor, ‘rancidity’, English derives rancour.

‘Only one biscotto!’ exclaimed my husband, grabbing a little packet labelled ‘Biscotti’ at the station coffee stall. It fell from his agitated fingers and broke into two. ‘There you are, darling, two biscotti,’ I said cheerfully, to his annoyance. But singulars and plurals for foodstuffs are seldom simple. Take macaroni. It is an obsolete form of maccheroni in Italian, ‘tubular pasta’. But Italians hardly think of talking of one maccherone. It’s a funny word anyway. An origin is seriously proposed in the Greek makarios, ‘blessed’, and aionios, ‘eternal’, which together named a funeral chant. I suppose macaroni was consumed after the funeral, as we do ham sandwiches.

‘Slither, slather, sliver, slaver, slabber, slobber,’ chanted my husband from the armchair beside his glass of whisky, to a little tune he had composed all by himself. The occasion for this outburst was a seventh item of slip-slop vocabulary: a newspaper reference to a slice of bread ‘lathered in mayonnaise’. I think it might just have been a misprint for slathered. Slather has been used for less than a century to mean ‘spread or splash liberally on’. The OED illustrates its fundamental meaning of ‘slip’ with a Kipling quotation: ‘I hate slathering through fluff.’ This is not very illuminating, since fluff is dry, not slippery. But the quotation comes from a story published in 1905, ‘With the Night Mail’, a futuristic tale of a transatlantic airship set in 2000.

‘What does it mean by faggot?’ asked my husband when I showed him a newspaper item headed ‘Champion faggot’. The cutting, from the Northern Daily Mail for 6 November 1897, was sent to me by the historian Andrew McCarthy who had found the headline when looking for something else, and had no idea what it meant either, until he sensibly looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary. There it explains that (when votes depended on property), a faggot was ‘a vote for a particular candidate or party fraudulently contrived by nominally transferring sufficient property to a person who would not otherwise be qualified’.

Anthony Horowitz (Diary, 4 February) tells us he was advised by a ‘sensitivity reader’ to remove the word scalpel from a book with a Native American character lest it suggest scalps (though the words are unrelated). I’ve stumbled across the birth of a new forbidden phrase on Twitter, that social media swamp for the older swampster: knocked up. A California lawyer called Johnathan Perk declares in a tweet: ‘The phrase “knocked up”, referring to pregnancy, originated with US slavery. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the expression back to 1813. Back then the price of enslaved African women was “knocked up” by the auctioneer when she was pregnant – promoted as a deal for buyers.

‘I don’t mind when a Scotsman says it,’ remarked my husband magnanimously. The ethnically sensitive word in question was outwith. The Stornoway Gazette announced in 1998: ‘On Christmas Day and outwith these hours, arrangements to have urgent prescriptions dispensed may be made by ’phoning 701472.’ I like the apostrophe in ’phoning. Short for telephoning, as ’bus is for omnibus. Good writers use outwith. ‘He’d wanted to buy a place there, but it had been too isolated for his wife – and outwith their means anyway,’ wrote Ian Rankin in Dead Souls (1999).

‘Claiming that I am a drag Queen or “performed” as a drag Queen is categorically false,’ tweeted the US Representative George Santos last week. ‘I will not be distracted nor fazed by this.’ ‘Wow, George Santos did something interesting!’ responded Stephen Colbert on the Late Show. ‘All his other lies are super-boring, like “I worked at a bank”.’ After yet another tennis match that went on into the early hours, Andy Murray’s brother Jamie said: ‘I’m sure you guys had to stay up super-late.’ Leicester is ‘one of two “super-diverse” cities in the UK’, wrote someone in the Guardian, while the Sun encouraged readers to ‘fill in the super-quick and straightforward three-step form’. Super is on everyone’s lips, and it’s annoying.

In 1625 John Donne said: ‘As Manna tasted to every man like that he liked best, so doe the Psalmes administer instruction, and satisfaction, to every man, in every emergency and occasion.’ I’m not sure where Donne got this idea about manna, but I wonder whether C.S. Lewis had it in mind when he wrote in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe about Turkish delight that was enchanted, so ‘anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves’. Anyway, when Donne spoke of an emergency he did not mean something out of ER, but more a circumstance or juncture, indeed an occasion.

‘Is it sponsored by the oil people?’ my husband asked as we drove into London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone, past a sign: ‘ULEZ.’ Naturally his words reflected mental confusion, but I had some sympathy for his presumption that the acronym was pronounced to rhyme with the French verb culer, ‘make sternway’. By oil he was not referring to anything to do with engines but to what we both remember as Oil of Ulay. In different countries it was called Oil of Olay, Oil of Olaz or Oil of Olan. Suddenly, at the millennium it became Olay, just before Jif became Cif. Cif cleans the kitchen floor. Olay is for the skin and used to be advertised as producing ‘a younger-looking you’. It was invented by a South African chemist called Graham Wulff (1916-2008).

‘It’s very annoying when someone pulls a grape or two off the bunch,’ said my husband, glowering at the ‘obscenely’ denuded pedicels. To him it is a crime not to break off a cluster or cut its peduncle with grape-scissors. For me a far more annoying trend is to use bunch in a strange new way. We are used to bunches of grapes with natural connections or bunches of radishes connected by being tied together. We have absorbed the application of bunch to socially connected groups, as in The Wild Bunch (film, 1969) or any old bunch of idiots. But now it is used as a synonym for lots. ‘You spend a bunch of money without getting the benefit,’ I read in the Guardian.

‘Homer, the poet?’ asked my husband, puzzled, as he often is. He was responding to my scornful observation that the Cambridge Dictionary had chosen homer as its word of the year for 2022. The reason was merely that it had figured as the answer to a Wordle puzzle and many people did not know what it meant, so looked it up. The homer in question was presumed to be a home run in baseball. The poet would not qualify, being a proper name. He does however find a place in the Oxford English Dictionary under nod, since Homer nods became a proverb, taking its cue from the Ars Poetica of Horace: Indignor quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus; ‘I feel aggrieved when sometimes even excellent Homer falls asleep.

Something has gone wrong with the use of quite. Someone wrote in the Telegraph: ‘Beating Brazil at a World Cup? Quite the experience.’ Then I heard: ‘It’s been quite the dreich day.’ The annoying part is the the. An idiom does exist with quite the, but the meaning is different. If my husband displayed his portly figure in a snug piece of fashion, I might be tempted to say: ‘You’re quite the Beau Brummell this evening.’ But if the afternoon is sunny, then it’s ‘quite a sunny afternoon’. Quite, as an adverb, possesses two main contrasting senses: ‘completely’ or ‘comparatively’. Quite exhausted could mean ‘utterly exhausted’ or ‘fairly exhausted’.

‘Jersey Royals are easy-peelers and I don’t fancy one in my stocking,’ said my husband, lapsing into sense. I had been complaining about supermarkets labelling all little orange citrus fruits ‘easy-peelers’. We have called oranges oranges since the 14th century. The bitter orange became known as the Seville orange. Both Thomas Nashe and Shakespeare joked at the end of the 16th century about being civil like an orange. In contrast, the sweet kind was known as a China orange.

I’ve heard two people in the past week make a jocular remark about things just growing ‘Like Topsy’. They were both life peers as it happens, Lady Altmann and Lord Norton of Louth. Is one still allowed to make this proverbial reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin? In a way the simile is the same as saying something is like the curate’s egg meaning ‘good in parts’, even though the curate’s egg was nothing but bad. The orphan Topsy said she expects she just grow’d, though naturally she did once have a mother. Asked where she was born, Topsy insists: ‘Never was born!’ This reminds me of The Caretaker, where Aston asks the drifter Davies: ‘Where were you born then?’ To which he replies (darkly): ‘What do you mean?