Dot Wordsworth

‘The festive decoration of my childhood Christmases,’ wrote Geoff Cunnington (Letters, 26 September), ‘featured a concertina-like, bell-shaped paper object which my mother called a “whim-wom”.’ This fits in with the use of whim-wham as ‘a trifling ornament’ (12 September). That was in the 17th century, but it has survived in a deliberately obscure context: an answer to children asking what you are making. In the form a wing-wong for a goose’s bridle, it was investigated by the brilliant Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog. Subscribers reported its use in Australia, though it was not invented there. Since the original term whim-wham was unfamiliar, it was sometimes turned into wigwam.

Would you blush to admit you lived in Crotch Crescent in Oxford? Once again, newspaper stories have sprouted about rude-sounding place-names. It all seems rather artificial. What happens is that a company seeking publicity (this time a financial products outfit) finds a list of place-names that could be taken as rude. They get a survey company to show the list to innocent bystanders, who say which they find rudest. Newspapers obligingly publish the graded list as though it were news: Fanny Avenue, Crotch Crescent, Titty Hill, Wetwang, Shitterton… down to Jackass Avenue and Great Snoring. (Are those two even rude?) In truth, Crotch Crescent is named after a child prodigy and composer, William Crotch (1775-1847).

Playbooks are proliferating like cookbooks. In the past fortnight or so I’ve come across: the counter-hybrid playbook, the wartime playbook, the Coldplay playbook, the preppy-meets-sporty playbook, Hitler’s playbook, the Ben Stokes playbook and the nepo-baby playbook. I used to think that the rather thumbed metaphor of playbook referred to a book of words containing the script or libretto. After all, book of words or book of the words has often been used figuratively to mean ‘the rules’. In Money in the Bank (1942), P.G. Wodehouse has Dolly Molloy exclaim: ‘There’s nothing in the book of the words to prevent Mrs Cork having the bozo pinched and stowed away in the cooler.’ In the medieval theatre the literal playbook was looked after by the garnement man, the props man.

The present Lord Howard de Walden’s first name is not Howard. It’s Peter, for the 11th Baron is the film-maker Peter Czernin. In 2004, the barony of Howard de Walden was called out of abeyance in favour of the 9th Baron’s eldest daughter, who married Joseph Czernin. All this spoils it for the Financial Times, which refers to peers according to this pattern: Lord Peter Mandelson. That is not English. Lord Peter Mandelson would be the son of a duke or marquess, like Lord Peter Wimsey, the younger son of the Duke of Denver. My husband has been driven to incoherent rage by wireless announcers talking of Lady Victoria Starmer, the wife of the former PM, and making things worse by referring to her as the First Lady. In America the First Lady is the wife of the head of state.

An intelligent reader is annoyed by whimsy. ‘Clothes, interiors, children’s birthdays… it’s everywhere!’ she exclaims. ‘What is whimsy anyway?’ It is indeed everywhere. ‘Whimsy has been institutionalised,’ wrote James Marriott in the Times, its symptoms including Larry the Downing Street Cat and the saintly Paddington Bear. This recognises a modern side to whimsy that is sentimental and twee. But to me its historical side acquires interest from a remark in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.’ Flim-flam was only one such reduplication with a vowel variation expressive of contempt.

‘It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing,’ George Orwell declared in Homage to Catalonia when he came across ‘a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint.’ He’d got it wrong. It wasn’t a harrow but a threshing-sledge, to be pulled by oxen or mules, to separate wheat from chaff. It was easier than beating the corn with a flail. The threshing could thus be done by old people and children riding on the sledges. The sledges, now seen in museums, are called trillos in Spanish.

Error sticks to the word taxi like ants to an echidna’s tongue. Ten years ago I wrote here that I’d heard a cabby on the wireless explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. This blunder swarms all over the internet. ‘At the end of the 18th century,’ goes one version, ‘the Thurn und Taxis family, who managed thousands of carriages and horses with which they distributed mail, decided to diversify their business, using their network and their vehicles also for passenger transport… Their name, Taxis, may have inspired the modern term taxi…’ But it didn’t. The Thurn und Taxis family did run international postal services under the Habsburgs. Their family names meant Tower and Badger, but they did not invent those either.

The Cornish pasty shop that I often walk past has not been the most enticing venue during the recent hot weather. ‘Crimped by hand,’ is the claim in the window. I wondered whether the thumbprints of the pasty-makers are discernible, but my curiosity was not great enough to make me buy one. The toothpaste-tube community is the other great area of interest in crimping. Toothpaste tubes are crimped shut at one end. People who are annoyed by the amount of toothpaste that resists removal from the tube are ready to invest small sums on devices to squeeze it out. These are often said to crimp the tube flat as the paste is used. Some are designed like the keys for rolling up the tops of sardine tins.

‘Well, we all have areas of ignorance,’ said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realising that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin. Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium bc. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

Modern Toss was invented in 2004 as the label for a series of cartoons by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage. Many use foul language and some are very funny. Under the category of Work, a man says to a person sitting at a desk: ‘I think I’ll go home. I’m a bit bored.’ As often in satire, reality has imitated art. I assume the title Modern Toss coincides in meaning with an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary from 2007 giving an ‘additional sense’ for toss. An illustrative quotation came from Viz for 7 December 1990: ‘See this book Tom… Yes, I’ve read it actually. Yeah. Me n’all. Right load of toss, isn’t it. But at 16 quid a throw, he must be coining it in.’ The dictionary, in suggesting an etymology, invokes a letter from 1915 by Lytton Strachey quoted in P.N.

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant, but, not inviting others to eat, he alone ate. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632-95). Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once.

In 1969, The Spectator’s leading article appeared on the cover. The first of that year was headed ‘The Old Boys’ Club’ and declared: ‘The Commonwealth is an Old Boys’ Club, whose members’ only universal characteristic is the entitlement to wear the Old British Colonials’ tie.’ Last week Nicola Sturgeon, responding to remarks by Sir David Davis in the Commons in which he accused her of lying, got her lawyers to issue a statement: ‘This member of the “Old Boys Club” has been spreading conspiracy theories on behalf of the late Alex Salmond since 2021.’ No apostrophe this time. Perhaps lawyers charge extra for those. An old boys’ club is different from a boys’ club – or in the north, a lads’ club.

When my husband asked me whether I knew any mathematics at all, I replied by telling him that I had been a properly brought-up girl. The cause of our little wrangle was the phrase vanishingly unlikely. A newspaper article on scams pointed out that ‘only a tiny minority of oil workers are women, meaning it is vanishingly unlikely to meet a real one online’. Another said that ‘Britain is vanishingly unlikely to meet Nato’s target of spending 5 per cent of GDP on national security by 2035.’ In both those examples, vanishingly is used in the sense ‘infinitesimally’. But the meaning properly wanted here is ‘hugely’ or ‘almost infinitely’ unlikely. It is the likelihood that is vanishingly small. The unlikelihood is very great.

‘If I hear anyone say Manchesterism again, I will…’ said my husband, leaving his thought unfinished, and slipping, rather easily, into the role of Lear in his impotence. I had no intention of explaining to him what Andy Burnham means by Manchesterism. No one knows – perhaps not even he. But the word has been around since 1883, when it was reputed to be a system that ‘enriched the few at the expense of the many’. That had been the charge against its inventors, Richard Cobden and John Bright, whom Disraeli accused in 1846 of being ‘Gentlemen of the Manchester School, who believe they may fight hostile tariffs with free imports’.

Andy Burnham must feel the burden of the sobriquet with which he has been saddled: King of the North. It is recognised as a joky reference to Game of Thrones, even though in that series and the novels by George R.R. Martin that inspired it, the title is King in the North. The North has a reputation for being stern and hard, with moorlands and mountains and a harsh climate; a wall across the land protects it from alien dangers even further north. The people of the North stand out by their accents. All this is also true of Martin’s fantasy land. There is in addition a King-beyond-the-Wall (John Swinney?). On the television, Robb Stark, King in the North, marches south but is betrayed and killed, and with him are slaughtered most of the Northmen in the South.

Thank heaven my husband doesn’t even pretend to like football. Indeed he emphasises his indifference by making ironic remarks like: ‘Poor old Ivory Coast was robbed.’ The World Cup has brought out the Babel in naming countries. Do we call them by the established English names or by what they call themselves? Ivory Coast, which has French as its official language, calls itself Côte d’Ivoire. (Diacritics cause online complications, as with plucky little Curaçao, which I heard referred to as ‘Cure-a-cow’.) Fifa too employs the home-grown Côte d’Ivoire, but BBC News and BBC Sport call it Ivory Coast. To us it is obvious that Germany is not Deutschland and Spain is not España. As names used by those outside, Germany and Spain are known as exonyms.

‘Don’t they speak English?’ asked my husband, tossing over a copy of the Daily Mail as though it were my fault. The headline read: ‘Missing in action’. It referred to Dan Jarvis disappearing from view in his new job as Defence Secretary. The headline writers should know that, militarily, those missing in action are presumed dead. The Mail meant Awol – absent without leave. I mentioned this ignorant error here in 2022. In 2024 I remarked how odd it was that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should say about mob violence outside a migrant hotel near Rotherham: ‘It is organised, violent thuggery.’ Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it.

My husband’s task was a simple one: to buy a couple of bottles of water from the Morrisons opposite the station in case there was no buffet service on board (which would have made a waterless three-hour journey torture). If the train had left on time, he’d have missed it, but he came puffing up the steps full of talk about a ‘meal deal’ and proffering some Walkers crisps. Luckily for him he had also bought water, but what caught my eye was the labelling on the crisps: ‘Grab bag.’ I was aware of the term meaning an emergency bag containing food, water and first aid supplies, which would be kept near the door in emergency or war. A packet of crisps would hardly be a substitute.

‘That’s not a facepalm,’ said my husband. ‘It’s a headslap.’ He proved the point by making contact between the flat of his hand and his noble brow, producing a percussive sound. Then he covered his eyes with outstretched fingers and said: ‘That’s a facepalm.’ He was right to make a semantic distinction between these two non-verbal gestures. The headslap signifies usually comic frustration at another’s stupidity. The facepalm conveys embarrassment. The names are recent. Facepalm is not found earlier than 1996 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Those who like to employ emojis (which I do not) will find one for the job. The headslap has not yet been noticed by the OED.

‘Italians are not inventing any new words,’ the head of the Italian language academy told the Telegraph. ‘They’re not creating anything. They take everything from English.’ Professor Paolo D’Achille is the head of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583. Crusca means ‘bran’, which is what the academy wants to keep out of the fine flour of Italian. English is of course bran. There was a big hoo-ha in Italy a decade ago when a recruiting poster appealed to young people: ‘Be cool and join the navy.’ I suppose there’d be a bigger hoo-ha in Britain if a recruiting poster was printed in German. These things have their degrees of unacceptability.