The film Around the World in Eighty Days, though identified as a turkey by the taxonomists of the critics’ circle, took more money in Britain last week than any film but one, with incalculable effects on the English language. But before I drone on about that, let me mention a satisfying sighting of well reported by Mr Robin Taylor of Blackburn. It is from Thomas Hardy’s poem on the loss of the Titanic, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Mr Taylor mentions it as an example of Hardy incorporating everyday speech, but I was surprised by the proportion of elevated ‘poetic diction’ in the composition, even if Hardy knew what he was at.
Naturally the management of the universe comes in for criticism, through a conceit perhaps taken from Plato’s concept of the ‘other half’, in pursuit of which men are supposed to be forever engaged. In any case, Hardy develops the fancy that while the Titanic was a-building, its appointed iceberg was growing to ripeness. He begins his narrative section thus:
Well: while was fashioning
This creature of cleaving wing,
The Immanent Will that stirs and urges everything
Prepared a sinister mate
For her — so gaily great —
A Shape of Ice, for the time far and dissociate.
And as the smart ship grew
In stature, grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Now read on. And so back to around, for this is an American usage that is tending, like some Japanese knotweed, to displace round in English where before it was the autochthonous growth. Last week in the Daily Telegraph I read of the first blind person to ‘fly around Britain’. I’m not sure what this really meant anyway, but the writer would ordinarily have said ‘round Britain’ if he meant circumnavigation.
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