Mind Your Language | 24 July 2004

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.