Mind your language | 5 February 2011

The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian of language examining the speeches of politicians to gauge the linguistic habits of the ruling class. Nothing could be more misleading.

The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian of language examining the speeches of politicians to gauge the linguistic habits of the ruling class. Nothing could be more misleading.

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Ed West

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Samuel Johnson would sit in Edmund Cave’s office above that strange medieval survival, St John’s Gate, Clerkenwell, making up parliamentary speeches for the Gentleman’s Magazine from notes brought to him by men who’d heard them. Now we have verbatim transcripts of speeches (the important ones never made in Parliament), but we know they are not written by the people who deliver them. As for the statement on Egypt, it was made jointly with Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel, written in a language never spoken by human lips, excepting those of diplomatic spokesmen.

So what are ‘legitimate grievances’? Legitimate has branched out since Dr Johnson in his dictionary gave it the sole meaning: ‘born in marriage; lawfully begotten’. I remember seeing some touching 17th-century portraits in Madrid of nuns in the Spanish empire. An inscription on each gave name and dates and the status hija legitima, ‘legitimate daughter’. Actually, the term already had a wider meaning in Latin: legitimus also meant ‘legally competent’, so for some purposes a man under 18 would not be a legitimate agent — or voter.

In English, doctors used legitimate as a synonym for exquisite (borrowing from the second-century Galen) in the sense of ‘genuine’, as opposed to bastard: ‘An exquisite differs from a bastard Tertian,’ says John Smith in his Compleat Practice of Physick (1656), a handy distinction if you are troubled by the ague.