I’ve just been laughing at a television advertisement for ‘snail polish’.
I’ve just been laughing at a television advertisement for ‘snail polish’. It turns out to be ‘Sixty Seconds Nail Polish’. Normally when we use ‘sixty second’ adjectivally, it remains in the singular form. BBC 3 television has an item called ‘Sixty Second News’. Perhaps what has happened is that a make-up company, Rimmel, has named a product ‘Sixty Seconds’, and has then been reluctant to adjust the valuable brand-name according to the laws of grammar. Hence the polished snails.
It has not all been laughter in my sheltered life of kitchen, church and children, and I shall not even mention the election. I have been much irritated in recent days by the phrase ‘to pay down’. To me, this has always meant ‘to hand over cash’, promptly.
‘Augustus,’ wrote Nicholas Udall in his translation of Erasmus’s Apophthegmes, ‘had paied down for him out of his cofers in readie mony one hundred thousande crounes.’ In 1542, when he published that book, Udall was making a comeback, after a spell in prison after confessing ‘that he did commit buggery’ with Thomas Cheney, a pupil, ‘sundry times’.
A recent biographer of Udall has argued that buggery was a scribal slip for burglary. For the headmaster of Eton that was more excusable. Nor is the excuse quite as fanciful as it might sound, for burglary derived from the Anglo-Latin burgaria or burgeria, into which the letter l intruded in the late Middle Ages. Most people, however, still think that Udall was the first person to be charged under the Buggery Act of 1533, a pioneering piece of Henrician legislation.
In either event, Udall meant by pay down what I mean by it, not the unfamiliar sense which politicians have started using, of ‘reducing a debt by paying some back’.
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