I feel flattered to think that Ed Miliband was inspired by my column of 31 March to invent a word for his speech at the Stock Exchange earlier this month. I had written, after Theresa May denounced preloading, that it was ‘easy to tack pre- on to words’. I forgot to advise that some meaning should be predetermined for the word.
But to use a word that no one knows the meaning of is quite in the spirit of the radical 17th century. Owen Felltham (1602-68), for example, a man who kept on writing the same book, which he called Resolves, invented, for the edition of 1628, the word disdeify, which is plain enough. In the eighth edition, of 1661, he wrote: ‘Wealth in a miser’s hand is useless’, a sentence that might attract Mr Miliband, and, on the same page: ‘Wisdome and Science are worth nothing, unlesse they be distributive.’ In the sense that he appears to have intended, the word distributive was then unknown, though the thought was a commonplace, often expressed in the Latin tag bonum diffusivum sui, which derives from the Pseudo-Dionysius in the fifth century.
Anyway, Felltham would have loved Mr Miliband’s notion of predistribution, for he had given thought to the far more troubling question of predestination. His neat tripartite formulation was: ‘I hold man saved to be the subject of predestination. I believe no man saved but by God’s mercy; no man damned, but by his own default.’ For God read the state, and for predestination read predistribution.
As it happened, predistribution was used only four times in Mr Miliband’s speech, but the phrase ‘is about’ was used five times. Supporting Britain ‘is about’ something, Labour’s agenda ‘is about’ another thing and predistribution ‘is about’ saying something else.
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