The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’
Well, yes and no. Her children were registered as Mountbatten-Windsor at birth. That was a name invented by a declaration in the Privy Council in 1960. But Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess now and need not have a surname. The trouble is that other descendants of the late Queen made up surnames for their children. In the army, for example, the Duke of Sussex was Captain Wales.
Meanwhile the poor Duke of Sussex had resigned from the charity Sentebale that he cofounded in 2006 in honour of his mother, Diana, Princess of Wales. There has been a bust-up between the board and the chairman, Dr Sophie Chandauka. She speaks of ‘a woman who dared to blow the whistle about issues of poor governance, weak executive management, abuse of power, bullying, harassment, misogyny, misogynoir…’. The word misogynoir was minted by Moya Bailey in 2008. She helpfully explained that it is ‘a combination of misogyny, “the hatred of women”, and noir, which means “black” but also carries film and media connotations’. Perhaps so, but the word seems ill-formed. Misogynie in French is feminine, so maybe it should be misogynoire. The Greek derivation is miso, from misein, ‘to hate’. But the Greek for a black woman is melaina, so on the model of misandrist, ‘man-hater’, a hater of black women would be misomelainist.
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