‘We got a gusher!’ exclaimed my husband in his idea of the accent of a Texan oil prospector. Normally, I’m not ashamed of his deranged behaviour, but now it seemed wrong. For we were watching the hypnotic livestream from Westminster Hall of people paying their respects at Queen Elizabeth’s coffin.
There was many a tear in the eye, but the convention was not to blub openly. Every now and then, a loyal subject shed tears freely and my husband would croak out his cruel cry.
Almost as annoying as his private discourtesy were self-deprecatory remarks by the mourning public that they were welling up. It is as if cry and weep did not exist. The shortest verse in the Bible would be a word longer in a future easy-language version as: ‘Jesus welled up.’ (The International Standard Version already has ‘Jesus burst into tears.’)
In coverage of the service at St Paul’s, one broadsheet had the headline: ‘Congregation well up as choir sing.’ Underneath, the report said: ‘Members of the congregation were tearful through the service as the choir sang. One woman was seen using a handkerchief to wipe her eyes.’ There you go, then.
I suppose I don’t like the idea of a person welling up. Tears have long welled up. Chaucer has someone’s heart becoming less swollen through tears ‘that gonnen up to welle’. For centuries, water, smoke, blood and lava welled up. But a person welling up is not recorded before 1989, of all places in a translation of Achilles Tatius, a Greek novelist from Alexandria in the 2nd century after Christ.
How foreigners cope with well up, I can’t imagine. In, ‘He had been doing well up to now,’ it has a completely different sense from, ‘He was well up in local history,’ let alone, ‘We are well up for the football challenge.’
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