Mind your language

“As the door turneth upon his hinges,” says the Book of Proverbs, “so doth the slothful upon his bed.” But today nothing turns, neither the door, nor the slothful, nor his ox, nor his ass. It pivots. I read in the paper that Meg O’Neill, the new CEO of BP, is “expected to double-down on the pivot back towards oil and gas.” Doubling down on a pivot must take some gymnastic skill. Saudi Arabia meanwhile is trying out a new snooker shot: “to pivot away from less lucrative projects” – such as snooker. Here the writer might as well have said “turn away,” as in the Bible. Pivot has the restrictive extra sense of remaining in one place as you turn. We English borrowed the noun pivot from the French in the 14th century, and they used it to mean “hinge.

“Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,” said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – “his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office,” according to another source of the Daily Mail’s. Every young person tries to convince their chosen “uni” that they are passionate about law or sport science. “When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,” observed Marie-Louise Eta, the football coach, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged.

The public disturbances in south London, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. “You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,” wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, “the surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.” Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three “flash mobs” were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend that began in 2003 for crowds suddenly to materialize to do something attention-seeking.

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits. Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: “When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.” A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years ago was up the Straits, meaning “in the Mediterranean.

“That’s really meta,” said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a review in the Guardian of James Acaster playing a tribute act to James Acaster and “making meta-merry in a carnival of self-satire.” We must clear the ground with a brief visit to metaphysic. This was first found in a translation made in 1387 by the estimable John Trevisa, the Cornish-born vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

‘It’s lunchtime and it’s raining. Both things can be true at the same time,’ said my husband, putting on the face that makes him look like John Betjeman on a windy day. The use of this gnomic formula has grown so popular that not many minutes go by without encountering it. Danny Fortson, in the Sunday Times, wrote: ‘If the question is “is AI ‘real’ or a bubble?”, the answer is “yes”. Both can be true.’ A leading article in the Times observed that ‘violent crime has dropped to historic lows, yet a rise in antisocial behavior has made many Londoners feel less safe. Both phenomena can be true at the same time.

Misuse of myself "should be a capital offence," suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. "As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you)," he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr. Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered. Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that "both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly." There it is used as part of a compound subject.