Dot Wordsworth

‘What’s he saying now?’ asked my husband in a provoking manner when an actor read out a bit of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle on one of those excellent television programmes by Michael Wood about King Alfred. Very good the Old English sounded — a little like the Danish in The Killing. There were subtitles for those whose focus went further than their whisky glass. Despite a good deal of Viking smiting, the word Viking was not heard. It is a historian’s word, not used in English until as late as 1840. In Alfred’s day they might be called Danish and in The Battle of Maldon (about an encounter we lost in 991), they are referred to as æschere, an ‘ash-army’, from the ash-wood of their boats.

There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally as ‘virtually, as good as’ — in other words, the reverse of its established meaning. Pedants were literally up in arms (in the new sense). The funniest thing was that the offending entry in the OED had been inserted in 2011, and the pedants hadn’t noticed for a couple of years. So I thought I ought to see what else the dictionary-makers had been doing on the quiet. I started with hopefully. This word is much deplored when used to mean ‘it is to be hoped’. In that sense, it applies to the whole sentence, and is thus known as a sentence-adverb.

Alexandra Shulman was on Desert Island Discs this summer and one choice was ‘Bongo Bong’. Its words tell a simple story: ‘Mama was queen of the mambo. / Papa was king of the Congo. / Deep down in the jungle / I start bangin’ my first bongo.’ Such were his talents that: ‘Every monkey’d like to be / In my place instead of me / Cause I’m the king of bongo, baby, / I’m the king of bongo bong.’ But when he goes to the big city, ‘They say there is no place for little monkey in this town. / Nobody’d like to be / In my place instead of me.

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack,’ replied my husband unwittily when I asked how he’d feel if shale gas was discovered at the bottom of our garden. But he did illustrate why the word has proved so good for campaigners. Someone at Balcombe had painted a sign saying: ‘Frack off.’ The word enables the debate. Quibbling about hydraulic fracturing would hardly have had the same impact. In this way, fracking serves the same purpose as did bonking in the 1980s, when it purported to supply a non-moralistic term for the act. I am not sure the illusion lasted, for the parallel case of bunga bunga in Italy soon enough suggested dirty old men. However, fracking positively benefits from its taboo associations.

Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able ‘to breathe a second spring’. The phrase second spring was picked up by John Henry Newman, in 1852, to describe the re-establishment of the English Catholic hierarchy under Cardinal Wiseman. This was ‘a national commotion, almost without parallel, more violent than has happened here for centuries’, he declared.

‘Planes don’t run off batteries,’ declared my husband, his finger unerringly on the pulse of technology as ever. I had merely mentioned that two Dreamliner aircraft had earlier this year seen fire and smoke emerging from their batteries. The batteries do not make them fly, but are used for lights and brakes when the engines are not into operation. Another Dreamliner caught fire at Heathrow last week, when no one was aboard. The name Dreamliner for the Boeing 787 was settled upon in 2003 by public competition. Alternative proposals were eLiner, Global Cruiser and Stratoclimber. Those who voted for a name were put into a sweepstake, won by Ross Coogan, of Auburn, Washington. He already had some experience of naming, for his 12-year-old daughter was call Kelsea.

On 21 June 1785, James Woodforde was in Norwich and in the evening went to Bunns pleasure gardens, where ‘there was tolerable music, indifferent singing, some pretty transparencies and tolerable fire works’. These transparencies, lit from behind, depicted natural, mythological or allegorical subjects. Later, the word was transferred to magic lantern slides and in our own times to film slides projected on to screens. Today, transparency is deemed a virtue in any circumstances whatsoever. In the Guardian a few days ago, a professor of international law called in all seriousness for ‘transparency, and spies who are accountable to parliament and to the general public’.

Swathe is a popular word at the moment, and ignorance of its meaning, spelling and pronunciation deters no one. It is in the papers every day (swathes of empty seats at Wimbledon), and I was interested to hear it on the wireless the other evening pronounced to rhyme with moth. Can that be right? The army of Amurath, so Longfellow wrote in his tale of Scanderbeg, was ‘Mown down in the bloody swath/ Of the battle’s aftermath.’ That’s definitely wrong. An aftermath was the second growth of grass, after its first mowing, which is what math means. Mowing or math is what you do in a meadow. Math rhymes with path but, the OED tells me, swath can indeed thyme with moth or else with forth. In its alternative spelling, swathe, it rhymes with bathe.

Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all the odder is that some feminists had in the past 30 or 40 years adopted the spelling wimmin because it did not include the element -men. Its pronunciation didn’t include the element ‘men’, but now it is being made to. In origin, woman does not come from womb-man, but from wife-man.

An Iranian on the wireless was complaining that disqualification of presidential candidates had left voters with ‘Hobson’s choice’. No doubt this idiom was learnt from a careful teacher, but I wondered how many English people would use it or even know its meaning. All Spectator readers do, of course. In the original Spectator for 10 October 1712, Richard Steele told how ‘Tobias Hobson’ a carrier of Cambridge, hired out horses but obliged each customer ‘to take the Horse which stood next to the Stable-Door; so that every Customer was alike well served according to his Chance, and every Horse ridden with the same Justice’. So Hobson’s choice came to mean ‘this or nothing’.

‘Scatter ye rosebuds while ye may,’ sang my husband, reckless of words and tune, thereby offending the ghosts of Herrick, William Lawes and my good friend standing nonplussed on the hearthrug, who had been seeking a sympathetic ear. I really wonder if these outbursts of disinhibition indicate the onset of dementia. My friend had been complaining that she had sent off her new book to the publisher, and that, when it came back, commas had been scattered throughout the text in a most ludicrous way. Thus when she wrote of ‘a meagre light-industrial estate’, it had been turned into ‘a meagre, light-industrial estate’, as if it might have been another kind of estate entirely and still meagre.

Last August President Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. He repeated the phrase in December: red line. Why should the line be red and what happens if it is crossed? A simple, unhelpful answer is that the metaphor is taken from a safety gauge indicating a maximum speed, for an aeroplane perhaps, or for an engine’s revolutions. The big fat Oxford Dictionary in 20 volumes traces that figurative use back to the 1970s. But it seems at odds with a warning against chemical weapons. If Assad loosed off clouds of deadly gas, Mr Obama wouldn’t shout ‘Hey, slow down!’ Nor is the Obama red line related to the thin red line presented by the British Army to the Russians.

‘One good term deserves another,’ said my husband in his infuriating way of almost making a joke. As he was talking to the wireless, it hardly mattered. His provocation, a serious one, I admit, was someone saying ‘in terms of’ when she meant no such thing. It is happening more and more, and my husband’s response is unvarying. It can’t go on. If any meaning can be ascertained in the misuse of in terms of, perhaps ‘as for’ is the one often intended. Instead of saying: ‘As for a cheap holiday, you’ve left it too late’, people say: ‘In terms of a cheap holiday...’.

Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The Wedding Guest in Coleridge’s rime had his own ideas about care in the community: ‘Get thee hence, thou grey-beard Loon,’ he cried, to little enough effect, it must be admitted. But what did he mean by loon? The Ancient Mariner was not being ‘diagnosed with lunacy’, as Coleridge would certainly not have put it.

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending a woman ‘who worked in a grocery store near Eton’. The Americans have been calling a grocer’s a grocery for some time, and a baker’s a bakery. Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, noticed it in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a decade later Dickens wrote of the Americans’ ‘Bakery’, ‘Grocery’, and ‘Bookbindery’.

In the days when we had bottles of milk delivered, some tits discovered how to peck through the foil tops and consume the cream beneath. Suddenly all the tits were at it. This illustrated what the alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance. Something similar has happened over the past days with the phrase game-changing. Trevor Kavanagh, in the Sun, commented: ‘The local elections delivered a ground-breaking, game-changing, seismic political moment.’ In the Independent, Donald Macintyre compared ‘Ukip’s position to that of the game-changing SDP’. Except, in the days of the Gang of Four, the obligatory epithet was not game-changing but breaking the mould. That metaphor was used erroneously almost from the outset.

‘A cab?’ said my husband. ‘Was the Underground out of order?’ I had been telling him about an interesting notice that I’d seen in a taxi, but he’d chosen to focus on thrift — never mind that I’d fought my way back from John Lewis with an extendable paint roller, a tray and 2.5 litres of Dawn Blue eggshell. And guess who’s going to be using it. The interesting notice I’d seen was: ‘Black Cabs just got easier.’ It was an advertisement for the Hailo mobile app, but that wasn’t what interested me. The tense was the thing. It was the simple past, got, where one would expect the perfect have got. Ah, you may say, it is merely that the auxiliary, have, has been omitted.

In the sobriquet Iron Lady, isn’t lady too deferential for a mocking nickname? Its author, Yuri Gavrilov, hardly knew that in current English, lady is a genteelism when used by those who fear that if they say woman it will be taken as an accusation that someone is no lady. This has had the perverse effect that those who normally call women women still call the cleaning woman the cleaning lady. It was in the Red Star newspaper dated 24 January 1976 that Margaret Thatcher, when leader of the opposition, was called zheleznaya dama, ‘iron lady’. The iron part had parallels in the Iron Chancellor Bismarck or the Iron Duke of Wellington.

Ian Hislop mocked Stephen Mangan, when he put in a turn as the man asking the questions on Have I Got News For You last week, for saying ‘masination’ (for machination), but Hislop himself used the unjustified modern pronunciation ‘mashination’. The version with ‘mash-’ is not known for sure until 1961, although a book published in 1931, The BBC’s Recommendations for Pronouncing Difficult Words (which I recommend to Mr Hislop) stipulates the traditional pronunciation (‘makination’). This suggests that people were already going wrong in those days. Pronouncing the first syllable as ‘mash’ came about through the influence of machine. Pronouncing words that we have only seen in print is a problem for us all.