From a Dunce to a Ferris Wheel

Any English word of more than three syllables - especially those derived from Latin or Greek, as so many are - can act as tripwires to the writer, or indeed to the speaker. I have just come across an instance in a story in Jeffrey Archer's Twelve Red Herrings.

In an effort, perhaps, to make his text sparkle a little, Archer writes, in connection with J B Priestley's play An Inspector Calls, "the eponymous inspector was staring into a house into which an Edwardian family were preparing for a dinner . . ." What Archer obviously means is that the Inspector referred to anonymously in the play's title was staring into a house.

But the term 'eponymous' refers either to something named after a person or place (such as a 'Ferris wheel' - named after an American engineer); or to someone who has given (?lent) his or her name to something, such as Duns Scotus, the 13th century scholar after whom a stupid person may be called a 'dunce'. It's all to do with naming, and the Inspector is not actually named either in the title of Priestley's play, or in Archer's allusion to it.

Buckingham Palace, Platonic mariage, the Maginot Line and the Davy lamp may all be termed 'eponymous'; and so, in certain contexts, may Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, Margaret Thatcher, Samuel Morse and the Bible's anti-heroine Jezebel.

From a Dunce to a Ferris Wheel

"Not 'arf I Don't !"

Agatha Christie's Death in the Clouds was first published in 1935.

In chapter 16 the Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot tries to persuade Norman Gale, a dentist by profession, to send a written message to a certain person implying that he, Norman, has knowledge of some shady deal and may choose to make it known.

Gale, an honourable man, demurs. He fears he might be accused of blackmail. Poirot assures him that he himself, well respected at Scotland Yard, will take the blame if anything goes wrong.

"Norman surrendered with a sigh. ' All right. I'll do it. But I don't half like it.' "

To us today it would seem that Christie has misunderstood the idiom don't half. To us, 'Not 'arf'' and 'don't 'arf' mean 'wholly'. Christie seems to want it to mean 'not as much as half' - that is, by implication, 'not at all'.

So either the idiom could once, early in the last century, be used to imply 'not at all'; or else Agatha was confused about the significant 'meiosis*' of the cockney phrase 'not 'arf'.

Since Agatha was a 'gentlewoman' writing in a period of strong class differences, I think it is just possible that she has got her slang muddled. But then, her character Norman Gale was himself a dentist, a professional. Perhaps Gale was the one who was muddled. Or as we might prefer to say now, 'idiomatically challenged'.

* meiosis has been defined as 'understatement so as to intensify'. Compare "I'm not feeling too well." Meion (with a long o) is Greek for less. The Greek suffix '-osis' denotes a condition or state (eg halitosis = breath condition); so meiosis = (literally) a state of lessening.

Not 'arf I Don't

No Sky Pie on the Heavenly Menu

Curiously, I have twice within the past few days seen, in print, the phrase "pie in the sky".

The curiosity consists in the apparent acceptance that the phrase as spoken should be spelt in this way. Soon, I suppose, we shall have Radio Times's consultant 'lexicographer' (sic) answering a query about the phrase's origin.

A senior pedant such as myself (senior in years, I mean, not necessarily senior in pedantry) will be aware that this started as a mildly witty (but not very well informed) tease of the Christian belief in an afterlife: "pi in the sky when you die". "Pi" in this context is not 22 divided by 7, but "piety" - especially, perhaps, the never-ending singing of hymns as described in the Book of the Revelation of St John the Divine. A "pi-jaw", a couple of generations ago, was a religious lecture, usually addressed by an earnest adult to an erring youngster. No connection with the fabled food of shepherds or Jack Horner, or the final resting-place of four and twenty blackbirds.

I am glad to note that my opinion about the spelling is supported by the latest edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: see under 'pi-jaw', a term apparently dating from the nineteenth century.

No Sky Pie on the Heavenly Menu