Do you Require a Clue ?

What is a 'metaphor' ? It comes from an ancient Greek term that describes using one idea to describe another.

The concept depends on the fact that it is often helpful to explain something in terms of something else that it reminds you of. "She swept into the room . . . " Don't you know that 'whooshing' movement that you associate with the flourish of a broom as it stirs up the dust ? "Swallow your pride"; "Head of the queue"; "The joke fell flat"; "I'm not a mind-reader, you know"; "You paint a very gloomy picture"; "I don't much like the sound of that".

"Sailing close to the wind" may not ring a bell with landlubbers, but even if you have only done a little sailing in a dinghy, you will be aware of the risk of a gybing boom banging you on the head if you alter direction carelessly when tacking. ("Changing tack" is a familiar metaphor too.)

We don't only find metaphor in cliches* and proverbs and phrases. There are some single words whose main use nowadays is metaphoric, while the original metaphor is quite forgotten.

'Require' is one. We usually use it to mean 'need' or 'necessitate.' "To replace the blade you will require a half-inch spanner." "Entry to the event requires a ticket". "The matter requires investigation". But the basic meaning of 'require' is to 'ask for' or to 'seek' (from the Latin verb quaero/quaest-: think of our derivatives 'quest' and 'question').

Clue is another. A clue (or clew) used, in Old English, to mean a ball, such as the ball of yarn that the legendary Greek hero Theseus unwound as he entered the Cretan labyrinth so that he would be able to find his way out again. The term came to mean anything that helps to solve a problem.

* 'Cliche' is a metaphor too, a French word referring to the block or plate from which pictures are mechanically reproduced or 'stereotyped**', lots of them, all identical.

** So is 'stereoptype', of course.

*** A few weeks after writing this I received in the post a form to fill in (to do with a certain health survey). The covering letter ends with the statement, in large black type, "IF YOU REQUIRE THIS INFORMATION IN LARGE PRINT PLEASE CALL . . . .(phone number)". Since two Latinate syllables are always regarded by officials as double the value of a single old English one, 'require' (or perhaps 'desire') takes the place of cheap, old-fashioned 'need' or 'want'. [Hint for drafters of formal letters who are paid by the syllable: 'Desiderate' has four syllables, so might make a suitable replacement for 'desire'.]

Do you Require a Clue ?

Suffer, let, allow, permit

In our local church there hangs, on a wall near the font, a very home-made-looking board framing a text in capital letters, SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME.

I remember that when I was a small boy the word 'suffer' in that particular context was puzzling. To suffer meant (to me, at that time) to feel pain. I supposed that Jesus's words showed that he was particularly anxious to help little children who suffered: what, I wondered, might be the nature of their suffering ?

Eventually I became aware that our verb 'to suffer' meant also to 'allow', to 'let', to 'permit'.

'Suffer' was not an Old English word, but one based on the Latin verb suffero, made up of a prefix sub-, meaning 'under', and a verb fero meaning to 'bear, carry' - much the same idea as our verb 'tolerate'. When you suffer from an injury or an insult, you 'put up with it' or 'allow it', however reluctantly. As early as the Middle English period (say, the fourteenth century) our word 'suffer' meant either 'put up with, endure'; or 'allow, permit, let'.

'Let' has an interesting history. We have two verbs to 'let', both derived from old English (probably anciently connected), but now with quite separate meanings. The first of these verbs has a set of related senses: to permit; or to to release (to 'let' go); or to offer the use of a room or house in return for payment. The second is to hinder - as survives as a term in the game of tennis when the ball just served hits the net on the way over, and in the phrase 'let or hindrance'.
'Allow' is stranger still. It derives from the Old French verb alouer, itself evolved from the ancient Latin allaudere, meaning to praise, commend, approve (from L noun lauda = praise). The word 'allow' has weakened over the centuries, and far from implying 'praise' can be used now to denote grudging, disapproving, permisson: "I suppose so, if you really have to".

To 'permit' is also Latin-based, and carries the notion of 'official authority'. The Latin verb mittere means to 'send'. A person on a 'mission' was authorised, probably had a royal passport in the name of His or Her Britannic Majesty. We see this in the noun, a 'permit', a written authority. "I am afraid that smoking is not permitted" is the polite but pompous way of saying "You can't smoke here: the authorities say so."

Suffer, let, allow, permit

Where the Kerb Leads

I came across a copy of the rules governing Norwich diocesan churchyards yesterday. It wasn't very exciting, but I did notice that new graves must not be marked by 'kerbs'. This set me wondering how the term 'kerb' originated: it doesn't look like Old English or Latin, which are where most of our English words come from.

Various etymological dictionaries tell us that it is just a variant spelling (dating from the 17th century) of the word 'curb', meaning to cut short. Well, that doesn't look very like Old English or Latin either, so I consulted the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Here I found a curious piece of lexicography. The verb 'to curb', the SOED informs us, originates from the noun 'curb'. And where does that noun originate ? Probably from the verb 'to curb', the dictionary suggests. There is also a throw-away recommendation to the enquirer: 'Cf CRUB'. So we look up 'crub', only to find that it is a dialect variation of the noun 'curb'. Aha.

The modern Dictionary of Word Origins by John Ayto (1990) and the Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories (2002) follow Wyld's Universal Dictionary of the English Language (1932) and Skeat's Etymological Dictionary (2nd edn, 1888) in deriving the verb 'curb' from French courber = to bend something, itself evolved from L curvare = to bend, curve.

Pedants may be interested to know that the medieval Latin curba or courba was used to denote a curved bit of wood used in a boat or in the mechanism of a mill or in plough-harness. Curb was also used to mean a certain part of a bridle, so that the verb to curb came to mean to pull back a horse's head to slow it down - or metaphorically to restrain any kind of action. So we are expected to curb our impatience, our anger, our excessive enthusiasm.

So Latin it is - and 'kerb' is just an aberrant 17th century spelling. Wyld, incidentally, tells us that 'kerb' is an 'architectural' usage: and then defines it as 'the stone edging of a pavement in a street'. I must admit that I have never thought of pavements as architecture until today.

Where the Kerb Leads

Incidents, Incidence and Instances

Malapropism* isn't always wildly extravagant. Frank Swinnerton in his autobiography wrote of the publisher J M Dent's tendency to confuse words. "Heavens, how my taste was vitiated !" he once remarked. He meant 'vindicated'. I like too the example given in the Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: 'dancing the flamingo'. A book by a well-known historian refers to burials in a churchyard as 'internment'. That could be a typesetter's misprint, of course. But there are other commoner words that are easily confused.

An article by a person who shall remain nameless, writing recently in a journal that shall also remain nameless, mentions "people who want to criticise [a certain person's] use of blusher or express their indignation at some incidence of the use of the word tits . . ."

Now 'incidence' is an abstract noun meaning the rate or frequency of some phenomenon - such as the average number of earthquakes that occur in Australia in a hundred years, or the percentage of earwigs that are born lame. The notion of 'some incidence' can't be right: the term 'instance' is required here.

We have often seen in print, or heard on TV or Radio, of 'unfortunate incidences', where the writer/speaker really means 'incidents', and, possibly confusing the two with 'instances', assume
that 'incidences' is the smarter term to use.

* Malapropism is a term coined from the fictional name of a character (Mrs Malaprop) in Richard Sheridan's eighteenth century play The Rivals. She spoke of an 'allegory on the banks of the Nile', and used the word 'contagious' when she meant 'contiguous'. The name Sheridan gave her is an amalgam of the Latin stem 'mal-' = bad and the E word 'appropriate' (itself derived from Latin)

Incidents, Incidence and Instances

Two Unrelated Pingos

Aha, I thought a day or two ago: I have found a new word. I was driving through our nearby market town, and saw a sign advertising one of those establishments where you can get a ring put through your nose or a dragon tattooed on your back. And the word that stood out in big letters was PIGMENTAL. I chuckled. Must be some enterprising little business that invents new terms to make its services seem more subtle and professional than their rivals. Pigmental, indeed !

But I find, to my chagrin, that the word was first recorded in the 19th century - as an adjective based (obviously) on the noun pigment. Who would have used it, though ? Artists ? "I have had some pigmental problems today", Toulouse-Lautrec or one of his mates may have written in his diary. But my first thought about the word as I rolled it round my tongue was that it was one of those words like dog-tired or bird-brained. "That traffic warden (or that shop assistant, or that referee or that neighbour) is plain pig-mental", I could hear myself saying.

"Silly old sow", Alf Garnett might have muttered.

As for the word pigment itself, it was in use in the scriptoria of medieval monasteries, and was based on the Latin verb pingo* (pingere, pinxi, pictum) meaning to paint; and so is related to our words depict, pictorial, picture and so on.

*Our E noun 'pingo', though, is not derived from Latin, and is not even mentioned in my SOED of 1955; but the latest edition tells us that it is a 20th century Englishing of a word in the Eskimo Inuit language. It refers to a mound or hollow formed in times of permafrost by the accumulation and expansion of underground ice, or its subsequent thawing and subsidence. There are ex-pingos in some parts of the west of Norfolk, my own home county, and I have been to look at them. Not spectacular, but interesting curiosities.

Two Unrelated Pingos

The Usher and the Ostler

It was a wedding, earlier this afternoon in the ancient church just opposite our home, that made me think of the term 'usher'. How does one 'ush', and where does the term come from ?

To start with, one doesn't 'ush' - there is no such word. But we might well have guessed (correctly) that someone had used it by now: in fact SOED cites the 'dialect and colloquial' verb to 'ush', a 'back-formation' from the word 'usher'.

We have had the term 'usher' in our language, in one form or another, since Chaucer's day, when English adopted the French huissier to mean a 'door-keeper'. This French word derived from the medieval Latin ussarius, which in turn had evolved from the old Latin ostiarius.

This basis of this is ostium - Latin for a door; and the ultimate root here is L os meaning a mouth.

We can see how to the Romans the 'mouth' metaphorically became a door - a hole in the wall that we pass through. But it is curious how in modern use the 'mouth' metaphor can operate both ways, in and out. The mouth of Hell, I take it, is one that greedily gobbles up a regular intake of sinners: once inside, you stay there.

The mouth of a volcano may well swallow up any one unwise enough to stand on the rim; but it also is the mouth from which the lava is spewed. A mouthpiece for the government utters authoritative speech, which we simple people are expected to 'swallow' as gospel. The mouth of a wasps' nest and the mouth of a cave both allow ingress and egress - the 'door' metaphor again.

The mouth of a river, though, is really a one-way passage; true, a rising tide can, as it were, push water back into the estuary, but it is disgorging rather than swallowing that the term signifies.

'Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings . . . ', runs the proverb; but nevertheless we can 'put words' in people's mouths (ready for them to regurgitate, of course).

Incidentally, although in days gone by you might meet an 'ostler' at the door of an inn, the term does not mean a door-keeper and is in no way related to ostiarius. 'Ostler' is related to 'host' and 'hotel', 'hospitals' and 'hospitality', all based on a quite different old Latin word hospis meaning a 'host'.

The Usher and the Ostler

Dodgy English

If I seem to quote dodgy English mostly from the works of Agatha Christie and the Radio Times, it is because I read and re-read Christie's novels (I think I now have them all in paperback), and take Radio Times weekly.

Sometimes it is possible to excuse AC on the grounds that her solecisms are put into the mouths of her characters, so that they are to blame, not the author. But on page 153 of my copy of They Came to Baghdad (a cheap hardback, as it happens), the author herself tells us that "Victoria was just congratulating herself that she had made less mistakes than usual". Not so the writer: the proper term to use is 'fewer', not 'less'.

If some independent authority is required to back up this statement of mine, visit the first edition of H W Fowler's Modern English Usage, a copy of which is on my desk before me. Under the entry 'less' he writes approvingly "The modern tendency is so to restrict less that it means not smaller, but a smaller amount of, is the comparative rather of a little than of little, and is consequently applied only to things that are measured by amount and not by size or quality or number. . . . ."

Now Victoria's mistakes are clearly to be reckoned by number, so the proper way to express the object of her self-congratulation is that she has made fewer mistakes than usual, not less.

But here is a caution: Fowler himself hints that the distinction between fewer and less was a 'modern tendency' when he wrote in 1926. So-called 'correctness' in the use of language is never more than a current 'convention' mutually (but usually unconsciously) agreed by a community to enable all its members to understand one another's speech. But the more precise the conventions, the more precise is the potential understanding; so to ignore the conventions, while not in itself morally wrong, is to put clear understanding at risk.

Dodgy English

Sound and Soul

This pedant regularly buys The Big Issue. Our local vendor extends such friendliness and charm that it's a pleasure to meet and chat with him every week. It so happens that I also support The Big Issue's aims and agree with perhaps 85-95% of what its writers have to say to us. One of the great things about it is that its seems to accept that the opinions of members of the public are entitled to be heard, considered and understood, even if they may sometimes be wrong.

It was interesting to note that one of its racier regular contributors tells us this week that he is grateful for having had some Latin drilled into him when he was at his Comprehensive School: "Latin taught me that there was actually some ancient meaning to our muddled language". Hear, hear.

But a modicum of Greek can also shed light on our muddled (but very rich, nevertheless) language, and it would have come in useful in the editing or proof-reading of another article in the same issue, reminiscing about London's Portobello Road in the 1960s. Three lines within the opening paragraph tell us that "the Portobello was a cacophany of late 1960s flamboyance; beads, bells, long hair, psychedelic music . . ."

Our word 'cacophony' should have one a and two os, not two as and one o. The phon- element, as in 'telephone' and 'sousaphone', and of course 'phonetic' and 'euphony', means 'sound' or 'voice'. 'Euphony'* means 'good, or pleasant, sound'; 'cacophony' means 'bad, or unpleasant, sound'. [Epiphany, by the way, as we can tell from its spelling, is from a different root: the Greek verb phaino, meaning to 'appear'. Greek epiphaino means to 'shine forth'.]

* The euphonium is mellow-sounding tenor instrument in a brass or military band. What the tone of a cacophonium would be like I don't even want to imagine.

'Psychedelic' is usually spelt in dictionaries with an e as its second vowel (we may count the y as the first), rather than an o. This is because the person who coined the word (H Osmund, as recently as 1956) spelt it in this way. Actually, although Greek psyche has no o in its stem, when the ancient Greeks themselves coined compounds with it they used the vowel o, creating such terms as 'psychomantis' (meaning someone who conjures up the spirits of the dead); and 'psychomacheo' (meaning to fight to the death, or to the last flicker of life). So, although the author of the Big Issue article is technically correct, it is only because the person who first coined the word got it wrong.

The 'del-' element in 'psychedelic' is borrowed from the Greek verb delo-o meaning to reveal or signify; so the intended significance of the term is really 'soul-revealing'.

Sound and Soul

Bubbly more Punchel

Under a new experimental mobile-phone-based ticket scheme, buses* in one part of Britain will, a spokesman told us on telly, be able to "leave more puncherly" .

I don't record this either to complain or to mock - but merely to illustrate an aspect of spoken language that has been operating for millennia: words and phrases built up of what were once significant syllables and sounds tend to become simplified and modified to make them easier to speak - though often with the original meaning lost.

In this way, our phrase 'will not' has become 'won't', and 'can not' became first 'cannot', and then 'can't'. Many children say 'probly' for 'probably', because they quite correctly think that that is what their parents say. I remember as a small boy hearing a companion of mine say "bubbly hink" for 'probably, I think'. Similarly the prayer 'May God be with with you' has degenerated into the simple 'Good-bye'. Have you ever wondered what a bad bye might be like ? And now we say 'Bye-bye'.

Lorenzo, in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, greets Jessica (once Launcelot has left him and Jessica alone together) with the words "How cheer'st thou, Jessica?". In later times the conventional greeting becomes "What cheer ?", and in later times still a mere "Wotcha !".

So the four-syllable 'punct-u-al-ly' has, for most of us, become a three-syllable 'punk-cher-ly'. Often the 'k' sound is dropped to make 'puncherly', and the next phase will perhaps be a two-syllable 'punchly': indeed, it is probly in use already.

* Even buses were once 'omnibuses': omnibus being the Latin word meaning (in this context) 'for everyone'.

Bubbly more Punchel

Pluralising the already plural

We all know the English word incident, and we all know (more or less) what it means. I say 'more or less', because a lot of us probably imagine that it means an accident, a mishap or a misdemeanour of some kind.

Actually it just means a 'happening', something that 'befalls', and is derived from the Latin word cado meaning to fall. (There was a literal 'incident' on a slippery road up which I was walking on the way to a party at Christmas. I never reached the party, but slunk home with a couple of bruises.) But you can have good incidents too, like finding a pound coin on a path in the park, or (as we did yesterday) seeing a barn owl from the living room window.

But another word from the same root is 'incidence' - signifying the frequency with which something happens -the incidence of seeing barn owls may be perhaps ten times a year in these parts, and of finding one-pound coins a great deal less, and accidentally falling over, somewhere in between.

But every now and again on telly you hear someone use the non-term 'incidences'. Nearly always they mean the (plural) 'incidents', but because they have heard the (singular) word 'incidence', they assume it means a happening, and pluralise it as 'incidences'.

Incidentally, 'incidentally' is an adverb based on the word 'incidence' - reminding us that not only bad things befall us. "Incidentally, you may like to know that I want to share my Lottery winnings with you."

Pluralising the already plural

From Abeigh to Zonk: the art of playing Scrabble

Some time ago we were given a copy of Collins's Scrabble Dictionary. We have always been partial to a game of Scrabble, and would occasionally challenge one another's entries, objecting to the spelling or doubting whether a certain word really existed. As an aid to arbitration we would resort to a conventional dictionary whose word was to be accepted as law, even if you knew that you were right and the dictionary wrong or plain ignorant. Like a cricket umpire. The mutual assumption is that players would only enter words they were pretty sure about and could explain if challenged. What else is a game of scrabble for, if not to test the players' vocabulary and spelling ? We had a house rule that foreign words were ineligible unless found in a small conventional dictionary - words like fete or risotto or maximum or (perhaps) angst.

So much for decent compromise and consensus (there, you see, a Latin term but allowable): the Scrabble Dictionary has changed all that. The advantage is handed now to the expert in foreign languages or archaic usages. I have turned at random to page 560, and what have I found ? Perswaded is the first entry (an 'obsolete form'), and this page's four columns include pertake, perthite (a form of feldspar), perthitic, pertusate, pertuse, to perv (to 'give a person an erotic look'), perviate, pervicacy, pesade, pesant and pesaunt (both 'obsolete spellings of peasant'), pesewa ('Ghanain monetary unit worth one hundredth of a cedi'), pessima, pesterous, petabyte, petahertz, petaline, petalodic, petar ('obsolete variant of petard'), petara ('a clothes basket'), petary ('a weapon for hurling stones'), petasus and petasuses (both variants of petasos - 'a broad-brimmed hat worn by the ancient Greeks'), petaurist ('a flying phalanger'), petchary ('a type of kingbird'), petcock ('a small valve for checking the water level in a steam boiler or draining condensed steam from the cylinder of a steam engine'), petechial, pether ('old variant of pedlar'), pethidine, petillant, and petiolule. And that's on only a single one of the dictionary's 882 pages -which suggests that there are some twenty-eight thousand, two hundred and twenty-four such outlandish words for the keen scrabbler to memorise. Start tonight.

The only valuable use of this dictionary that I have discovered as a player is to enable me to invent an unknown word, cunningly place the tiles over a triple score square, pretend to look it up, and then, nodding wisely, announce that it is a term used by ancient Persians to denote a phial half full of sour wine, or by Russian genealogists to indicate the relationship between a man and his wife's great-grandmother. Then you quickly slam the dictionary shut and tell the person on your left that it's their turn.

From Abeigh to Zonk: the art of playing Scrabble

Less may be More, but it is not Fewer

Really, I insist. We must all try never to confuse the terms 'less' and 'fewer'.

We may have less trouble, we may make fewer mistakes: but we cannot properly say that we have fewer trouble, or that we make less mistakes. We may drink less beer, or fewer glasses of wine: but we cannot properly say that we drink fewer beer, or less glasses of wine.

The term 'less' refers to amount and to things that you can't count, such as oil or beer or rain or hope or porridge; 'fewer' refers to things that can be counted, such as biscuits or your toes or sheep or members of parliament. Fewer coins in the pocket, less money in the bank. Less rain, fewer rainy days.

I have just looked this up in my ancient and ancestral 1926 edition of Fowler's Modern English Usage. I am interested to see that he regards the distinction I am trying to make as a "modern tendency", but one that he believes "makes for precision" and that "should be complied with".

My old Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1955 says that equating 'less' with 'fewer' is "now regarded as incorrect". Half a century on, the edition of 2007* labels it as "non-standard". So if you want to be old-fashioned or eccentric, feel free to ignore this article; but those who prefer to be up-to-date may as well conform !

* Those of us who have become close friends of the older SOED may find the modern one a little less human, rather too rigid or mechanical, and in some ways less informative. The old edition would tell us, for instance, that 'reminiscential' and 'aberrancies' first appeared in print in 1646, so that we can track them down to Sir Thomas Browne's entertaining Pseudodoxia Epidemica; whereas the twenty-first century edition coldly labels the words as 'M17 ' as though they were points on a motorway. The older edition is generous with quotes** from all periods of English literature: the modern one prefers to cite modern authors. Presumably this is so as to show us helpfully how the terms are used today; but something of the 'historicity' of words is lost.

** The old SOED does not recognise this rather sloppy use of the word 'quote' as a noun, though the new one does.

Less may be More, but it's not Fewer

While shepherds watched . . .

How did the shepherds watch their flocks by night without the aid of infra-red technology* ?

This is a false question, based on a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word 'watch'. In the twenty-first century we go out to a stadium to watch a football match, or to a nature reserve to watch birds, or stay in to watch television. To us, the term 'watch' is all about sight, and following action with our eyes.

To our Anglo-Saxon forebears, though, the verb wacian meant to be 'awake' (rather than asleep); the related word waeccian meant to 'stay awake' in order to forestall any possible attack. Thus there are the 'watches' or periods of vigil on board a ship, and the 'night-watchman' who remains awake patrolling the town to ensure that nothing untoward happens to the other, sleeping, inhabitants.

So the shepherds on the hillside near Bethlehem were 'keeping watch' over their flocks, listening rather than looking, ready to scare off wolves or thieves. 'Watch' in this sense virtually means 'guard'**.

* OK, there could have been a full moon overhead that night.

** The watch that you wear on your wrist seems to get its name from some primitive alarm or 'waking' clock, designed to rouse a person from sleep.

Now 'flock' is interesting, too.

The natural assumption might be that the 'flock' of sheep is somehow related to the 'flock' that means 'fluff'', such as we meet in the term 'flock wallpaper'. After all, sheep are fluffy, and if we can have a 'pride' of lions or a 'murmuration' of starlings, surely we can understand a 'flock' of woolly sheep.

But no: there are two entirely different words 'flock'. The Anglo-Saxon one is flocc meaning a troop or band or gathering, whether of people or (other) animals. The other derives from Latin floccus meaning 'fluff' or (metaphorically) worthlessness. There is a lovely word still to be found in big English dictionaries, 'floccinaucinihilipilification', implying 'treating something or someone as not being worth even fluff or dust or a hair or indeed anything at all'. The word is based on a similar composite Latin word introduced into a play by a Roman comic dramatist. They had stage comics even in Julius Caesar's Rome.

So our flock wallpaper has no connection with flocks by night. And that comic 29-letter word must be the only one in the English language containing nine letter 'i's.

While shepherds watched . . .

Appreciating the unfamiliar word

The more you read, I suppose, the more likely you are every now and then to come unexpectedly on an entirely new word - new to yourself, I mean. It's happened to me twice in the last week. First 'apolaustic'.

I met it in Hesketh Pearson's biography of Oscar Wilde: "Along with his laziness went a love of luxury. His nature was apolaustic, and the things he enjoyed were usually expensive."

Now the prefix 'apo-' shows that this word must be based on Greek, like apoplexy and apology and apostrophe. But there is no Greek verb 'lau-o' (my Greek dictionary tells me that even in the classical period it was obsolete) though the adjective apolaustikos meant 'of or for enjoyment'. It was first used in an English context in the mid-nineteeth century, so not many people know it. It doesn't seem to have caught on very much in a hundred and fifty years either, even though we have no other single word that I can think of it that we can use instead*. But now you know.

* 'Hedonistic' is too strong, implying a philosophy of personal comfort and shameless self-indulgence. 'Sybaritic' goes even further, suggesting almost an orgy of sensual pleasures: the ancient inhabitants of Sybaris in Italy were Greek colonials, renowned for 'effeminate voluptuosity'.

The other new word is one I found in a book by Alan Bennett. "Much of what I've written in Telling Tales could have been told to an interviewer . . . . It could also be done on a chat show. Probed by the caring, maieutic voice of the interviewer, you regurgitate with a fetching spontaneity recollections you have already recollected for some nervous young researcher beforehand . . ."

Maieutic ? Greek again ? Yes, indeed: the 'mai-' element is related to our word 'mother', and the Greek verb maieuomai means to 'serve as a midwife'. So the maieutic voice of Bennett's interviewer is, as it were, encouraging the birth of ideas and recollections from the guest's mind.

But if you are observant, you will have spotted that that Greek maieuomai (whether written in Greek or English letters, actually) has within it the five main vowels all in a row.

A further coincidence: last week I also came across (I can't at the moment remember where) the term 'miaou', as an alternative spelling to the more familiar 'miaouw'. It occurred to me that if we used it as a verb, in the past tense, then we would have the word 'miaoued' - another instance of all five vowels in a row. Well now, can you beat that ?

Appreciating the unfamiliar word

Onfriday blues

On Friday 5th September 2009, a new word appeared onpage. It may have done so earlier, but if so I missed it. Noel Gallagher had announced (so runs an account published that day in The Week) that he could longer go on working with his brother Liam: the two brothers were not on speaking terms, and only saw each other onstage . . .

Nonetheless, let us hope that a reconciliation is by now underway or at least onthecards.

Well, if you can have the words 'upstage' and 'ongoing', what is wrong with 'onstage' (or 'upgoing', for that matter) ? 'Underground' and 'underwater', which originated as adverbial or adjectival phrases, became mergeable in the middle ages and the eighteenth century respectively . There is no point in getting upworked about it. I just want to be the first to put the neologism onrecord, that's all.

Onfriday blues

Anticipating highly

BBC News has today spoken of "a highly anticipated novel". This is, in terms of proper English, a very poor phrase.

Over and over again well accredited pedants have pointed out that the term 'anticipate' does not mean 'await' or 'expect'*, but to 'take appropriate action in advance of an event'.

If you are wearing a cyclist's helmet when you swerve in the road and fall to the ground, you will be glad that you donned that helmet in anticipation of a possible accident. If you go to meet the 2.45 train because you think your friend will be arriving on it, and he/she does indeed do so, you have anticipated his/her arrival. If you successfully set a mole trap, you have anticipated the capture of a mole.

The term is made up of two Latin elements; first ante = before; and secondly capere = to catch. The idea is 'catching in advance'. If you manage to catch what you set out to catch, you have anticipated it. If you fail to catch it, you have failed to anticipate it: failure is not anticipation, any more than hoping for something guarantees that you will get it. Anticipate does not mean mere 'hope', nor does it mean the vague 'look forward to'. It implies success. Anticipation can therefore, by definition, not fail - though (paradoxical as it may sound) you can successfully anticipate failure.

But the pedant's insistance on 'correct' usage is pretty well vain. Modern dictionaries ('descriptive' rather than 'prescriptive' ones) merely record common errors without comment, perhaps on the principle that 'if it already appears in print, it's too late to wish it hadn't'. Much poor English, as well as much false information, appears in print: do we have to accept it all as valid ?

And while we are about it, just look again at that phrase 'highly anticipated', and consider it for a moment. There are indeed contexts in which 'highly' can mean 'much' or 'very' - contexts in which the metaphor of 'height' still has a resonance: 'highly praised', 'highly coloured', 'highly respected', for instance. But 'highly anticipated' ? Uggh ! What's wrong with 'eagerly awaited' ?

* Though any well accredited pedant will be able to tell you that the very verb 'expect' essentially means to 'go on waiting until you actually see something you think is going to happen'. Its Latin elements are spectare = to look intently; with the prefix ex- implying (in this context) 'until it happens'.

Anticipating highly

Reading too much

This is not about losing yourself in a novel, or even straining your eyesight; but about the way we can be misled by reading a wrong meaning into a word.

The trouble is that perfectly good words (that is, words whose meaning should be clear) gain more and more 'associations' as time goes on, until readers and listeners can never be quite sure what the writer or speaker is implying.

Here's an instance; a choir is going to contribute some items to a church Carol Service. Obviously it is fair enough to say that they are going to sing them. But to say that they are going to perform them might be thought inappropriate for such an event. Performances, the church people may feel, are what you get from amateur theatricals, rock bands, circuses, conjurers and big egos. Not quite what we go to church for. The church may have welcomed an audience for a choir on Saturday, but will be attended by a congregation and a choir on Sunday. Yet the word 'audience' means no more nor less than 'listeners'; and 'congregation' implies no more nor less than 'gathering together'. There is no essential reason why one should not speak of a congregation on the Saturday and an audience on the Sunday - except for the words' associations. We might even risk the term 'assembly' - but that has been hijacked by politics.

Our forefathers had hijacked a quite different word for what one does to a song - a word that to them must have sounded more dignified than 'performing' and more meaningful than the rather plain 'singing'. They liked a song to be 'rendered'. But we use the verb render for heating and purifying cooking fat. And look what happened to its noun 'rendition'. Render was never a very satisfactory word for 'performing', but now its associations have spoilt it entirely*.

Talking of parish priests (well, we were getting pretty close), it was not unusual a few generations ago for a clergyman to earn a reputation as a 'painful preacher'. This referred not to his excruciating delivery, or even to the way wooden benches seemed to get more and more uncomfortable the longer the sermon dragged on; but referred to the painstaking preparation of his 'addresses'. And even this last term now has associations with post-codes and websites. And minor traffic misdemeanours: I am afraid I must ask you for your name and address, sir.

* Though since first posting these paragraphs I have read in a high-quality national magazine of a much praised recent rendition of a piece of classical music.

Reading too much

Critical ramifications of aggravated panoplies

E'en Homer nods, occasionally slipping on a banana skin to reveal his Achilles' heel.

That is to say, even professional word-mongers sometimes use words or metaphors poorly. The term 'panoply', as I have mentioned in the related website (see at head of this blog), seems to have acquired spurious overtones of pomp and brilliance through its superficial resemblance to the word 'pageantry'. It really means 'complete set of weapons'*. Is this what Arnold Bennett intended when he wrote "Then a dark and elegant young man in full evening panoply appeared [in a dance hall] from the street"; or again, in the context of another social event, "The exit of Dr and Mrs Raste in full panoply . . . into the garden . . . took place at ten o'clock" ? No - I think Bennett was unaware of the meaning of the word: note how in both instances he uses the phrase 'full panoply': the word element 'pan-' already means 'full' or 'inclusive'.

* from the Greek word 'panoplia' ('pan-' = complete and 'hoploi ' = weapons). The translators of the King James Bible were interpreting St Paul's use of that word (if indeed he originally wrote in Greek) when they wrote "Take unto you the whole armour of God" - the breastplate of righteousness, the sword of the spirit, the shield of faith and so on.

"Are there likely to be ramifications between the USA and the British Government following this decision ?" asked a BBC News presenter recently. I guess he meant something like 'complex repercussions affecting relations between the USA and Britain'. But 'ramification' (from Latin ramus = branch or twig) means (literally) 'making branches' or (metaphorically) what we might think of as 'knock-on complications' spreading in the pattern of branches and twigs. 'Ramifications between two nations' is nonsense.

And we are often told that a person in hospital is 'critical'. A critical illness is one the outcome of which has yet to be judged or assessed. A person may be 'in a critical condition' (ie in a condition of uncertain outcome). But to say that a person him- or herself is critical means something quite different: it means that they are criticising. And strictly speaking (which we usually aren't) the word criticise (from the Greek word krit-es meaning a judge) means to assess, or to use one's impartial judgement, with no implication of carping or complaining or blaming or disapproving. 'Crisis' (from Greek krisis) means a judgement, a deciding moment.

As for aggravation, let us once and (wishfully) for all explain that it derives from the Latin stem gravis meaning heavy, and means 'adding weight to'. We use it metaphorically and correctly in the phrase 'aggravated burglary', implying that it wasn't just simple burglary, but burglary with violence added to it. We could say that 'adding insult to injury' aggravates the injury by making it heavier to bear. We can say that pneumonia is 'aggravated' (or made more burdensome) by exposure to cold air. But for that excellent journalist Andrew Rawnsley to write about "the government's growing aggravation about Whitehall's inability to keep secrets" is nonsense*. In this instance, it is not the government that is becoming more burdensome, but its problems. And Rawnsley's misunderstanding of the term 'aggravation' is betrayed by his describing it as 'growing': the sense of 'growing' is built into the term itself (by the Latin prefix ad-).

*I think Rawnsley meant 'irritation' or 'annoyance'. But because the passage quoted comes from a report (in The Week) of Rawnsley's article rather than from the original itself (in The Observer), it is possible that the fault lies with The Week's editor who may have paraphrased Rawnsley's words clumsily. Incidentally, I am aware that this misuse of the term 'aggravate' has a long history: but that doesn't make it right.

Critical ramifications of aggravated panoplies

Unaccustomed as I am . . .

Our English language has a number of terms to describe the unfamiliar, which we use in very different contexts: foreign, strange, exotic, weird, abnormal, extraordinary, eccentric, unwonted, inappropriate, indecent, impertinent, improper and insolent, for instance. Of this selection of over a dozen of them, it is noticeable that more than two-thirds are negatives: so many things, so much behaviour of other people, are most aptly described as 'not what we like because it's not what we're used to'.

Not all such terms necessarily mean 'bad': exotic, foreign and unwonted, for instance, are pretty neutral words. Abnormal, eccentric and extraordinary carry warning signals, suggesting phenomena that may perhaps turn out to be a wee bit uncomfortable.

Strange and weird have distinct overtones of discomfort; while improper, insolent and impertinent positively overflow with indignation. But these last three words are merely negatives implying (etymologically, any way) no more than 'stepping beyond the bounds of what is normally acceptable'.

Proper, from the Latin adjective proprius, used to mean 'one's own' - as in the phrase 'personal property'. This word can also mean the characteristic, normal, qualities of something: the properties of the metal quicksilver (mercury) include its liquidity and its capacity to expand in heat. "Talk properly" a parent may say to a small child, meaning "talk the normal way, the way speech is meant to be used ". 'Improper' and 'impropriety' essentially mean little more than "being out of the ordinary" - on the assumption, of course, that our own personal behaviour is the one most suitable to form the general standard.

Insolent comes from two Latin word elements: 'in-' meaning 'not', and the verb 'soleo' meaning to 'be used to'. So insolent talk is talk that we are not accustomed to hear addressed to us. (It all depends what you are used to, of course: the higher you esteem your own station in life, the more you are likely to regard the frank comments of social outsiders as insolent. Whereas your own frank comments to those beneath you are of course perfectly justified - indeed, it is your social duty to make them.)

Impertinence is a similar concept. Latin elements in- = not, per- = throughout, and the verb teneo = to hold, are involved, together signifying "contrary to what is comprised by proper social behaviour". Once again, the subjectivity of the the concept of propriety is at work.

But lastly, consider this recent addition to the terminology of political correctness: 'inappropriate behaviour'. Inappropriate is of course a member of the 'propriety' group, dependent once again on what is deemed to be socially acceptable. Deemed by whom ? The great majority, presumably. It is a pity that this 'standard of decency' has to be invoked and interpreted by our governors, including public servants at many levels, whose own personal standards of decency are not one hundred per cent publicly acceptable. But there it is - can you suggest a better system ?

'Decency' and 'indecency' are also derived from Latin, in which language decentia (from the vb deceo = to be seemly, fitting or proper) meant 'propriety'. The ancient Romans believed in the concept, then; but what we read or hear about life in Rome two millennia ago may well make us doubt how much is to be achieved by appealing to 'standards'. Where standards are not already deeply and widely embedded in the convictions of the people, appealing to them may be a waste of time. And what is decent and applauded in one culture may be indecent and illegal in another.

Unaccustomed as I am . . .

Order ! Order !

"Order ! Order !" shouts the Speaker of the House of Commons. On his (or her) secretary's monitor, in-coming emails appear in date order. His wife has ordered a sirloin of beef from the butcher, while his son, as a young subaltern in Afghanistan, obeys the orders of his superior, his cousin is a clergyman in holy orders, and his aged mother wants to put her affairs in order.

Is the word 'order' really the same one in each instance ? Yes - and let's add ordnance, ordinary, ordination, subordinate and insubordination to the list.

Latin ordo/ordin- is a noun meaning a correctly straight line, a disciplined rank of soldiers, even a row of seats in the theatre. So the Speaker's shout is a reminder "Be orderly ! Keep in line!" The Latin verb ordino means to set in order, to regulate or govern; so the ordaining or ordination of a priest is a matter of the Church putting its servants into their appropriate rank. God himself (or Fate) is seen as 'ordaining' whatever happens: the result is seen as the proper way our world and the universe should work.

To 'subordinate' is to put something or someone into a lower rank. 'Insubordination' is a sort of 'breaking out of one's lower rank', not conforming to one's lower place in the hierarchy.

The Latin ordo/ordin- evolved over time into the French verb 'ordre', which English absorbed into its own vocabulary in the Middle English period some six or seven centuries ago. 'Order' meaning rank, proper control, is a fairly obvious derivation, accounting for our terms 'alphabetical order' and 'in good order'. Our verb 'order', meaning to command, derives from the military or government sense of the term. The housewife ordering her leg of lamb is commanding (however tacfully) her butcher to provide it.

Our term 'ordnance' (which lends its name to the Ordnance Survey which prepares our maps) strictly means 'artillery'. This originally referred to the regular, proper placement of large guns for defensive or offensive purposes; then to the guns themselves, collectively; and then to the military command responsible for such placement.

'Ordinary' implies 'the natural, proper, ordained, every-day state of things'; unexceptional.


Order ! Order !