Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued

Most of us are aware that our Anglo-Saxon ancestors spoke Old English, but that our language was subsequently enriched from (among others) two main sources: Norman and Angevin French, whose language had evolved from vernacular Latin; and renaissance scholars’ use of classical Latin and Greek. So very often we have in our vocabulary word-synonyms derived from three ancient languages.

When I came across the fairly common term 'polychromatic' recently, I found myself mentally translating it, as it were, into 'multi-coloured', and then again in to 'many-hued'. They all mean the same thing, but (one might say) in three different languages.

'Poly-', 'multi-' and 'many-' all mean the same in Greek, Latin and English respectively. Chrōma is Greek for English 'hue', and color is the Latin equivalent. Any apparent nuances of meaning derive from their association: 'polychrome' sounds rather technical and scientific; 'many-hued' sounds a little bit archaic, deliberately old-fashioned or poetical. It is the Latin derived 'multi-coloured' that now seems most neutral to us.

But how useful to have the choice !

Multilingual, polyglot and many-tongued

A most voluminous manner

We have looked at one or two choice examples of the ‘transferred epithet’ before, but here's one from Edith Sitwell’s English Eccentrics, in a passage introducing to her readers “the Hermit . . . Mr Matthew Robinson, afterwards Lord Rokeby", who was "famous for his amphibious habits, and for possessing benevolence and a beard. This gentleman of long life and virtuous habits . . . seems to have had only one fault - the vice of reciting to visitors in the most voluminous manner.”

Edith Sitwell was herself an English Eccentric - though it was unnecessarily unkind of Penguin Books to add on the front cover of their edition their own subtitle A gallery of weird and wonderful men and women, and to place immediately beneath it a photograph of Dame Edith in one of her most eccentric costumes and poses.

She was clearly fascinated by the versatility of words and could skilfully use them, especially in her poetry, much as an impressionist might paint with imaginative dashes and blobs of colour. Her witty pre-occupation with words could be compared (though their contexts were very different) to those of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll - though we get the impression that her humour, however verbally arresting or even outrageous, always comported itself with high seriousness. Did Edith Sitwell ever chuckle ?

‘Voluminous’ is an unexpected epithet for a person’s ‘manner’: we can see that it really describes (before being transferred) the overwhelmingly well-meant wordiness of the noble hermit. We know just what the author means, and somehow the very imprecision of the phrase ‘voluminous manner’ suggests the noble hermit’s own style of speech.

A most voluminous manner

Vernility and the Mincing of Citizens

Samuel Pepys’s friend and fellow-founder of the Royal Society, John Evelyn, was a genuinely learned dilettante. He once prepared a schedule of headings under which the English language might be assessed and eventually improved - rather as the Académie Française were busy pontificating about French at about the same time.

His first suggestion was to “Conceive the Reason both of Additions to and Corruptions of the English Language (as of most other Tongues)”. Among the possible sources of addition and corruption Evelyn listed Plantations and Colonies, Staples of Commerce, Pedantry of Scholes, Pulpets, Style of Court, the Barr, and ‘Vernilitie and Mincing of Citizens’.

The Mincing of Citizens sounds painful, but must be related to what we may call ‘mincing’ behaviour or speech today - self-consciously affected mannerisms, somewhat as we imagine Oscar Wilde must have practised, or of the kind that so miffed the prophet Isaiah: “The daughters of Zion are haughty and walk with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes, walking and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet”. Enough to disturb any righteous citizen.

As for Vernilitie, it isn’t in my Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, but no doubt is featured in the full OED. I reckon it is a nonce-word coined by Evelyn from the French verb vernisser or vernir (meaning to glaze or varnish), referring to the desire of mincing talkers to embellish their sentences with fancy terms. Evelyn also had a word for those who devised new words, and that was ‘logodaedali’, from the name of Daedalus, the legendary artificer of Athens who not only invented many different craftsmen’s tools, but created the labyrinth at Knossos in Crete where the minotaur was housed, and a set of wings with which he was able to fly over the Aegean sea. The Greeks had a word daidaleos meaning ‘cunningly or curiously wrought’. Evelyn must have been aware (or, at least, I hope he was) that his own use of ‘logodaedali’ and ‘vernilitie’ were themselves the product of his own scholarly logodaedalic vernility. Unscholarly logodaedalicity has become a characteristic of modern English: there’s yet another one for the lexicon.

Vernility and the Mincing of Citizens

Steam Engines and Owls

We heard on the TV news recently that the first newly built steam locomotive since the 1940s, costing some three million pounds, has been shown to the public by York Railway Museum. Good news for those of us oldies who treasure memories of the sight, sound and smell of the pre-diesel and pre-electric railway engines. I remember how, as a small boy, I spent a night at the station hotel at Leeds ready to be seen off on a train journey early next morning, and was woken by the ceaseless symphony of railway station sounds, the rattling of the couplings, the occasional steam whistle and the rapid ch-ch-ch of the steam escaping as wheels of departing trains span for a moment as they got a grip on the track. It must have been at about that time that my brother and I were shown over a long-established railway engine factory at York or Leeds - though one thing I do recall is that diesel-powered engines were being built there and were something of a novelty.

‘Locomotive’ first appeared as an adjective meaning ‘moving about’, or ‘travelling’. Someone in the seventeenth century had coined the word from Latin elements, moveo/mot-- = to move, and locus = place, position. The noun ‘locomotive’ is a shortening of the early nineteenth-century phrase ‘locomotive engine’ meaning a ‘machine that can move about’. The further abbreviation ‘loco’ came into use in the late nineteenth century (a close parallel to the emergence of our term ‘zoo’ for ‘zoological gardens’).

USA ‘loco’ meaning ‘barmy’, ‘off his rocker’, ‘crazy’ may be derived from Spanish or Italian, according to which authority you choose to follow: in either case, the derivation would at first seem to be from L locus, though the semantics would be unclear. Tony Thorne, in his Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, tells us that the word is Spanish and comes from ‘L ulucus = owl’. I can’t trace any such Latin word, but there is a L ulula = screech-owl: and Eric Partridge in his etymological dictionary Origins refers to Sanskrit ulukas = owl. Funny how owls can at the same time serve as images of wisdom and images of insanity. I suppose they are not unique in looking wise but sounding demented.

Steam Engines and Owls

As we like it

A rather nasty verbal virus is creeping into our language: the merging of the idiomatic constructions ‘cold as it may be, at least the sun is shining’; and ‘as cold as it was yesterday’. In the first example, the conjunction ‘as’ is the equivalent of ‘though’; in the second the two ‘as’es indicate comparison or equation.

So what a horrid hybrid is this comment (from The Times, no less) on our current financial difficulties: “This mother of all bail-outs” acts as “some kind of gigantic and much-needed backstop, so that we know that, as bad as it still might get, we won’t have to take our money and put it under the mattress”.

To say “This may not be as bad as it will get” is allowable – comparing badness now with badness in the future. But it is barmy to equate ‘future badness' with our not needing to put our money under the mattress, which is presumably a good thing.

Also from The Times, reporting on the England v. Australia World Cup Rugby match last November: "As blindingly good as Australia were, they were aided and abetted [cliché !] by one of the worst performances by a national team in living memory". Again, this sentence, as it is written, is nonsense, all because of that introductory 'as'. That and the balancing 'as' three words later, form an idiom of comparison that could almost be construed as equating 'blindingly good Australia' with 'one of the worst performances in living memory'. Not at all what the reporter meant.

“Good as it is, your poem has not won the prize”, a panel of adjudicators might say. In this idiom, ‘as’ means ‘though’. If the adjudicators say “As good as your poem is, you have failed to win the prize” the poet (as a perceptive language craftsman) might well remark ruefully “What does the panel think is so good about failure ?”

As we like it

Further petrification and some peril

A judge in a fictional court case (so a distinguished critic and writer explained to us in the Christmas edition of Radio Times) is “petrified that if he decides there is no Santa, he’ll disillusion children . . .”.

The Society for the Care of Aged Metaphors* is already handling an earlier serious case of petrification (see blog of 26th October below): so, since the matter is sub judice, I will not confuse the issue myself - unless, of course, I am officially called to give evidence on behalf of the metaphor.

* A pity that this has to be abbreviated to SCAM, though. The Society for the Protection of Aged Metaphors won't do as a title either. We'll have to think again.

But the Radio Times writer interestingly continues, in his/her next sentence, “Glorious stuff - just right for these present parlous times”. It is the word ‘parlous’ that is interesting. How many of us have ever used it ? Would you recognise a parlous time if you passed one in the street ? The term is actually an old form of ‘perilous’ (= dangerous, risky) and is derived from Latin periculosus (of same meaning)’, from L periculum (= danger), the elements of which seem to signify a ‘little trial or test’: the ‘peri-’ bit found its way into Latin from the Greek verb peirao (= to try).

As well as ‘peril’, our words ‘experiment’ and ‘pirate’ are of the same family as ‘parlous’. But ‘parliament’ and ‘expire’ are not even distant relations.

Further petrification and some peril

The Department of Nomenclature

The offices of the Ministry of Communications are situated, I think, somewhere near Victoria Station, in a vast stone building in a 1960s minimalist style that tells you nothing except how minimal its original architect and clients were.

Somewhere on the fifth floor is a long corridor on either side of which are big rooms housing rows of desks, each equipped with a computer and all other mod office cons. There are similar rooms on the sixth and seventh floors too, but we are referring here to those of the Department of Nomenclature, and in particular to the Fabrics and Medications division with its two units, usually abbreviated ‘Manmadfabs’ and ‘Dispensimarks’.

‘Dispensimarks’ is the office where the names for new drugs are created. A few years ago it was done by a small team of men, known as nomenclators, with a dictionary. The men would think up new and fairly predictable names like Throatex and Constipan and Pimplol, and one of the senior women secretaries would look in the dictionary to ensure that there was no such word already, and if the whole team thought the name was a good one, it was listed in the Official Index (HMSO) and in due course licensed to any manufacturer who thought they might use it.

Then computers were introduced, but they were so prolific of new names that the team of nomenclators had to be trebled in size, merely in order to rule out silly names like Prtotgn%_dz and HjTi#fbnaaa. This took up far more time than the old team needed to produce a similar flow of more serviceable names, so recently the procedure has been simplified.

Now the process begins at the ‘syllabary’, where new word-bits are concocted, mostly out of the heads of specially chosen young graduates with an ear for words and a poetical (but not too poetical) imagination. They prepare ‘pools’ of suitable short syllables such as -tri- and -pol- and -clor- and -zyn-, which are fed into a computer which treats them rather like the machine with numbered ping-pong balls that deliver the lottery winners. The syllables are produced in random order in batches of anything from three to six. These are passed across the screens of a battery of monitors, each watched by a senior nomenclator who clicks an ‘approval rating’ of 0 - 9 on the side of the screen. The scores are totted up by another computer, and only the top ten out of every hundred (you can see that the level of scrutiny is pretty severe) are passed to a ‘Referral Officer’ who takes each day’s list to be vetted by the Minister of Communications’s Senior Nomenclature Advisor who eliminates the ones he doesn’t like* with a blue pencil and refers it back to the Dispensimarks office to be typed up.

* ‘Tritoblerone’, for instance, he rejected because it might be read as an advertisement.

There is such a demand for newly licensed names for newly licensed products that the Dispensimarks staff can only just keep up with it. Names like Phlognostican and Drigoblin, Cratulopsipan and Plantospitrol, Sillimoxlin and Ganjospermadsidate, actually bring in millions of pounds a year to the Treasury.

There has, of course, been a black market in names. This was inevitable. Some have been produced in large quantities in innocent looking sheds on city allotments, or the cellars of houses in Islington. Many are imported illegally by word-smugglers who copy the names on to the back of the little round paper discs that you find at the bottom of tins of cough sweets, or are written on cigarette papers and then rolled and carried casually between the lips of day trippers returning from the continent. The following list was found by British Rail police on a small piece of paper secured to a bunch of daffodils with a rubber band in the left hand of an eight-year-old girl whose right hand was in the hand of her mother on platform 16 at Waterloo:

Vamstatsinim
Thrandestine
Preposterol
Polyphrasterin
Phytoglysterol
Dispralocalculaburol
Glyxtrocyclone
Crepuscinofozil
Pyglixiphogratulate
Brentiligropatine
Aspidoxipral
Spiflitoxin
Centrofigoblin
Fibrillipantimon
Propesterol
Hexodorodistine
Aspidoxapril

There is money in this business.

The Department of Nomenclature

Possibly probable, perhaps

A funny word, ‘probably’, though we use it daily without a thought. We usually mean “I expect so” or “shouldn’t wonder”. But, as anyone can see, it’s an adverb formed from the adj ‘probable’ - which we often take to mean ‘likely’ - which is another curious word.

But ‘probable’ actually means ‘able to pass a test’ - perhaps ‘worth testing to see if it’s OK’. It is derived from Latin vb probo/probat-- = to ‘approve’, to ‘announce that something has passed the test’. We get our words prove and approve and proof from it - and they are all to do with testing. If you ‘demand proof’ you are requiring a demonstration that a statement or a theory passes the test of thorough scrutiny.

‘The exception proves the rule’ does not mean ‘The exception demonstrates that the rule exists’; nor, as some people have thought, that it shows the rule is too strict: it tells us that the exception tests the rule and shows that it is valid.

‘80% proof’ means that a mixture of distilled spirit and water has been tested, and found to be 40% pure alcohol (ie the standard 'proof' proportion is, in USA, 50% water, 50% alcohol - in UK, a little more alcohol and a litle less water). ‘The proof of the pudding is in the eating’ means that to eat it will be a test of its quality. The 'proofs' of a book or written article are the first printed sheets that are to be 'tested' by a proof-reader to ensure that they are correct before the main print-run begins. ‘Probation’ is a period of testing or trial. ‘Probity’ is the possession of well-earned ('proven') public respect.

And our word ‘probe’ means ‘test’ - to poke something to see what happens, to test it, to show it’s OK. If you receive something ‘on approval’ it allows you time to test it before you buy it. Approbation is a sign that someone or something has passed the test of your - or the public’s - assessment.

So ‘probably’ is rather a cautious way of qualifying your acceptance of a statement: sort of “I’m not saying it isn’t true, but it needs to be tested and verified (maybe perhaps probably) before I accept it”.

Possibly probable, perhaps

Try it in Italian

How do you pronounce the word ‘rationale’ (if you use it at all) ? I have long assumed that it's one of the very many words that we have adopted from the French language, so have said something like ‘rashen-arl’. But it isn’t a French word at all: it was borrowed into English in the seventeenth century from Latin, in which language it is the neuter singular of the adjective rationalis (which means ‘reasonable’ or ‘reasoned’). So Latin rationale means ‘something reasoned’.

But it looks like French; so for a long while a number of people, including me, ignorant of its derivation, have read it and pronounced it as if it were 'Franglais', ‘rash-en-arl’, with three syllables. In fact in true French it should have four syllables 'rass-y-on-arl'; but in Latin it had five syllables, rat-i-on-al-e.

I see that the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1955 encourages us to pronounce that finale ‘e’ separately, to make the word sound something like ‘rash-i-on-ayl-i’. But the modern BBC English Dictionary, the newsreader’s bible, flows with the popular tide and recommends ‘rashen-arl’.

As for me, I think I’ll go Italian. After all, their language is directly derived from Latin. They have the word rationale in their vocabulary, and say something like ‘ratz-i-o-nar-lay’. The fact that it sounds as if it might be the popular name of an Irish Vermin Controller (Ratsy O’Narley) makes the word much more fun.

Try it in Italian

Typical pedantry

“How typical !” we may exclaim when someone does something that we think is stupid - the government, a fussy head teacher, an incompetent do-it-yourselfer, a difficult aunt.

It is surprising what a poor job of explaining the words ‘type’ and ‘typical’ many dictionaries make. We may want to know why ‘typical’ seems to mean ‘the silly way a person behaves’; why we can talk of a posh type or a difficult type or indeed a pedantic type; and why we use the word ‘type’ as a verb to describe using the keyboard of a computer.

As so often, there has been a sort of long semantic evolution: a simple term becomes applied to something else, by a ‘transfer of meaning’. Then one or other of the meanings may be used as a metaphor, signifying something else again. The new metaphorical use may itself become ‘transferred’, and any of these uses may in time spawn new transferred or metaphorical meanings - and so the process rolls on. Meanwhile the original meaning may well be forgotten.

The ancient Greeks had a verb tupto* meaning to bash, hit or strike; and a noun tupos* meaning a hit or blow. The Greeks themselves then transferred the meaning to the mark left by a blow - a pattern, say, impressed with a tool on to the soft clay of a pot before firing; and then even to the tool which impressed it. They made coins or medals by hammering a hard metal die on to a softer metal disc. Tupos could mean the die itself, or the resulting coin, or the very blow with which the die formed the coin. If they had butter pats then (and even we don’t seem to use them now, though I bought a pair a few years ago for old times’ sake) then each little ball of butter that bears the patterning of the wooden butter pats might have been considered a tupos, as well as the butter pat itself , and the gentle ‘patting’ by which the pattern is impressed on the butter.

* Greek ‘u’ was transcribed ‘y’ by the Romans, from whose language we adopted the spellings of 'type' and 'typical'.

It was centuries - if not millennia - later that the first European inventors of printing (Gutenburg and Caxton and Co) invented what became known as ‘movable type’: each line of each page of a book was assembled letter by letter, by hand. But first the letters had to be made by pouring molten lead into a matrix which itself was ‘struck’ by a hand-cut die. This principle had been used for centuries in making coins and medals - the typus of the Romans, who borrowed the word from the tupos of the Greeks.

Thus in the later fourteenth century we got books printed by ‘type’. And when five hundred years later Pastor Malling Hansen of Denmark invented a machine with which a person could write a letter by pressing keys on a keyboard, our English forebears named it a ‘typewriter’. The Victorians would ‘typewrite’ a letter, and a for a while a secretary who did this job for an employer was called a ‘typewriter’, because by then the word 'type' meant not only the die etc, but also the printed text. It was only later that the term ‘typewriter’ became used for the machine only, while the operator became a ‘typist’.

And a mere four or so generations later on we have almost forgotten the typewriter, but still use the same pattern of letters on a keyboard to create text on our computer screen - sorry, I mean ‘monitor’ - and are happy to refer to the process as typing.

It’s because the use of a tupos or type enabled the mass production of large numbers of an image, that the word got its metaphorical meaning of ‘one of many identical units’. We like to imagine that all professors come from the same mould, as it were, (absent-minded), or all clergymen (with a special way of talking), or all army officers (brusque and moustached): they are all - for the purposes of funny anecdotes and sketch shows, anyway - ‘types’. “There was a Scotsman, an Irishman and an Englishman, see . . .” And actors and actresses who find them selves having to portray the same kind of character over and over again, become ‘type-cast’.

Thus the remote cousins of the Tupos family proliferate, but tend to lose touch with one another until a Word Genealogist re-unites them.

Typical pedantry

Help Yourself to a Sandwich

I haven’t seen a man carrying a sandwich board for years. Perhaps it’s because I live in a small village, not a big city. A man walking through our village in a sandwich board from the pub to the bowling green and back might be lucky if he saw four people, but a high percentage of that small number might turn their heads - say 75 per cent: the other one might be busy pushing a wheelbarrow or looking over a hedge. A sandwich board man in the centre of Manchester might walk the same distance and pass through a milling crowd of five hundred, but he only needs a ten per cent turn of heads to get his message across to fifty potential readers.

All of which philosophising and arithmetical hypothesing arises because I was wondering what to put in a sandwich. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich in the late eighteenth century, had the reputation of being a gambler who was so hooked to the gaming table that instead of going out to get a proper lunch, would ask someone to fetch him two slices of bread wrapped round a slice of ham. No sandwich bars in those days, though today a good one may offer a choice of twenty or more fillings. Every single sandwich bar in the world takes its generic name from this eighteenth century earl.

But John Montagu, 4th E of S, was not just a rake. He had a long career in politics: he sat in the House of Lords, served as an officer in the army, served also as a diplomat and ambassador abroad, became a member of the Admiralty Board, Master of Trinity House, Receiver of the Revenues of Ireland, Postmaster-General, and eventually First Lord of the Admiralty. True, he was not a great success in this last post, but we can see that he must have been a busy man, and we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he resorted to dining off slices of ham and bread in the office. But surely he can’t have spent as much time in the casino as his reputation suggests.

But how came his family by the title ? The first Earl was Edward Montagu (1625-72), firmly pro-Cromwell in his earlier days, but Admiral of the Fleet (with Samuel Pepys as his secretary) at the time of the Restoration. He was instrumental in setting the scene for the return of Charles II, and was rewarded with the title Earl of Portsmouth, later amended to Earl of Sandwich (who suggested the change, I wonder ? We might be eating cheese and pickle portsmouths). Sandwich in Kent was one of the Cinque Ports.

The earliest link in this semantic chain must be the origin of the place-name ‘Sandwich’. The first element ‘sand’ means what it says. The second element ‘wich’ signified in the early middle ages a commercial or market centre (compare Norwich and Ipswich and Dunwich). Presumably Sandwich was named for its sea-shore trade.

Help yourself to a sandwich

Time and time again

We know that this phrase and its alternative version ‘time and again’ mean ‘repeatedly’, or ‘once and again’; but it is not easy to see how or why. Nor do the ‘Phrase and Fable’ dictionaries, or the standard dictionaries for that matter, offer much in the way of explanation.

The problem seems to be that we don’t use the simple word ‘time’ to mean ‘once’: if we did, there would be no doubt in the matter.

The solution may lie in the close relationship of the two words ‘time’ and ‘tide’ (both of which, as we all know, wait for no man). The words have the same ancient root of ti, but with different (and again, pretty ancient) terminations. Old English used both tima and tid to mean simple ‘time’ and also the notion of repetition in time. Over the centuries it was the tid derivative 'tide' that came to mean both regular seasonal festivals (‘Christmastide’, ‘Eastertide’) and the regular rise and fall of the sea (‘high tide’, ‘low tide’).

We get a hint of the dual significance of ‘tide’ in a well-known passage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men”, declares Brutus rather over-optimistically, “Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune . . . On such a full sea we are now afloat, And we must take the current when it serves . . . ”

But it seems that the notion of regularity also lingered in the word that became our ‘time’. In our phrase ‘time and time again’, it is the notion of regular repetition, which we associate usually with the word ‘tide’, that is alluded to in what may be a very old English idiom.

Time and time again

To and Of

“There’s an irony to the PM’s solution to the crisis”, said a certain ‘commentator’ in a weekly magazine. “There is no guarantee of the strategy working - and then what ?”

How should we explain the grammatical significance of the two ‘tos’ and the ‘of’ - and indeed how justify the word ‘then’ hanging in the air ? As so often, we can see what the writer is getting at in those few words, but his English is awful.

To and Of

The Truth about Petrification

"This is absolutely barmy", cried an MP recently, appalled (not unreasonably) at the decision of a College in Yorkshire to delete Christmas and Easter from its calendar. "They are petrified that they offend the minority, but what are they doing offending the majority ?".

This gentleman is obviously pretty angry, but he could have expressed himself better.

'Petrified' means 'turned to stone' (from Latin petra, itself derived from Greek petra or petros, all meaning stone, rock or crag). You can say (metaphorically) "I saw this beast coming towards me: I was petrified". But you can't be 'petrified that . . .' or even 'petrified of . . .' any more than you can be 'turned to stone that. . .' or 'turned to stone of . . .' It is even worse to say (as some people do) "I was literally petrified", as if you had actually caught the eye of a Gorgon, or been hung up at the Knaresborough wishing-well to be coated in limestone.

It is a pity that so many good metaphors are no longer recognised as such, have (to most users) lost their point entirely, and so have become ridiculously misused. This is a genuine loss to our language: I think I shall have to found a Society for the Care of Aged of Metaphors.

The truth about petrification