Mind your language
SOME of the programmes on Channel 5, which to me seems nothing but the dreariest and most tawdry porn, are dignified with the label 'erotic drama'. They say erotic, I suppose, because it sounds a hit classier than sexual.
Though anything human can be ele- vated and complicated beyond the ani- mal, erotic — despite the efforts of C.S. Lewis in his book The Four Loves boils down to 'sexual', like it or not. And if Chaucer wrote of Eros, the adjective comes into English no earlier than 1622, in the form erotical in that relentless miller of words Robert Bur- ton's The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Burton would make a poor copy- writer for Channel 5, since he attributes to the erotical passion 'daily mono- machies, murders, effusion of blood, rapes, riot and immoderate expense', besides loathsome diseases 'worse than calentures and pestilent fevers', and, in short, 'feral melancholy, which crucifies the soul in this life, and everlasting tor- ments in the world to come'. And all this between Newsnight and Despatch Box on the other side.
The whole vocabulary of sexual psy- chology is in a terrible mess, partly because of unthinking importation of German terms and partly from the wild indifference of such founding fathers as Havelock Ellis. He is to blame for the ill- formed erogenous, which he coined in volume IV of his Studies in the Psycholo- gy of Sex in 1905. By the time he reached volume VII in 1928 he declared 'I now prefer erogenic', while noting that some English psychoanalysts had put forward the form erotogenous. The last is the best etymologically, but it was too late for this to prevail.
Perhaps we could take a leaf out of the booksellers' catalogues. They used to designate the pornographic as curiosa or facetiae. The adjective face- tious already has its semantic territory, but in place of the pretentious erotic for Channel 5's shoddy wares we might try reviving the obsolete adjective facete (stressed on the second syllable). Then the programme guides could just label such output with the initial F for the appropriate f-word.
Dot Wordsworth
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