A dose of the verbals
Dot Wordsworth
Alight moment in the preliminary stages of learning Turkish is to discover that the word in that tongue for ‘talking nonsense’ is fart. Later on one finds that the Turkish for ‘violin bow’ is arse, though these facts alone are not always enough to carry the student chortling on to complete mastery of the language. The Danish for bookshop is boghandel and the Swedish for ice-cream is glass. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s The Meaning of Tingo (Penguin, £10) is not entirely filled with such false friends, but he does like them.
I began to be suspicious when he claimed that slug means ‘servant’ in Gaulish. Gaulish? No one speaks Gaulish. A Celtic language, it is known from a few inscriptions, and slug is indeed the root of the word for ‘servant’. But I suppose looking too seriously into these things spoils the fun. We must suspend disbelief and accept for a laugh that bum is the Arabic for ‘owl’ and the Turkish for ‘bang’ too. (Actually, bum is the English for ‘bang’ as well, but we spell it boom.) Unmentionables, as de Boinod is aware, are not so merely for scatological reasons. An Albanian word for ‘wolf’, he says, is a contraction of the aspiration, ‘May God close his mouth.’ Such threatening creatures can be euphemised, as the Furies were known as the Eumenides. But I do not think that the Russian medvedev for ‘bear’ is a euphemism, as A. J. de B. suggests, so much as a kenning, just as an Old English kenning for ‘bear’ was ‘bee-wolf’, or Beowulf.
I rather liked the author’s list of animal noises in a selection of languages. Sheep are divided into those which go baa and those which go meh. Like English baa-lambs, Slovene sheep go bee-bee and Vietnamese ones go behehehe. Portuguese sheep say meee meee and Mandarin sheep go mieh mieh. Crows seem to be even more of one mind in their cry, from the French croacroa to the Korean kka-ak-kka-ak. Babies of all nations are mostly in agreement about the name of their putative fathers, with those in 70 per cent of language communities choosing papa. Obstinate, mixed-up Georgian babies insist on mama.
The meaning of tingo, by the way, is, in the language of Easter Island, ‘to borrow things from a friend’s house, one by one, until there’s nothing left’. Or is it? Howard Rheingold, who in 1988 published They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases, gives the slightly different meaning, ‘to take all the objects one desires from the house of a friend, one at a time, by asking to borrow them’. Mr Jacot de Boinod is even less likely than Mr Rheingold to know the language of Easter Island, but tingo is hereby relaunched as a standby of saloon-bar, folk-linguistic anecdote.
Let us not be too hard on tingoism. Beware: far worse lurks on the bookshop shelves, many dressed in a neat easy-read format, with feeble ‘humorous’ drawings. Penguin has brought out Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep: The Origins of Even More Phrases We Use Every Day by Albert Jack (£10), as a follow-up to his Red Herrings and White Elephants. It’s not much cop. Take gammy leg. The lad Jack says it comes from game, which ‘derives from the Irish cam meaning “crooked”. It has been used for centuries, right up until the 1950s, when game started being pronounced gammy, so resulting in our modern expression.’ Every detail is wrong. Game did not start being pronounced gammy in the 1950s; goodness knows where that idea came from. Gammy is recorded from the early 19th century, says the Oxford English Dictionary, and game might be a shortening of it. ‘The suggestion that it is adopted from Welsh [not Irish] cam (feminine gam), crooked, is unlikely,’ the dictionary adds, ‘as the alleged primary sense of “crooked” which is given in dictionaries seems to be an etymological figment.’ Mr Jack says on the flyleaf: ‘Place beside toilet — open when seated.’ Cut out the middle man, I say; don’t waste time reading it first.
Worse is March Hares and Monkey’s Uncles: Origins of the Words and Phrases We Use Every Day by Harry Oliver (Metro, £9.99). If you think the title is rather similar to Mr Jack’s, you should see the dustjacket. His treatment of monkey’s uncle is more pitiful than that of march hare. I would be ashamed to find this next to, or even in, anyone’s ‘toilet’.
Much more respectable is The Real McCoy: The True Stories Behind Our Everyday Phrases by Georgia Hole (whose name, poor thing, does not appear on the dustjacket, or the cover, of this package of goods, at £9.99, from the Oxford Dictionaries factory, though I note she acknowledges that Sarah Hawker did much spadework). Inside we learn that moment of truth derives from the bullfighting term hora de la verdad, and that the English is first recorded in Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon (1932). But Miss, or probably Dr, Hole spoils it by adding, ‘The reason it is called the moment of truth is presumably that it determines which of the combatants will die, although the odds would always seem to be against the bull.’ This makes me think she has never seen a bullfight, which is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, the bullfighter has to plunge his sword deep into the spine of the bull, when the head is bent low, allowing the blade to pass through a small area between its bony shoulders. It is a matter of timing, judgment and accuracy, and the crowd holds its breath; a moment of truth indeed. If the pass fails, the matador loses kudos, but the bull will still be killed, by another attempt or by someone else, if the torero can’t manage it. As for the real McCoy, Dr Hole has to admit ‘the source of this expression is far from clear’. No ‘true story’ there, then.
Don’t be put off by the title of Tom Burton’s Long Words Bother Me (Sutton, £8.99). It comes from that Bear of Very Little Brain, Pooh, and is meant, I suppose, ironically, for the author knows his onions all right. In writing of the surprising fact that daft and deft were until modern times the same word, Dr Burton says, ‘The Lincolnshire priest Orm (quoted in the Middle English Physiologus) described Mary as “shammfasst and daft and sedefull”, that is, “modest and humble and chaste” .’ For all the outcrops of erudition, the contents, originating from a series on an Australian radio channel, are readable, in a chattily discursive style. The inevitable cheery drawings look as if they had been approved by a committee of BBC World Service staff.
My lavatory is not stocked with books (chacun à son lieu), but beside my bed is a copy of Word Origins (A& C Black, £12.99) by John Ayto, who is, frankly, a lexicographer. He’s a good one, having edited the excellent Twentieth-Century Words (a decade-by-decade dictionary of neologisms) for Oxford and an edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a brave task. The 554 close-set pages of Word Origins (subtitled The Hidden Histories of English Words from A to Z) are more entertaining and better written than the packaged books that are meant to be so ‘accessible’.
Here’s lamprey: ‘12th century. The words lamprey and limpet [Old English] come from the same source: mediaeval Latin lampreda. This was an alteration of an earlier, 5th-century lampreta, which has been plausibly explained as literally “stone-licker” (from Latin lambere “lick”, source of English lambent, and petra “stone”). The reason for applying such a name to the limpet is fairly obvious — it clings fast to rocks — but in fact the lamprey too holds on to rocks with its jawless sucking mouth. See lambent, limpet, petrol.’ I did, and went from there to parsley, and thence to celery. Very moreish. Managerial revolution? What next? The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Polemicists? Luckily, no. This is the cover of a rare pamphlet by Orwell on the American political theorist James Burnham, who in 1940 wrote The Managerial Revolution, in which he speculated that the heirs to the world’s great capitalist, communist and fascist power-blocs would be a new breed of political ‘managers’ — unelected oligarchs whose only raison d’être would be to stay in power. Orwell argues against this idea. ‘Fortunately the “managers” are not so invincible as Burnham believes,’ he says. ‘The huge, invincible, everlasting slave empire of which Burnham appears to dream will not be established.’ It is curious, then, that in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948) he takes a notably Burnhamesque position, imagining just such a world, in which rival slave-states are locked in perpetual phoney war. Either he had changed his mind or Nineteen Eighty-Four is a tongue-incheek thriller, not so much political prophecy as political satire — on Burnham.
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