Mind your language
ANY mother must be rather alarmed by all these men doing unspeakable things to little children. Or rather, not unspeakable things, for we hear of little else on the wireless and television.
Now the former Bishop of Mashona- land, the Right Reverend Paul Bur- rough, has suggested in a letter to the Times that paedophile — 'lover of chil- dren' — should be replaced by misopaed — 'hater of children'.
I agree with the bishop that something should have been done, but I am not sure that it isn't too late. The mis- prefix that Dr Burrough uses comes from the Greek verb miseo 'I hate', as in misogy- nist. (It has nothing to do with the Old English prefix mis-, meaning 'wrong, ill', nor indeed with mix-, as in miscegena- don, which comes from miscere, `to mix'.) But in any case, there are more ways than one of hating children.
The problem as things stand is with the suffix -phile or -phiha. It comes from the Greek phileo, 'I love'. The kind of love it refers to is the sort that a philosopher has for wisdom or the philanthopist for mankind, not the per- verted sexual love of the paedophile. The Greek word for a sexual lover is erastes; so a child-lover in that sense should be a paederast.
The trouble is that paederast had already been appropriated so firmly for 'sexual love of boys' that the girls didn't get a look-in, thank heavens. Indeed, it was used by the Greeks themselves for 'boy-lover' — a common status among well-off Greek men. In the 18th centu- ry, Bailey's dictionary robustly gave the meaning of the English word paederast as 'a Sodomite, a buggerer', which makes the ground clear enough.
The word paedophilia is a newcomer and comes, by way of Havelock Ellis, from the German, no doubt, just like necrophilia, which was introduced by Krafft-Ebing. Both terms were in learned circulation by the beginning of this century. The first use of paedophile, though, is not recorded until 1951, since when it has made up for lost time.
Modern psychologists have been sin- gularly inept in their neologisms look at the bastard coinage homosexual, which is a mixture of Greek and Latin. It is a shame, but I don't see how, even by a dogged cam- paign, we can replace paedophile, even by misopaed.
Dot Wordsworth
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