The virtual linguist

Dundee United is slang for 'fool' in Lagos

The BBC is running a series called Welcome to Lagos at the moment and in last week's episode a Nigerian man who was being interviewed about having sense or being foolish said "If you are a Dundee United" meaning "if you are an idiot" (here it is on iPlayer; it's said at 56:20 ie just before the end of the programme).

There are two theories why the football club Dundee United has made such an impression on the Nigerians: i) the team travelled to Nigeria in the 70s but did not play well and ii) the team threw away a two-goal advantage to Roma in an important match in the 1980s.

Here's the story.

H-less

The adjective h-less (pronounced aitchless) is in the OED. It means 'not pronouncing the letter H'. Not pronouncing H was always considered a lower-class trait and mocked by snobs and the upper classes, as the OED citation for the word makes clear: "Millionaire cheesemongers who dwell h-less in the feudal castles of the poor" (from an 1893 edition of Temple Bar Magazine).

The people often at the receiving end of such snobbery were Cockneys, since the Cockney dialect is renowned for not pronouncing Hs where they are written (remember Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady having to practise "In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly happen"?). Conversely Cockneys often pronounce an H where it is not written. Here is an old poem called The Letter H's Protest to the Cockneys (from A Whimsey Anthology compiled by Carolyn Wells):

Whereas by you, I have been driven

From 'ouse, from 'ome, from 'ope, from 'eaven,

And placed by your most learned society

in Hexile, Hanguish and Hanxiety,

Nay, charged without one just pretence

With Harrogance and Himpudence, --

I here demand full restitution,

And beg you'll mend your Hellocution.

Gooseberry

I wrote something for an Australian magazine and I was told that the concept of babies being found under the gooseberry bush was not familar in Australia. In fact, the editor told me that she had never seen gooseberries in Australia.

Gooseberries certainly grow in Britain, although you don't see them that often in supermarkets, perhaps because they are fiddly to top and tail so people don't like cooking with them. Gooseberries are not as popular as they used to be, mind you. In the mid-19th century there were 170-odd gooseberry shows a year, now there are eleven, held mostly in Cheshire and Yorkshire in the north of England (there is lots about gooseberries and gooseberry shows here).

I looked up 'gooseberry' in the OED and, although people have in the past suggested that the word comes from a similar Dutch or German word, or is related to the word 'gorse', the Dictionary feels that the word probably comes from the two words goose and berry.

Gooseberry has other meanings. It can mean chaperon, or a third person whose presence is not wanted by a pair of lovers. To play old gooseberry used to mean 'play havoc'. The big gooseberry season is the time of year when newspapers are short of real news so fill their pages with trifles.

No-one seems to know for sure how gooseberry bushes came to be associated with the birth of babies. Gooseberry blossom is symbolic of anticipation, so that might be it. Another possibility is that gooseberry bush was 19th-century slang for 'pubic hair' (see here).

There are regional names for gooseberry eg grozet (Scotland) and feaberry.

Arbour

Arbre means 'tree' in French, and English words such as arboretum (botanical tree-garden) and arboriculture (cultivation of trees and shrubs) are clearly related. However, the English word arbour (shady garden retreat) is not related to this group.

Arbour comes from the Old French erbier, and ultimately Latin herba, meaning 'plant'. The spelling erber then became arber by association with the Latin word arbor, meaning 'tree'.

There has traditionally been a link between -er spelling and -ar spelling and pronunciation. Clerk, Derby, Hertford, Berkshire and sergeant are pronounced as if they were written with an a. The words carve, bark, farm, starve and other words spelled -ar were once spelled -er.

Harbour, incidentally, has a different history. It is from the Old English herebeorg, which is linked to the German Herberge and French auberge (which both mean 'inn').

Conservative

The election slogan of the Conservative Party is "Vote for Change". As a letter writer to one of today's papers asked, "Isn't 'Vote Conservative, Vote for Change' an oxymoron?". Indeed it is, if conservative is written with a small c. Here's the OED definition of conservative:

Characterized by a tendency to preserve or keep intact or unchanged.

George

Oops! I meant to write something about the name George on St George's Day, but the day (23 April) passed me by, I'm afraid. I didn't plan on writing anything about the man or the history, but wanted to talk about expressions which contain the word George. George is in the Oxford English Dictionary, and here are some of the more interesting entries:

by George: a mild oath

let George do it: let someone else do the work

brown George: a type of brown bread, or a style of wig

to take St George to borrow: said as security for one's truth or good faith (the equivalent of 'in God's name')

St George to speed (or to borrow): goodbye (Scots)

George (on its own): just as Tommy was the nickname for an ordinary soldier, George was the nickname for an airman.

The word Geordie, meaning a person from the North-East, is a diminutive of the word George.

Lightening up the election campaign -- Mad Cap'n Tom

I haven't had a single canvasser come to my door to solicit my vote, nor have I had many flyers or leaflets through the door. The election in my part of south-west Surrey is a very staid affair indeed. What a shame I don't live in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency, where one of the candidates is the independent Mad Cap'n Tom, a buccaneer who wants you to mark your voting paper with a skull and crossbones. Here be his policies:

* tax-free rum

* fix broken Britain with a free roll of duct tape sent to all homes

* force Apple to change the name of its iPad to iPatch.

* a complete ban on unexpected items in the bagging area (that won't mean much to you unless you use the self-service tills at Tesco or Marks and Spencer!)

Mad Cap'n Tom is Tom Scott, who runs the International Talk Like a Pirate Day (I blogged on this here). There is another post here on Pirate English, but you can hear Mad Cap'n Tom giving his own party political broadcast in Pirate Speak here.

Atrium

Not much is known about the Etruscan language. For a few centuries after about 800BC the Etruscans had an advanced and prosperous empire of city states in north-west Italy, an area roughly equivalent to modern Tuscany but extending south to Rome. Their culture was almost completely assimilated into the Roman culture which followed. We owe an enormous debt to the Etruscans, as it was their alphabet that the Romans adopted and it is thus the precursor of our own writing system today.

The Etruscan language cannot be read today (the civilisation left hardly any books or written texts) and there is much dispute about the origin of the language and any relatives it might have. It seems to be a complete one-off, seemingly unrelated to anything, certainly not Indo-European. The Romans did adopt a few words into their language, and it is believed that our modern word atrium has an Etruscan origin. Athre in Etruscan meant 'building' and this became atrium in Latin. The typical Etruscan building had an internal courtyard, or atrium, and the Romans adopted this architectural style as well as the word.

There is an Etruscan glossary here if you want a taste of the language. 

Too many police can't shoot straight or take bribes

One of the cuttings a team member on Radio 4's comedy show The News Quiz earlier had brought in for the final round was from the English version of the German magazine Der Spiegel (this is it). It reads:

Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight or take bribes.

I notice I am behind the blogosphere on this one, as many other bloggers published the article days ago and it generated great debate. Some commentators felt that the addition of an Oxford comma would have prevented the amusing ambiguity (as the sentence stands the 'can't' governs 'take bribes' as well as 'shoot straight'). Personally, I don't think the addition of a comma would have been much help. I think the solution would have been to change the word order, insert another 'they', or repeat 'too many', eg

Too many police, they say, take bribes, can't read or write and can't shoot straight (an Oxford comma would have been okay here, but it wouldn't have changed the meaning; moreover, 'and' sounds better to me than the original 'or' here)

or

Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight, or they take bribes.

or

Too many police, they say, can't read or write, can't shoot straight, and too many (of them) take bribes.

A week is a long time in politics

One of the tiredest clichés is "a week is a long time in politics" and it is being bandied around a lot at the moment, as the parties' popularity swings up and down depending on the latest soundbite or tv interview.

It was Harold Wilson, Labour prime minister for two terms in the 1960s and 70s, who made the famous quote, probably in 1964. It refers to the vagaries of politics and the fact that things change very quickly.

The phrase "a week is a long time in politics" is a sort of snowclone, or frequently adapted phrase. After the first televised leaders' debate last week, we read "Ninety minutes is a long time in politics" (the debate lasted ninety minutes and it resulted in a surge of popularity for Nick Clegg and the Liberal Democrats), and sports reports often include phrases like "an hour is a long time in a sports match"; there's also the "a week may be a long time in politics but it's an eternity in (football, sport etc)". I am guilty myself of using it when teaching a language ("a week may be a long time in politics but it's nothing when it comes to learning Russian").