The virtual linguist

Troth

And for my last post of the day with a 'Royal Wedding' theme, I'll look at the word 'troth' which featured prominently in the ceremony, along with other archaisms.

 

Troth developed from the Old English word for 'truth'. It originally meant faithfulness, loyalty or honesty. The word on its own died out in the 16th century, only remaining in certain set phrases, such as plight one's troth. To plight one's troth means 'to pledge one's faith' or 'to make a solemn promise', particularly a promise to marry. The slightly more common, although old-fashioned or literary, word 'betrothed' is from the same root.

Royal peculiar

I learnt when I was watching the Royal Wedding this morning that Westminster Abbey is what is known as a 'royal peculiar'. Peculiar is a term used in the Church of England to denote a church, chapel, parish or ecclesiastical court that is exempt from the jurisdiction of the diocese where it is located, and thus of the bishop of the diocese. Instead, it is the monarch who has jurisdiction. Royal peculiars developed in the Anglo-Saxon period. Before Henry VIII founded the Church of England, the Abbey was a papal peculiar, but with the Act of Supremacy in 1559 the jurisdiction previously exercised by the Pope was transferred to the sovereign. See the Westminster Abbey website for a bit more detail.

Best man

Prince William chose to call his brother Harry his best man at today's Royal Wedding. Traditionally, royal bridegrooms have had one or more 'supporters', not 'best men', as the official website of the British monarchy says (near the bottom of this page). This site also says that if the bride is royal but the bridegroom isn't, then the groom has a best man, not supporters.

 

The term 'best man' dates back to the beginning of the 19th century. It was originally a Scottish term.

 

If you haven't yet had enough of weddings, see this recent post of mine on the terms for other wedding attendants.

Calm down, dear

David Cameron's jibe at Opposition front bencher Angela Eagle, telling her to 'Calm down, dear', has resulted in a lot of media comment and criticism. 'Calm down, dear', say critics, is a patronising statement, and presumably Cameron would not have said it to a male MP. You can see the clip from the Parliamentary session here; he says the phrase two or three times.

 

The phrase 'calm down' can in itself be construed as patronising, since it assumes that the person has lost their cool or is neurotic. Coupling it with the even more patronising 'dear' exacerbates the offence.

 

It is not so much words and phrases themselves that are patronising, but the context they are used in, the tone of voice of the person making the comment, and other factors. I am often addressed as 'dear' by shop assistants and the like, and that is fine; in those situations it can be considered friendly and down to earth.

 

David Cameron claimed to be merely repeating the popular catchphrase of Michael Winner, the film director and food critic. Certainly, the phrase is well known, since Winner says it in a television ad for insurance.

 

The phrase 'calm down' (without the 'dear') is also associated with Harry Enfield's stereotypical comedy characters, the Scousers (see this very short YouTube clip).

Companion animals, not pets

The term 'pets' to describe animals is insulting, according to academics editing the new Journal of Animal Ethics (I'm not sure if it is the animals themselves which feel insulted). The journal also objects to the terms wildlife, critters and beasts and does not like the humans who look after animals being called owners - it would prefer the term human carers. Instead, pets should be called companion animals, and animals in the wild should be called free-living, free-ranging or free-roaming because of the negative connotations of the word 'wild', which evokes images of uncivilised barbarity.

 

According to the academics, our terms for animals colours our judgement towards them and can affect the way we treat them. In addition, they do not like idioms in the language which make disparaging references to animals, such as 'as sly as a fox' or 'as drunk as a skunk'.

 

Here's one of the articles on the subject.

Wedlock

There are a number of words in English with the suffix 'lock', eg padlock, deadlock, warlock, hemlock and wedlock, and many puns and jokes have been created based on the similarities, but the origin of the 'lock' of wedlock is different from that of the other words.

 

In 'wedlock', the suffix '-lock' is from the Old English -lác, which denoted a noun of action and meant 'action' or 'proceedings'. Wed was a pledge, so wedlock meant 'pledge-giving'. There were a handful of words in Old English with the suffix -lác, eg beadolác, feohtlác, heaðolác (warfare), and réaflác (robbery), but only wedlock has survived into modern English.

 

Not that wedlock is a particularly modern word. It means 'the state of being married' or matrimony, but usually appears these days in the phrase 'out of wedlock', itself a fairly old-fashioned phrase.

 

The 'lock' of padlock is from the Old English -loc, meaning lock. The same goes for 'deadlock', which was once a type of lock, as well as meaning a complete standstill. The word for the plant hemlock comes from the Old English hymlice. The -lock of warlock was -loga in Old English, which was related to the verb meaning belie or deny (the original meaning of warlock was oath-breaker).

Wedding breakfast and cakes

Since this is Royal Wedding week, I shall write a wedding post. The wedding breakfast is not a breakfast, ie a morning meal, but the meal served after the wedding ceremony. No-one quite knows why it is called a breakfast. It has been said that the bride and groom traditionally fasted before taking communion at the ceremony which, pre-Henry VIII, would have been a Catholic mass, but the first mention of the term 'wedding breakfast' in the OED is only 1850.

 

Many wedding cakes are very ornate affairs with several tiers, and this explains why ornate buildings are often referred to as being 'wedding-cake' mansions, palaces etc. In particular, several tall Soviet-era blocks are often referred to as being of a wedding-cake style.

The forensic voice expert

Martin Barry is a full-time forensic voice expert (article here). He is enlisted by the police to examine recordings of voices -- although some recordings are merely fragments and scraps against the crackling background noise of a poor-quality tape. In one case a singer claimed to be making a recording in the studio at the time of a murder, and produced the recording in question. Barry compared this with another recording from an earlier date and found that the two were identical in every way, suggesting that the singer had submitted the earlier recording as his alibi evidence.

 

You might think that a listener would notice whether two recordings were the same or not, but Barry says that people's memories of voices are notoriously unreliable. He cites one academic who did not even recognise his mother when presented with a short recording of her voice, without being told who it was. That is because when we are talking to someone on the phone we know who it is, therefore we never pay very close attention to individual sounds and pronunciation quirks.

 

Forensic phonetic evidence alone is unlikely to convict or acquit anyone, but it can often be a useful part of the evidence mix. Despite the advances being made in this field, many police forces still rely on old-fashioned crackly tapes for their interviews, although the Association of Chief Police Officers has recommended a switch to digital recording equipment.

 

The BBC article about Martin Barry, the voice expert, here. It mentions the infamous Yorkshire Ripper hoax, where police were misled by the hoaxer's accent. There's a bit more on that story in this old post of mine.

Nit nurse

An article in today's Telegraph "Parents sign petition to bring back the nit nurse" brought back memories. When I was at primary school in the 1960s our hair was inspected for headlice by the 'nit nurse' (or 'nitty Nora' as my mother and aunts called her). As the article says, these nurses were phased out in the 1980s and 90s and responsibility for detecting headlice fell to the parents. When my children were at primary school in the 1990s we used to get regular letters asking us to check our children's hair and giving us the name of whatever was the popular lotion or shampoo at the time.

 

The story concerns a petition signed by parents at a school in Rhyl, North Wales, calling for the return of the nit nurse to combat the perennial problem of nits. Here's the article.

 

The phrase 'nit nurse' is in the OED, dating from the 1940s. The first citation is from the medical journal The Lancet: "The school nurse, known affectionately as the ‘*nit nurse’, resolutely tries to raise the standard of cleanliness".

Earl Grey tea

There was a short piece on why Earl Grey tea is so named on Radio 4's Pick of the Week earlier (listen here for another week - the piece begins at 05:58). Earl Grey is a rather elegant tea with a distinctive bergamot-orangey flavour.

 

Charles, Earl Grey was the British prime minister from 1830 to 1834. One of his envoys, while in China, supposedly saved a mandarin's life, and, in gratitude, the mandarin gave him a special tea recipe. The envoy duly passed the recipe on to the PM, who sent it to the tea-making firm Twinings to make up the recipe. The prime minister seemingly liked the tea and asked for another batch at a later date. Twinings had written the recipe down, so when Grey ordered it, they referred to this recipe as Earl Grey's tea.

 

The snippet on the radio was from a series, The Prime Ministers, presented by the BBC's political editor Nick Robinson (here's the Earl Grey episode). Twinings website carries the story, too. The story on the Tea Council's website is slightly different; they say it was Jackson's of Piccadilly who first created the tea.