The virtual linguist

Mammon

I went to Watts Gallery in Compton, near Guildford, Surrey, earlier, which was the former home of the Victorian painter George Watts, and I was looking at his painting Mammon (can be viewed here).

 

Mammon means wealth or riches, when regarded negatively. It is always written with a capital M because Mammon is wealth personified, often seen as a false god, a demon, or an agent of the devil. Mammon comes to us ultimately from the Aramaic word māmōnā, meaning wealth or profit.

The pronunciation of Cadogan and of other London names

My daughter was telling me about a concert she'd been to in Cadogan Hall, only the conversation was more about the correct pronunciation of Cadogan than the music. The correct pronunciation is Caduggan (with the stress on the 'dug'). The Cadogan family members are, and always have been, very wealthy Chelsea landowners.

 

By coincidence, there was an article on the Londonist website today about the pronunciation of some difficult London place names. The Bois of Theydon Bois in Essex is not pronounced the French way, as in Bois (bwah) de Boulogne, but as Boyce or Boyz. The L of Hainault is pronounced, but the L of Holborn is not. Although many of us say the mall of shopping mall like 'moll', the road in central London the Mall is pronounced to rhyme with 'pal', as is Pall Mall. The W of Greenwich, Woolwich, Southwark and Chiswick is silent (although we pronounce the W of Gatwick Airport and of Aldwych). The P of Deptford is usually not pronounced.

 

There is disagreement among commentators on the article about the pronunciation of Plaistow in east London. I've heard 'Plarse-toe', and that's what some of the commentators say, but others say 'Play-stow'.

 

Here's the article, with some informative comments.

John Rentoul's Banned List

Publicising his new book The Banned List: A Manifesto Against Jargon and Cliché, John Rentoul, political commentator who writes for The Independent, has included some of the political clichés he can't stand in an article in today's edition. They include 'transactional behaviour', as in 'not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income', a phrase that was used by Liam Fox about his friend and 'adviser' Adam Werrity before he resigned as Defence Secretary last week.

 

Rentoul highlights waffle used by David Cameron, such as 'in the driving seat' and 'sticking with the status quo is not an option'. Ed Miliband does not escape; he is taken to task for his 'hard-wiring fairness into the economy'.

 

Rentoul's proposed banned list of clichés includes 'going forward', 'any time soon' and 'a heads-up'. One of the dangers of writing about how annoying you find clichés and jargon in other people's writing is that, unfortunately, you tend to use them yourself. I can't decide whether Rentoul deliberately included such clichés in his writing as 'the damage has been done', 'the in-crowd', 'a mere statement of the obvious', 'a step ahead' and 'self-appointed guardians', or whether they just slipped through.

 

John Rentoul's article is here.

French Academy Dire, Ne pas dire

The French Academy, a body which polices and 'protects' the French language and issues a definitive dictionary of spellings and usage, has added a new section to its website entitled Dire, Ne pas dire (say, don't say). This section is designed to highlight and correct errors and sloppy usage which the Academy has noticed among modern speakers of French.

 

Under 'Errors' the Academy singles out the incorrect use of sur, on, with place names instead of où or à (so, people are saying J'habite sur Lyon instead of j'habite à Lyon). It also criticises the phrase au niveau de as a literal translation of 'at the level of', and suggests instead people should use en ce qui concerne or quant à.

 

There are two instances of Néologismes et anglicismes listed. One is using the verb impacter when referring to a consequence; affecter is advised instead. The other is the objection to best-of (sometimes written best-off) to refer to a selection of a singer's songs, for instance. French speakers are advised, instead, to use the admittedly much prettier French word florilège (anthology), or to say le meilleur de, revue, choix, or sélection.

 

As for wrong usages, French speakers are reminded that gérer means to manage something you own, and should not be used when describing other things eg when talking about dealing with a divorce, looking after children, or living with doubts. In addition, quelque part (somewhere) is to be reserved for talking about unknown places and not to translate 'somehow' or 'in some way'.

 

We are also told that the words Absolument, Effectivement, Tout à fait, Exactement, and Parfaitement are used to excess. A simple Oui usually suffices.

 

Here's the relevant page from the Academy's website and here's an English-language version of the story in a recent edition of the Daily Telegraph.

Stephen Fry's Planet Word Uses and Abuses

I found episode 3 of Stephen Fry's Planet Word fascinating (available on iPlayer here for those in the UK, and also on YouTube -- here -- for those outside the UK). The subject was taboo language, which encompassed bad language and swearing, euphemism, loaded language, secret languages and political correctness.

 

We saw a woman who had Tourette's syndrome who couldn't help punctuating her speech with the F word - and also the word 'biscuit'. Another patient had had a stroke and when he first began to recover all he could say was swear words. Seemingly in such patients the area of the brain that normally inhibits us from saying these words indiscriminately has been damaged by the stroke.

 

We also saw how swearing constantly helped Stephen Fry keep his hand in painfully freezing cold water for over twice as long a period as when he uttered a neutral word aloud.

 

There were also examples of Polari or 1950s/60s gay slang, Professor Stephen Pinker talked about how the words that shock or offend these days are not the same as those that caused offence 40 or 50 years ago and Stephen Fry sat in on a hospital course in Norfolk designed to give foreign nurses an inkling of what patients actually meant when they used euphemisms such as 'spend a penny'. The nurse running the course said that the staff themselves used euphemisms in front of patients in order not to distress them. So, if someone died on the ward, the nurse would pick up the phone and tell the porter that they had a gentleman or a lady for Rose Cottage, or a little one for Rainbow's End, Rose Cottage and Rainbow's End being euphemisms for the morgue.

 

The programme makes interesting viewing. Watch here on iPlayer or here on YouTube.

Cassandra

I went to an erudite talk yesterday, during which the speaker referred to possible doubters and Cassandras in the audience. A Cassandra in this sense is someone (male or female) who says that something bad will happen, but whose words no-one believes. The single-volume ODE definition is “a prophet of disaster, especially one who is disregarded”.

The original Cassandra featured in Greek mythology. She was a daughter of Priam, the Trojan king. Apollo, captivated by her beauty, gave her the gift of prophecy but when she deceived him he turned this gift into a curse, determining that any future prophecies she made, even if they were true, would never be believed. As a result her attempts to warn the Trojans of the existence of the Trojan horse were ignored and thus Troy fell.

Lackadaisical

Lackadaisical was Oxford Dictionaries Online’s word of the day today. It was defined as “lacking enthusiasm and determination; carelessly lazy”. The word has an interesting etymology. The OED’s first definition is “Resembling one who is given to crying ‘Lackaday!’”. Lackaday is no longer said these days, but it comes from the phrases ‘alack-the-day!’ or ‘alack-a-day!’, interjections with the sense ‘Shame or reproach to the day!’ or ‘Woe worth the day!’. Juliet’s nurse, in Romeo and Juliet, says “She's dead, deceased, she's dead; alack the day!”, when she finds her mistress dead. These phrases are based on the word ‘alack’ meaning pity or shame.

You can subscribe to Oxford Dictionaries word a day on the home page of their website.

Bazooka

PM David Cameron wants European leaders to take a 'big bazooka' approach to resolving the eurozone crisis (see this FT article).

 

A bazooka is a firearm, a tubular rocket-launcher, but originally it was a musical instrument. As a citation in the OED says (and the OED refers the reader to this citation for the definition, it offers none of its own) "a trombone-like instrument confected of two gas-pipes and a whisky funnel".

 

Bazooka is a 20th-century word - the first citation is 1935. It comes from the word bazoo, a late-19th-century word. The Dictionary says the origin of the word is unknown, but it refers the reader to the Dutch word for 'trumpet', bazuin, for comparison.

 

Bazoo was originally another word for the simple musical instrument, the kazoo. Because it was originally a harsh, rasping musical instrument, the word soon became used to refer to the mouth.

Shad Thames

I had dinner last night in a restaurant in Shad Thames, a now very trendy area (Shad Thames is the name of both a street and of the whole area) near the river in south-east London. In the 19th century this area was a marshy dockland area full of wharves, mills, warehouses, granaries and factories.

 

The word 'shad' is in the OED, but only with the meaning 'type of fish'. Shad in the name Shad Thames is believed to be an abbreviation of St John at Thames. In 1733 an Act of Parliament created a new parish in the district of Horselydown, as the area was then called (probably because it was once open land on which residents could graze their horses and cattle, although there is also a folk legend that King John's horse lay down here and threw the monarch off its back). The newly built church for the newly created parish was named St John's.

 

Not far away, on the other side of the river is the district of Shadwell. The 'shad' of Shadwell has a completely different etymology - it is from the Old English sceald, meaning 'shallow'.

Poltroon

I had a long and frustrating conversation with my bank earlier after having been locked out of the internet site for forgetting first my password, and then the answer to my security question. The trouble is the bank asks 'what is your favourite word?' and I can never remember what I said originally. I haven't got just one favourite word; I keep coming across words that could easily be my favourite and it changes all the time. One word I love is poltroon, which I have very little cause to use, unfortunately.

 

I came across poltroon in a text earlier and, although I know it means a despicable coward (and is often used jocularly), something prompted me to look the word up in the OED. Poltroon is from the Middle French poultron, coward, which, itself, comes from the Italian poltrone, a worthless or cowardly person. The OED says that it is ultimately a post-classical Latin derivative from the Latin pullus, young animal. Incidentally, pullus may remind us of pullet, which is a young hen, but actually pullus is a cognate of the word foal, an Old English word with a Germanic root (p and f are related in the history of Indo-European languages, as I mentioned in this post when I referred to Grimm's Law).

 

As well as meaning coward, a poltroon is also a falcon whose hind talons have been removed. The OED says that this name was given to the bird probably because of an earlier belief that the word poltroon developed from the Latin phrase pollice truncus, literally 'one who has deprived himself of his thumb'. In a bid to avoid military service cowardly types would cut off their right thumb so that they could not fire a bow and arrow. This practice is mentioned by Latin authors in the 4th century.