* The obscure term ‘barnacular’, which Ivor Brown attempted to popularise in the 1940s, was designed to invoke the Tite Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit. ~

† Ecclesiastes 9:11, ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all’.

* A slightly different version of this little essay, ‘The Bird and the Beast’, appeared in a Classics journal of the 1940s, where it was translated into Greek. There its author was described as being an evacuee, and, in a later reprint, as a schoolgirl. ~

* This list continues to grow, so that we now also have, among others, roadmaps, pinch-points, cut-off points and core goals. ~

* A Civil Service correspondent takes me to task for having dealt too leniently with this phrase, which he calls a ‘monstrosity’: it is one, he says, that ‘the cynic regards as being typical of the civil servant, who is (in his eyes) incapable of decisive thought’. Perhaps it is wise to avoid a form of words that can arouse feelings of that sort in anyone. In The Valley of Fear, Sherlock Holmes reacts in the same way: ‘ “I am inclined to think —” said I. “I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently’.

* The debate here may not be wholly clear to all readers. It is possible by being selective to make a powerful argument in favour of English words of Anglo-Saxon origin. John Newton’s famous hymn on the subject of ‘faith’s review and expectation’ opens, ‘Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav’d a wretch like me!’ Both sweet and wretch are ‘Saxon’ words (swoete and wrecca) first recorded in Old English in the ninth century. Later Romance vocabulary (largely courtesy of the Norman invaders under William the Conqueror) gave English the alternatives dulcet and miscreant; and educated seventeenth-century taste spawned the further Latinate options sacchariferous, mellisonant and reprobate. Not a soul could believe that Newton’s hymn would be improved by choosing substitutes from among these Romance barnacles: ‘Amazing grace! (how sacchariferous the sound) That sav’d a miscreant like me!’ Yet grace and save are also Romance words, and some of us have need of saving graces. As for the idea that only our ‘Saxon’ words are earthy: to purge English of its Latin and Old French influences would require that we deny ourselves sex and violence, and how popular would that be? ~