‘If you don’t know the meaning of a word, look it up,’ my father used to say, and to this day in our house the path to the dictionary is well worn.
Not that I want to stomp about booming: ‘Back to your forfars, you bosky piddock before I have at you with my daguerreotype.’ (Just in case you want to, it is as well to know that you are threatening to use an early photographic process on a hairy mollusc if he doesn’t return to his coarse linen cloth.)
But I would love to be able to reply to the children’s: ‘Mummy, what’s a corollary?’ with an unhesitating: ‘Well dear, it’s a proposition appended to one already demonstrated, as a self-evident inference from it.’ If I could manage that, I might even throw in a light laugh. Or at the very least a careless toss of the head.
Reading one’s dictionary for pleasure does pay off occasionally. The children haven’t ever quite got over the evening when I happened to know the meanings of two words in ‘Call My Bluff’.
However, my moment of glory was soon shattered by Daniel’s: ‘Mum, what does the mean?’ Have you ever tried defining ‘the’ to a seven-year-old? I have become aware that he is developing a certain flair for the English language since he asked David why he likes doing hot-cross-word puzzles, and especially since he told us that our neighbour Jill is planting night-scented socks in front of her honeyscuttle.
But who am I to talk, having twice told the builder at our last house that what I really needed was a stainless steel stink?
One of the things my brother and I noticed early in our dictionary reading days is that certain words don’t sound at all like their definitions. Take ‘tyro’. To me this suggests a ruthless oppressor. Certainly not a beginner. And how about ‘sanguinary’? I see a pale, languid chap – not one who enjoys bloodshed. ‘Valedictory’ sounds mean but it’s only farewell. ‘Crepuscular’ too suggests all sorts of nastiness. How many, I wonder, would connect it with twilight?
Once a word establishes itself in our awareness, it seems to crop up everywhere. It leaps out at us from books, newspapers, radio programmes and conversations overheard on buses. Perhaps friends tell us that they are thinking of having a ha-ha. ‘Oh, one of those,’ we say as we slip off to look it up. Next morning on the front page of the newspaper there is a photograph of a cabinet minister gazing a thoughtfully at his ha-ha. We switch on the radio and a titled lady is telling us about her stately ha-ha. Suddenly everybody is going on about ha-has.
I must admit I haven’t actually heard anyone say: ‘My word, Millicent, it’s getting quite crepuscular outside!’ But there is a noticeable tendency for certain words to become trendy. (There’s one for a start.) And this seems particularly true in political and television circles. For years we manage without words like cartel/unilateral/fiscal. Suddenly up they come in every news bulletin.
I suppose we all do it. Sometimes from sheer nerves. I can remember, during school days, being invited to tea with a podgy, top-drawer girl called Nina. (‘I’m not fat – I’m stout,’ she used to insist, showing a nice feeling for the English language herself.) Nervously I did my best to answer probing questions set by Nina’s heftily regal mum. ‘Tell me about your family,’ she said.
‘My grandfather’s got enormous hands,’ I squeaked. Mama looked politely astonished.
‘And an enormous garden.’ Her expression grew a shade more hopeful.
‘But all that digging gives him enormous blisters.’ Mama began to look rather withdrawn and shortly afterwards I left the enormous Nina and her enormous mum standing at their enormous front door, etc, etc.
Since then there have been times when I’ve taken a great fancy to ‘pedantic’, ‘sardonic’, ‘huge’, ‘griddle’, ‘medieval’ and ‘swoosh’. My current is ‘absolutely’. Anna’s is ‘fantastic’. Daniel’s is ‘loads’. David’s is ‘poignant’ and my boss favours ‘monies’. The last two have a certain charm but it looks as if the rest of us had better head back to the dictionary.
Not that I want the children racing in to tea saying: ‘Oh by the way mum, there’s a febrile satrap in the gazebo.’ (Even if we do ever happen to have a feverish provincial governor in that thing down the garden.)
No, I just want to be able to avoid such little gems as these, heard recently:
‘She was wearing a sort of odalisque on a chain round her neck.’
‘There’s nothing like turpitude for cleaning paintbrushes.’
And even: ‘Well, if it’s really going to be a glittery occasion I’d better wear my gold Durex.’
Let us feel able to make full, confident use of such mellifluous words as mellifluous. And clew and cleat and clerestory. And possibly even plumose. Let us get as far away as possible from sentences such as:
‘Er, well, I mean, like, you know.’
Let us not grope for words. Let us plunge with etymological assurance.
Doubtless we’d all feel better if we could sidle up to the problem people in our lives (the idiot in the next office/the noisy neighbour across the way/that fool driving the car ahead) and hiss: ‘Viscous sinapisms to you mate – all over your turgid ramekin.’ Which, roughly translated, condemns him to a morbidly swollen cheese dish covered with sticky mustard plasters.
Now that’s what I call word power!