The fastidious reader sighing over a distorted word may well be looking at a form committed to the page by a writer innocently unaware of the regular alternative. In a different class altogether are the distorters of words who go about their task on purpose. These people no doubt cause annoyance with their every wayward locution. And yet of all the motives for deliberately interfering with the usual forms of our words, there is one that reigns supreme in the dismay it inspires—a dismay so profound that anyone might feel it, griper or not. This motive is the wish, broadly speaking, to render one’s language infantile.
On 21 April 1711, Addison wrote in The Spectator:
A very ingenious French Author tells us, that the Ladies of the Court of France, in his Time, thought it ill-breeding, and a kind of Female Pedantry, to pronounce an hard Word right; for which Reason they took frequent occasion to use hard Words, that they might shew Politeness in murdering them. He further adds, that a Lady of some Quality at Court, having accidentally made use of an hard Word in a proper Place, and pronounced it right, the whole Assembly was out of Countenance for her.
This story reflects badly on the men who accepted such tributes, and about as badly on the women who offered them. Availing oneself of ‘hard Words’ merely to pull off a silly-little-me act seems nauseating. Still, that was the point.
Among English speakers, those under similar pressure to pass themselves off as inferior need hardly go to such lengths. Much the same effect can be created without study by faking a lisp.** Nor is there an obvious cost in anything but grated nerves when a person uses ‘hypocoristic’ or ‘pet’ names, or, put another way, descends into baby language. In grated nerves, however, the cost can be quite tremendous.
The OED credits Jane Austen with the first recorded use of itty as a shortening. One hopes, rather a lot, that there was an affectionate touch of irony to her words in a letter of 1798 when she wrote, about her nephew ‘little George’, ‘I flatter myself that itty Dordy will not forget me’. Fifty years later, Dickens, in Dombey and Son, seems to have had qualms after getting Mrs Chick to say, ‘I thought I should have fallen out of the staircase window as I came down from seeing dear Fanny, and that tiddy ickle sing’. A narrative passage hastily explains: ‘These last words originated in a sudden vivid reminiscence of the baby’. Mrs Chick’s unexpected mental flip-flop has sent her to tiddy for ‘small’, or perhaps ‘tiny’, to ickle for little, and sing for thing, in a stab at matching the untuned speech of an ‘ickle’ child.** A crueller picture of such sentimentalising occurs in George Orwell’s novel of 1936, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in which he imagines a genteel lady in a library ‘enthusing’ over a book of dog photographs: ‘a Peke, the ickle angel pet, wiv his gweat big Soulful eyes and his ickle black nosie—oh so ducky-duck!’ Presumably most people overhearing this sort of talk in a library would find themselves wishing for a sick bag.
Many scholars believe that using this kind of cooing baby talk in an attempt to nurture speech in the very young is sensible and good—and that it works. There are, however, further motives for deploying such vocabulary that have nothing to do with promoting language-acquisition in ‘tiddy ickle sings’.
One is flirtation. The word ducky, used in Orwell’s line of drivel above, first enters the records of English in the writings of Henry VIII, who used it in a letter to Anne Boleyn as a pet term for her breasts: ‘wishing my self (specially an Evening) in my Sweethearts Armes’, he confessed, ‘whose pritty Duckys I trust shortly to kysse’. He finished, ‘Writne with the Hand of him that was, is, and shall be yours by his will, H R’, and soon after had her beheaded. In a conventional account, those who use baby language to flirt cast themselves in either a needy or a protecting role, but the transaction has the potential to be far subtler, surely, than this. When in December 2013 a law court broadcast several voicemail messages of the man second in line to the British throne, messages illegally intercepted in 2006 by the News of the World, newspaper after newspaper chose to report the story under a headline that featured his use, in addressing the then Miss Middleton, of the pet name babykins. Though these headlines had a sheen of prurience to them, the word babykins itself was deemed by instant analysts of the Prince’s verbal style to be blameless.** What interested reporters about the nickname was not that a possible future queen was being infantilised, but that a probable future king had it in him to be so comfortably silly.
Modern commentators have, however, been squeamish about more extreme use of such language by figures of note from the past. It is difficult to plumb the relationship between Jonathan Swift, scourge of those whom he despised, and Esther Johnson, whom he called ‘Stella’. They first met when he was twenty-two and she was eight. Her parentage was a mystery, but she had protectors. Swift, in need of money, accepted the job of being her tutor. They were thereafter closely and affectionately caught up with each other until she died in 1728, aged forty-six. After Swift himself died, letters he had written to her between 1710 and 1713 were published under the title Journal to Stella. Swift, we know, because he says so, took Esther Johnson’s letters to bed with him, but more than that it is impossible to say. Letters from her to him have not survived. Much of the content of his to her is political gossip, but his writing also contains many examples, some undecipherable, of what he called their ‘little language’. She is not only ‘saucy sluttikins’ and ‘Ppt’ for poppet, but ‘ung oomens’, as well. Swift uses ‘iss I tan, well as oo’ for ‘yes I can, as well as you’, ‘dood mollow’ for ‘good morrow’, and many other pseudo-artless approximations. At one point he explains: ‘when I am writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I was speaking it’. Elsewhere he takes (false) comfort from the idea that their habit of communicating like this will make their writing invulnerable to the gaze of a hostile world: ‘a bad scrawl is so snug’.
Swift would later be more than matched in this correspondence by John Ruskin, whose liking for a far younger girl is also not our real subject here. But—once more with a notional sick bag to hand—consider that Ruskin, in his fifties, was keen to write to his much younger cousin Joan, ‘Me dedful tired and worrited’, while reflecting quite correctly that people might be ‘dedfu socked ’at we tant pell any betty’. Later he would refer to this language as his ‘baby misbinefs’. When he was especially unkeen on being in Oxford, he wrote to her saying, ‘me so dismal me don’t no fot to do.— Me want to give up bein Pefsor’.**
Thomas Nashe appears a good deal more straightforward in dashing off playfully, in 1596, ‘because she is such a hony sweetikin, let her bee Prick-madam’. Yet no one who dips into this subject can resist quoting Thackeray’s impressive take on Swift’s ‘little language’: ‘I know of nothing more manly, more tender, more exquisitely touching’. Who are we to say, with the disadvantages of hindsight, what was really going on in the souls of those most concerned? For present purposes, what we need to bear in mind is no more than the likely effect of such writing on the casual outsider of today. And to that, the answer is simple: today’s casual outsider will almost certainly feel repelled.
Though a sprinkling of baby language may convey its users into the realm of coy flirtation, these forms can also be used—flirtatiously or otherwise—to veil indelicate subjects. Piddle has been a childish word for urinating since the late eighteenth century, though with other meanings the verb is much older. Tummy from stomach, and the lavatorial use of poop, are both Victorian. From the twentieth century, we have potty as a nursery word for chamber pot, and icky, a portmanteau word derived from sickly and sticky, and so on. Given that baby talk is implicitly hierarchical, it can also be deployed to convey contempt. Notoriously, when in 1928 Dorothy Parker, as ‘Constant Reader’, reviewed A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner for the New Yorker, she wrote that his word hummy marked the first place ‘at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up’. In fact, some babyish words are almost always employed to negative effect. From the 1890s, diddums—i.e. ‘did thems’ mistreat you?—is resolutely unkind; and from 1905 twee, a childlike rendering of sweet, is, in the delivery, rarely approving.
In all this, what of the babies themselves? Percival Leigh, in his Comic English Grammar of 1840, wrote, ‘The vocal comicalities of the infant in arms are exceedingly laughable,** but we are unfortunately unable to spell them’. This was to give up too easily. An infant in arms generally moves from simple babbling to what specialists call ‘reduplicative** babbling’, found in such uses as mama, dada, wee wee and boo boo; it is no accident that in our second childhood we are at risk of becoming ‘gaga’. The reduplicative phase of baby babblesque is mirrored in such nursery staples as the characters baa baa black sheep, incy wincy spider, Chicken Licken and Humpty Dumpty; in choo choo trains and the nimble namble riding game; in the adjectives teeny-weeny, easy-peasy, and the like.
But this seemingly childish lexical mannerism is found in ordinary adult vocabulary too. English has a vast number of what are called ‘reduplicative compounds’, where either the vowels alter: dilly-dally, wishy-washy, zigzag, flip-flop—or the consonants: hurly-burly, helter-skelter, hoity-toity, willy-nilly. Many writers have been inspired to create their own examples. Shakespeare wrote of ‘skimble skamble’ stuff, meaning disorderly nonsense. Fanny Burney, in 1778, invented skimper scamper to mean ‘confusedly’. Keats, in the early nineteenth century, dreamt up ruffy-tuffy to mean ‘dishevelled’, and H. G. Wells in 1910 coined pitter-litter. This was supposed to invoke tumbling down the stairs, but what he meant when he also wrote, in 1937, of ‘the wimble-wamble of the common world’, no one has been able to say.
Reduplicative compounds do not always come across as childlike, but so strong is their association with childish speech that it would be hard to concoct a new example that had gravitas right off the bat.** In a scene in his 1918 novel Joan and Peter, Wells, who appears to have had a special fondness for the form, depicts a delinquent aunt trying to manoeuvre two innocent little children into allowing themselves to be christened. She points out to them seductively her ‘croquet-poky lawn’, and a pony wearing ‘booty-pootys’ so as not to harm the grass while it pulls a mower. Then she tries to tempt them into what she vilely calls the ‘churchy-perchy’. She speaks of ‘all sorts of things’, says Wells, before adding savagely, ‘Particularly the churchy-perchy’.
He was not the first to use a reduplicative compound to convey this degree of disdain for an adult. What we now think of as the adjective namby-pamby started out as an insulting nickname for the mediocre eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips. Philips’s great enemy was Pope, who referred to him as ‘Namby Pamby’ in The Dunciad; but the compound first found its way into print courtesy of Henry Carey in his scathing parody of Philips’s infantile rhyming: ‘Namby-Pamby’s doubly Mild, / Once a Man, and twice a Child … Now he Pumps his little Wits, / Sh—ing Writes, and Writing Sh—ts, / All by little tiny Bits …’ (there is much more of this). With such a festival of derision behind it, the expression namby-pamby, in the general sense of ‘sentimentally insipid’, soon took off, so that by 1766, Richard Griffith, in a letter to his wife (the literary pair we met in Chapter 3), could call any sort of lowering of the tone in addressing a child ‘Namby Pambicks’.
Three hundred years after Ambrose Philips was in his heyday, namby-pambicising is with us still. A notorious recent example occurred in a 2007 episode of Doctor Who, ‘Blink’. With the combined time-travel stories of series upon series threatening to make even an amateur logician cry, David Tennant was called on to explain away the madness that had been generated by successive writers. He did so by saying that time is not linear, but must be thought of as ‘a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff’. Come the 2014 Christmas special, Santa Claus (or a projection of Santa Claus) would ridicule the flustered Time Lord (now played by Peter Capaldi) for the feeble quality of his scientific explanations: ‘As the Doctor might say, “Oh, it’s all a bit dreamy-weamy” ’.
It may by this point be striking you that no one sane would risk speaking publicly in baby language, even to a baby. And certainly the limits are tight on what anyone but an extremist considers its acceptable uses. There are a few old, well-established forms that seem to pass muster, such as Swift’s ‘up a-dazy’, now upsidaisy, from 1711, or beddy-byes, which sounds cheery enough. To balance these, there are new forms likely to inspire particularly keen dislike. The small child of today who has taken a topple, and who sits with arms outstretched weeping ‘uppie’,** may well be viewed unkindly by a sensitive passer-by. Unbearable will be the grown-up who comforts the forlorn child by discussing its ouchie.**
The good news for your campaign is that if you ever get tired of the niceties of battle, and want nothing more than to throw bricks for a spell, the slightest trace of baby talk should render your English repulsive in almost every circumstance. The bad news is that in reaching for this weapon you risk disgusting yourself. And now, let us with inestimable relief move on.