Sir Arthur Conan Doyle modelled the character of Sherlock Holmes on the great and popular professor of surgery at Edinburgh University, Dr Joseph Bell. Bell was an uncannily observant diagnostician; his clinical techniques are reflected and magnified in the investigative techniques of the Holmes character. According to Conan Doyle’s biographer Martin Booth, Dr Bell was ‘a sparse and lean man with the long and sensitive fingers of a musician … an angular nose … and a high pitched voice’. This seems a fair description of Holmes.
Holmes also had the engaging urbanity that characterised Bell. When his patience was tested by the duller wits around him, Holmes would, at worst, speak ‘with some asperity’. It is a characteristic feature of Conan Doyle’s writing that the exasperation of the educated classes was expressed by nothing harsher than speaking ‘with some asperity’ (unless, of course, it expressed itself in acts of murder).
Asperity is a useful word, but not often heard these days. The OED2 gives a series of quotations for its various senses, the latest of which is 1866. (Note, however, that the Sherlock Holmes stories were all written after that date: A Study in Scarlet was first published in 1887, and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes was published in 1927.)
Asperity means ‘roughness or harshness; sharpness of temper or manner’. It comes from the Latin asper ‘rough’, and can be used to refer to things or people; to physical characteristics; or to manner, but its use in reference to physical properties is archaic (in 1662 Henry More wrote of viewing ‘the Asperities of the Moon through a Dioptrick-glass’; in 1750 Johnson spoke of ‘The nakedness and asperity of the wintry world’). If it is used at all nowadays, it is used figuratively — to refer to speech or action, for example — rather than literally.
Some judges with literary flair or a taste for variety have used the word, but in the twentieth century it is rare: in the Australian federal jurisdiction it appears in only five cases. Three of the occurrences refer to harshness of agency:
1965: ‘[T]he asperity of the common law towards an innocent party purchasing goods from a person who has all the trappings of ownership but in truth has no proper title to the goods …’ (Pacific Motor Auctions Pty Ltd v Motor Credits (Hire Finance) Ltd (1965) 112 CLR 192 (Privy Council))
1993: ‘Any condition which presses with particular asperity upon a person may be described as a hardship.’ (Re Kabalan 40 FCR 560 per Gummow J)
1997: ‘This construction is then said to remove any apparent asperity in a construction of a statute which would release a debtor by virtue of a composition in respect of the adoption of which the creditor had been disenfranchised.’ (Pyramid Building Society (in liq) v Terry 189 CLR 176 per Gummow and Gaudron JJ)
The other two refer to harshness of manner:
1997: ‘This offer produced a response from Mr Woodward which rejected, with some asperity, the new terms.’ (BNWP Enterprises Pty Ltd v Unisys Australia Ltd per Justice Foster)
1998: ‘The memorandum records that the Department rejected this proposal (and, it seems, did so with some asperity).’ (Re Minister for Immigration; Ex parte SE per Justice Hayne)
Perhaps one reason asperity is not often used is that it is grammatically inflexible: it is an orphaned noun, with no living relatives, neither adjective, nor verb, nor adverb. Asperity does have ancestors, but they are long dead. So, asper was an adjective meaning rough or harsh or severe; Johnson also recognises asperous as meaning the same thing. In the past, to asperate meant to roughen; asperation was the action of roughening.
Grammatical inflexibility leads to (or results from) the ossification of a word: ultimately it dies out altogether, or is found only in one or two standard constructions. Easily recognised examples of such constructions include: one fell swoop; woe betide; and figment of the imagination. A word that permits variations for each of the principal word types will generally be more useful than one that does not. A near synonym of asperity is roughness. It is much more flexible than its elegant equivalent and has prospered accordingly. The family includes:
nouns: roughness; rough (e.g. a rough of a casting, a preliminary; also the unkempt ground adjacent to the fairway in golf; and the small culinary delicacy of our youth, the coconut rough); roughage (so important in modern diets)
adjectives: rough; roughsome
adverb: roughly (to describe manner as well as approximation)
verbs: to rough (to rough up a person; to rough out a plan); to roughen (i.e. to make a surface rough)
Rough has gone through several spelling changes: ruhe; roughe; rouch; roch; and (according to OED2) ruff. Only two instances of this last (and most obvious) spelling are given: one example is in a letter written by Jane Austen in 1811 — ‘We walked Frank last night to Crixhall Ruff, and he appeared much edified’. As the reference is to a place, it seems that the spelling is an archaic colloquialism.
The second is from the Illustrated London News of 27 November 1847: ‘Will you let the jury know what ‘Roughs’ are? I believe it is an electioneering name for ruffians’. But this is not evidence of the spelling (and may not be put forward as evidence), since ruffian is a distinct and different word. Ruffian dates from the sixteenth century and is defined by the Macquarie as ‘a man of a low and brutal character; one habitually given to acts of violence or crime’. In Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows the Magistrate refers to ‘the incorrigible rogue and hardened ruffian whom we see cowering in the dock before us’. These days, it is sometimes used in a softer sense, to refer to a person of rowdy manner; it implies a certain affection which its history would deny.
In any event, rough and ruffian are not related, except in their sound and in aspects of their meaning.
Ruff has other meanings, apart from its brief, unorthodox connection with rough. Everyone knows that the frilly starched piece at the neck or wrist of Elizabethan courtiers is a ruff. Fewer would recognise that a ruff is also a fish, a bird, a candlewick, a card game, and a state of high excitement.
To an angler, the ruff is a sea-bream. It is also the name for a freshwater perch, which was named aspredo by the Elizabethan scholar Dr John Caius, for its rough, prickly scales. Caius was a Cambridge graduate, who wrote the first known treatise on an epidemic (probably influenza): a Boke or Counseill against the Disease commonly called the Sweate (1552). He was also a generous contributor to Gonville College (as it then was) and subsequently Master of Gonville and Caius College (as it became). But the aspredo is no longer called by that name, just as asperity has slipped from regular use.
Ruff and Honour was a card game in Elizabethan times, but seems to be obsolete now. The associated verb to ruff is the act of trumping at cards when the player cannot follow suit.
The ruff is also a bird, the male of a bird of the sandpiper family (Tringa or Machetes pugnax), which displays during the mating season by a ruff and ear-tufts — as alluring to the female sandpiper, presumably, as the displays of the Elizabethan courtiers were to the ladies of the court. This connection with display may explain what is otherwise the oddest meaning of the word: ‘the highest pitch or fullest degree of some exalted or excited condition; an exalted or elated state; elation, pride, vainglory’. These uses of ruff are confined for the most part to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the Stuarts. Once the asperity of the Stuart monarchs was washed away by the rough justice of civil war, ruff in all its meanings fell into obscurity.