‘Fried food heart risk a ‘myth’’ is the most-viewed item in one of the papers this week, a welcome story along the lines of ‘Red wine good for you’, encouraging enough until you get to the small print. ‘Fries’, under their various names, may be the nearest thing to a global food. In Britain, deep-fried strips of potato are chips when off duty and French fries (or pommes frites) on a menu. It may be more classy - or genteel - to talk about pommes frites, but some would say there’s a valid difference between the fry and the chip: the first describes the thinner, elongated product while the second is chunkier. All this means nothing in the US, where chips are what the British call crisps, and fries are an accompaniment to almost any meal. But not necessarily French fries. In the build-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, two congressmen launched a ludicrous initiative to re-label ‘French fries’ as ‘freedom fries’, because of the reluctance of France to join America in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. The response of the relevant embassy was to point out - so droll and French - that French fries in any case originated in Belgium. In a nice postscript, one of the two congressmen later declared the Iraq invasion to have been a mistake. This was not the first time the USA had a nomenclature problem with French food. In 1943 vichyssoise soup was renamed ‘de Gaullesoise’ by a New York restaurant. The reason? General Charles de Gaulle was the London-based leader of the Free French forces while the town of Vichy was the base for the government collaborating with the Nazi occupation.
When Conan Doyle published his short story ‘The Final Problem’ in 1893, he didn’t intend to write a cliff-hanger but to finish off Sherlock Holmes once and for all by pushing him down the Reichenbach Falls together with Moriarty. When he resurrected Holmes in ‘The Empty House’, written ten years afterwards (though occurring only a couple of years later in fictional time), Doyle had Holmes explain his preservation by means of a literal cliff-hanger, since before making his getaway the great detective was dangling from a ledge above the Falls while one of Moriarty’s henchmen pelted him with stones. There were teasing hints in advance of the last episode of the current BBC Sherlock, that the character played by Benedict Cumberbatch would not survive. And five minutes before the end it seemed certain that he had not. Then, with only a few seconds to go, equally certain that he had. So the question became not ‘Will he ..?’ but ‘How did he ..?’
According to the OED, the word ‘cliff-hanger’ is not found before the late 1930s and originally applied to film series where the heroine was trapped on a cliff-face/tied to a railway track at the end of one episode before springing to freedom in the next. But the suspense of cliff-hanging was used by Thomas Hardy more than half a century earlier in his novel A Pair of Blue Eyes, when the hero is rescued from a cliff-face by the heroine tearing up strips of her clothing for a makeshift rope. More recent series cliff-hangers have been Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, which prints James Bond’s Times obituary, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Played With Fire (is Lisbeth Salander going to survive horrific injuries?) and Lee Child’s 61 Hours (has Jack Reacher finally been blasted to kingdom come?). Making it appear that you’ve killed off your hero or heroine may be a one-trick pony, but it’s still quite a trick.
James Daunt’s decision to drop the apostrophe from the bookshop chain which he runs has upset quite a few people. John Richards, the chairman of the Apostrophe Protection Society, called the change ‘slapdash’ while among the reactions on Twitter were comments like ‘Waterstone’s is now officially called Waterstones. You sell BOOKS, idiots. As in language and proper grammar and all that stuff. Remember?!’ Out of the hundreds of ways in which the English language can be wrongly used, apostrophe-blunders rarely fall from the top five of infamy. But putting the world to rights is not always straightforward. In 2008 a couple of graduates of Dartmouth College dedicated themselves to improving standards in public notices by establishing the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL). They went a step too far when they used marker pens to shift an apostrophe on a handwritten sign next to a historic watchtower in the Grand Canyon. Unfortunately for them, the sign was just as historic as the watchtower and they ended up with a fine and a year’s probation for defacing government property.
The decision to drop the apostrophe from Waterstones isn’t wrong, even if it does suggest a move away from founder Tim Waterstone. No more wrong than the pharmacy chain being known as Boots rather than Boot’s, or the retail giant as Marks & Spencer instead of Marks & Spencer’s (or even Marks’s & Spencer’s). The decision to keep the apostrophe in memory of a sometimes distant founder - as in Sainsbury’s or McDonald’s - is a question of branding and familiarity, not grammar. And, if one is being pedantic, it should actually be McDonalds’ since there were apparently two brothers involved in flipping those early burgers.
Sherlock was a big, intelligent hit on New Year’s Day, and justified comments about the importance of water-cooler television. The water-cooler expression is fairly new but the connection between loitering near a watering-place and gossip is an old one. In the US, rumour is often referred to as scuttlebutt, originally a piece of naval slang. A scuttle is an opening for light or ventilation (and, if below the waterline, can be used to ‘scuttle’ the ship) while a scuttled butt is a cask from which water is drawn. The cask was later replaced by a drinking fountain but the original expression persisted. Since sailors naturally stopped to gossip by the scuttlebutt, they were taking part in an early variety of the water-cooler moment. Along the same lines an Australian word for rumour is ‘furphy’, deriving from the name of the manufacturer whose iron cylinders brought water to the troops, particularly those in the Gallipoli campaign. There’s a further connection between proximity to water and the opportunity for gossip, as suggested by obscure slang from World War Two such as latrinogram or latrine rumour. But perhaps the oddest of all terms relating to rumour, and one that retains the water theme, is the French canard or duck, which in English stands for a false report or hoax. One explanation has the canard coming from an old expression about ‘half-selling a duck’, in other words, not selling it at all and so fooling the prospective purchaser with a fib. No one really knows if this story is correct, so the history of canard could be another case of a canard.
2011 has been the year of the bail-out for several countries in southern Europe, like Greece. Next year might be the one in which some of those same countries decide - or have it decided for them - to bale out of membership of the euro. Given the frequency with which both ‘bail out’ and ‘bale out’ appear in print, it is not surprising that the two spellings are sometimes confused. When applied to getting away from a tight situation, like a plummeting plane, either ‘bale out’ or ‘bail out’ can be used, but if money is involved only ‘bail’ is right. Both expressions are to do with extrication from difficulties so the overlap of meaning and spelling is understandable. When metaphors become confused they may still make a kind of sense. ‘Tow the line’ is wrong and ‘toe the line’ is right, but both imply effort together with compliance. Similarly, ‘at one fell swoop’ emerges as ‘foul swoop’ or ‘fowl swoop’. The correct version is the first and comes from Macbeth as a description of the way a bird of prey, the kite, swoops down. The kite - Macbeth is called a ‘hell-kite’ - would have been a familiar sight in Elizabethan London since, like ravens, they were protected birds and Shakespeare would have seen their distinctive dive as they went after the waste discarded by the slaughter-houses in the city. The ‘fell’ in ‘fell swoop’ has nothing to do with the way the bird drops from the sky but draws on an almost forgotten sense of ‘fell’, meaning ‘cruel’. To go back to the ‘incorrect’ versions of the metaphor, while ‘at one fowl swoop’ might suggest a chicken plunging out of the skies, ‘at one foul swoop’ catches something of the original ruthlessness of the bird of prey. Even when mangled, metaphors can still do their job.
How significant is it when a politician is known by an abbreviated form of his or her first name? Is it a sign of affectionate familiarity or of contempt? Tony Blair is and always was a Tony and ‘a pretty straight sort of guy’ as he helpfully described himself. David Cameron remains David, except to a few who are or were sceptical about his attempts to rebrand the Tory party and make a point of referring to him as Dave. Mrs Thatcher could be Maggie to friend and foe. In the US, the parade of wacky figures jostling to be the Republican candidate against Obama in 2012 are mostly known by shortened forms of their given names. Newton Leroy Gingrich is Newt while Willard Mitt Romney is plain Mitt. Long before ‘suspending’ his campaign because of sexual harassment allegations, Herman Cain christened himself the Herminator, which sounds like a surgical appliance. Then there is a Ron, the right-wing libertarian Ron Paul, who favours pulling back US troops from everywhere as well as the virtual abolition of the government. Two Ricks are in play. One is the Texas governor Rick Perry, who forgot in mid-debate which bits of the government he wants to kill off. And the other is Rick Santorum, who has a serious name problem though not one of his own making (Google him and see). The single woman standing - Michele Bachmann - has not clipped her name and nor has the final candidate, Jon Huntsman, a Mormon like Romney but too middle-of-the-road and sensible for the current hectic condition of the Republicans. At the moment the race seems to be between Newt and Mitt. Newt may sit better in US ears than it does in English ones, where it’s likely to evoke thoughts of Ken Livingstone and reptiles. Mitt has a man-of-the-people ring even if Romney is by far the wealthiest candidate. Altogether, it’s a funny old field.
With Christmas approaching and 2012 marking the bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth, one adjective whose routine appearance we can count on in the coming months is Dickensian. Yet it is a term with such a range of meanings, some of them contradictory, that it usually needs a bit more definition from the context. Among the possible meanings of Dickensian are ‘sentimental’ or ‘squalid’, ‘Christmassy’ or ‘heart-rending’, ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘comically anarchic’. On the one hand, there is the relatively realistic Dickens who depicted the lives of the London underclass. On the other, there is the Victorian author who set out to pluck his readers’ heart strings and get their tears flowing. Then there is the frequent association of the author with Christmas - stage-coaches rolling past snow-covered cottages, roaring log fires in inn parlours - even if here too the message is mixed. The idealised version of the season in A Christmas Carol - schmaltzy but it still does its stuff - can be set against the early scene in Great Expectations when Pip, the boy narrator, suffers from a table full of bullying adults while being ‘regaled with the scaly tips of the drumsticks of the fowls’ and Christmas Day ends with a hunting scene, not of a fox but of an escaped convict. And then there is the use of Dickensian to mean ‘life-enhancing’, ‘full of invention’. If Dickensian can’t mean everything it can certainly mean many things and, of all the terms associated with writers, only Shakespearean has a similar breadth.
The ongoing Leveson inquiry into phone hacking, intrusions on privacy and a hundred other sins recalls earlier warnings to the media to behave better. With every scandal, the press was always said to be drinking in ‘the last-chance saloon’, a warning to put its house in order (another favourite) before more punitive measures ensued. The ‘last-chance saloon’ originated in 19th century America when travellers crossing from one legal jurisdiction to another and entering an area where alcohol was not readily available, or even prohibited altogether, either took the opportunity for a final drink or went thirsty. To ensure the point was not missed, the phrase was often used for the name of the bar or tavern itself.
In Britain the last-chance saloon may not be literal but it is still found everywhere: about climate-change talks; IVF treatment for infertile couples; investment opportunities; a visit to a rehab clinic. But, apart from the press, the most fertile soil for the saloon is sport. Whether it’s a team captain who’s disgraced himself, a side on the verge of relegation or a national application to host the World Cup, the last-chance saloon is large enough to contain them all. The sporting context also encourages elaboration of the metaphor, as in ‘Halifax were said to be drinking in the Last Chance Saloon before this match, in which case last orders have been called and the doors are slamming shut’ (The Times). The association between sport and frantic drinking isn’t as odd as it looks. There is an unmistakable macho tang to having a drink in the last-chance saloon. And after all, what could be more challenging than the drinker’s next step, across the boundary, into the desert of dry territory?
The new wannabe Mad Men telly drama, Pan Am, prompted a slew of articles about the good old days when being up in the air was heaven and not purgatory. One union representative quoted in the Independent said of the present-day role of the cabin crew: “They aren’t trolley dollies. They are taught how to diffuse arguments, to deal with children, drunks and administer CPR to ill passengers.” But they aren’t taught how to ‘diffuse arguments’, or at least they shouldn’t be, since to diffuse something means to spread it over a wider area. In fact, the word is rarely found as a verb but much more often as an adjective with the sense of ‘scattered’ (‘The soft mounds that covered everything merged with the low, diffuse cloud into an eerily silent continuum of greys.’). What the person who was quoted above meant - or rather what the newspaper ought to have put - was ‘defuse arguments’. If bombs, rows and tricky situations have their fuses removed before they go off, real damage will be avoided. Confusing ‘diffuse’ and ‘defuse’ in print is quite a common error, and irritating to pedants and perhaps a few others too, since the words have definitions which are almost opposed to each other. Which would you prefer? Tension diffused? Or tension defused?