Wales and Bad English

Two points about Wales. First: it doesn't have a name. Wales comes from wealh and means foreign, in the same way that a walnut is a foreign nut because walnut trees were not native to England. Wales simply means foreign country. It is an exonym.

The Welsh word for Wales is Cymru, which comes from the Brythonic word combrogi meaning land of our compatriots. So the English call it "Their Country" and the Welsh call it "Our Country", which means that the floor is wide open for somebody to think up an actual name for Permanentlyrainingland.

Second: when I was young and easy and doing my GCSEs, I used have to write preposterous translations. No awkwardness of the other language (French, German or Latin) could be omitted. Frenchmen were forever "at the house of" other Frenchmen, Romans were always doing things "in order that they might" do something else in the subjunctive (which seemed unfair). I would carefully write out crimes against English prose like "The about to be killed legionaries saw the having been crossed river".

I can still (for some reason) recite some of my Latin set texts, which I, like everybody else, memorised in English:

At that time appeared in the palace a sign miraculous in both appearance and outcome. They say that while a boy slept, whose name was Servius Tullius, his head burnt with a divine fire; and they say that, a great shout having arisen, the king...

In today's Independent there is the story of an unfortunate potholer whose troglodyte corpse has finally been dragged to the light after thirty years in the underworld.

A spokeswoman for Dyfed Powys Police said: "Although he was located at that time in the caves, his body was never able to be recovered despite several attempts over the following weeks and as a result he has remained in the location he died."

There's something fantastic about "his body was never able to be recovered". It ascribes will and inability to a cadaver, but a will to be the subject of a passive verb. Located is fantastically ambiguous because you don't know whether it means "was there" or that his whereabouts were known. I stubbornly refuse to believe that anybody, even a policeman, could invent such a byzantine and grotesque sentence. The spokesman must have been speaking Welsh, or Latin.

All signs in Wales are bilingual, so English speakers who erect them have to e-mail a translator for a Welsh rendering. But translators go on holiday. The lower half of this sign reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.