Overground Retronyms

I was joyriding on the North London Line and happened to read the message that scrolls forever on the LED display.

WELCOME TO THE LONDON OVERGROUND SERVICE TO STRATFORD THE NEXT STATION...

Now quite aside from the redundancy of London (although I like to imagine somebody jumping up and shouting 'This isn't Tokyo?') the word overground is curious. It is what is known these days as a retronym. There was a time when all trains were overground unless otherwise specified, but London is now so filled with metal worms sliding gracelessly beneath the city, that they need to tell you that this train is overground.

It's the same principle by which we have a landline, organic food, or live music.

Mind you, as the train has windows, you wouldn't think that the word was utterly necessary.

Reasonably obvious

P.S. A philosopher friend of mine once pointed out how the use of the word music has changed: that you can now ask 'What music do you have?' and someone can reply 'I have Caruso singing Poker Face.' The idea would be incomprehensible a couple of hundred years ago.

How the Plague Spreads

As a little sequitur to Mrs Malaprop's splendid post about railway-speak on Thursday, the train I was on today suddenly stopped somewhere in Staffordshire. I assumed at first that the driver was a keen botanist who wanted to examine the hedgerow on our right hand side. It was a pretty hedgerow, blooming and blowing with all sorts of shrubs and bushes, and I wouldn't have blamed the driver for wanting to stop the train and have a closer look. Indeed, I was a trifle envious. But then his voice came from the loud-speakers telling us that the train was delayed - Imagine that! A British train delayed! - the delay, he told us in deep and masterful tones, was:

Due to a road traffic accident

Not  because of a car-crash, but  due to a road traffic accident.

Due, because it was clearly owing, the debt paid by reality to causality and collected with the violent assiduity of a starving mafioso. Road traffic because there's an awful lot of traffic off-road. Or perhaps because there's an awful lot of road accidents that don't involve traffic. I don't know.

Anyway, we sat there for a while and after about forty minutes which I had passed by re-reading L'Innommable the fellow opposite me made a call on his mobile phone. (The Americans call it a cell phone, which has always put me in mind of a garrulous monk).

'Hello? Dave?' he said in a broad Cumbrian accent. He seemed, indeed, to be a broad, Cumbrian man. 'I've been delayed... What?.. There's a been a...'

And I saw the flicker, the confusion, the slight linguistic tsunami pass across his face. It was the face of a man who has been hypnotised to kill his mother and, as he holds chisel above her sleeping head, is half remembering something, half knowing who he is, was and could be again. But he was too weak. TOO WEAK!

'It's due to a road traffic accident,' he said like one of those hostages saying he's being treated well.

'Yes... a road traffic accident... I know it's a train but... listen, I won't be at Preston before five at the earliest.'

It was like watching this:

Railways: On the platform edge

Railway-speak is a peculiar dialect, characterised by tortuous phrasing, a fondness for neologism, and a seeming reluctance to take responsibility for delays, unscheduled stops, failure to stop and indeed anything else that might go wrong. Announcers follow the principle that they should never use one word when two might do. Take, for example, the exhortation to “mind the gap between the train and the platform edge”. Why “platform edge”, and not simply “platform”? And, if you have to mention the edge, why do so in the odd phrase “platform edge” and not the far more natural-sounding “edge of the platform”?

The strangeness of the construction becomes clear when you apply it to other phrases. The Carpenters were standing “on the top of the world”, not “the world top”. And in the words of Kenny Price, everyone likes to be at “the front of the bus, the back of the church… [and] the middle of the road” – not the “bus front”, the “church back” and the “road middle”.

The rules governing the possessive and the use of noun combinations are incredibly complex, and there are exceptions – mountaintop, hilltop and table top sound natural, as do cliff edge and knife edge (although knife edge in particular seems more common as a metaphor). But, in general, possessives referring to a particular part or area of an object seem to use the “of” form (or, less frequently, “‘s”, as in “Land’s End”).

Here is an interesting discussion about the possessive and noun + noun combinations. It makes a distinction between objects belonging to living things (which typically take “’s”) and objects or parts of non-living things, where the possessive is formed through by using “of” or through a noun + noun combination.