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:

Gender Studies

The UK Government’s Treasury Select Committee has recently conducted an enquiry into “Women in the City” (which, until I checked the Committee’s homepage, I was convinced was called “Sexism and the City”, in homage to the television series Sex and the City; I was rather disappointed to find out that this was not the case). The enquiry is part of a broader debate about equality and the role of women in business, which has seen much written about “gender diversity”, “gender-related differences” and “gender pay gaps”.

One might have expected such language to be greeted with peevish letters from linguistic prescriptivists. Only a few years ago, this was still something that troubled newspaper readers, like the correspondent who ticked off the Guardian’s leader writers for confusing “the word sex (biology) with gender, a grammatical term for a linguistic oddity confined, I think, to Indo-European languages”; or the one who wrote to the Sunday Telegraph in 2003 citing Fowler’s edict that “gender is a grammatical term only”.

But the complaints, unless there has simply been a collective decision not to publish them, seem to have stopped. This suggests that “gender” is now accepted as a synonym for “sex”, particularly in social or cultural (as opposed to biological) contexts. It may be because it is useful to be able to make this distinction. It may also be because “sex” has become so associated with the act of having sex that some people prefer “gender” as less smutty: in an article on the subject, Rutgers English professor Jack Lynch imagines the frustration of pollsters after “finding the "Sex" blank on a form filled in with "Yes, please" for the jillionth time”.


“Gender” hasn’t edged out “sex” entirely – “sexism”, despite dating back less than a hundred years in its present sense, is firmly ensconced in the language, as are phrases like “sexual politics” and “single-sex school”. But in many other phrases, particularly newer ones or ones to do with feminism, “gender” may make more sense than “sex”. “Gender diversity” is much less ambiguous than “sexual diversity”, which is now almost always used to mean “diversity of sexual orientation”. And “sex studies” would mean something entirely different from “gender studies”.

Although the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that “gender” is a “modern euphemism” for “sex”, it cites examples of the usage going back to the fourteenth century. In 1709, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (above) wrote that “of the fair sex… my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them”, while an 1896 edition of the Daily News expressed the admirably enlightened opinion that “as to one's success in the work one does, surely that is not a question of gender”.

The Sartorial Singular

I have just received an email inviting me to buy Christmas presents at Sweaty Betty, which for the uninitiated is a shop selling fashionable sports and fitness clothes for women - in some cases so beautifully designed that customers are inspired to take up certain sports simply for the opportunity to wear the clothes.

One item in particular caught my eye: the "unwind pant". Pants, of course, is an American word for what the British call trousers. Although it is still considered an Americanism, it is gaining ground in Britain for terms referring to sportswear. "Sweatpants" is far more common than the unpleasant-sounding "sweat trousers". "Jogging pants" and "tracksuit pants", meanwhile, are used about half as frequently as "jogging trousers" and "tracksuit trousers" - although "bottoms", as in "jogging bottoms" and "tracksuit bottoms", remains the most popular word by a wide margin.

But it was not the word "pant" in itself, nor the use of the verb "unwind" as an adjective which struck me - it was the use of the singular. I have never referred to a "pant" or a "trouser", any more than I would use "a glass" to mean a pair of spectacles - it is always "pants" or "a pair of pants". "Pants" is what is known as a plurale tantum - a word that only ever appears in the plural form - and "pant" is a bizarre and grammatically incorrect back-formation.

However, the use of the fashion singular - identified here by the wonderful Hadley Freeman, although even she seems uncertain about the word "pant" - is becoming more and more common, mostly in marketing and advertising copy (as in the Gap advert above) but also in the words of designers themselves. We can probably expect to hear more about "the pant", "the trouser" and "the legging", although I hope that we will be spared "the bottom", at least in reference to sportswear.

A week or so ago I surprised myself by using the word "jean" in the singular - something like "that's a nice jean", or "I like a jean with a high waist". Thus fashion-speak insinuates itself into everyday life.

* Curiously, the only recent reference I have found to "sweat trousers" appears in a Financial Times fashion review).

Mean Streets

According to yesterday's Evening Standard (which was forced on me by a wild-eyed maiden in W.H. Smiths),

Leona Lewis has paid tribute to the mean streets of Hackney, telling how her tough upbringing has prepared her to face anything.

Quite aside from the military, Roman-Empirish connotations of paying tribute, I was pleased by the tenacity of “mean streets”.

The phrase was invented by Raymond Chandler in his essay The Simple Art of Murder written in 1950:

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor.

It’s astonishing that such a simple tethering of a common adjective and common noun should have held on for so long, like one of those shotgun marriages that lasts to a golden anniversary. It has no official, legal or psychobabble patron like hard labour, deadly weapon or tough love. Yet, like bindweed, it lives.

Chandler probably intended mean more with the sense of lowly or poor than with the purely malicious understanding that the word acquired with Martin Scorcese’s film.

Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean...

As a lovely point of trivia Raymond Chandler was educated at Dulwich College in London from 1900 to 1905 , just missing P.G. Wodehouse who was there from 1894 to 1900. They both excelled at classics: hence their impeccable grammar.

Chandler’s views on split infinitives must be left to another post.

The mean streets of Dulwich in 1890

P.S. According to Microsoft Word, which is always underlining my Heliconian scribblings, the first sentence of this post should have read “which did a wild-eyed maiden in W.H. Smiths force on me”. I rather like it; it sounds like one of those pseudy-demotic ballads of the early nineteenth century.

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.

Elaphine Weekends

The word elaphine means of or pertaining to a stag. Therefore, stag nights, stag parties, stag dos, stag drinks, stag weekends and all such hideousnesses could be rebranded elaphine nights, elaphine parties, elaphine dos, elaphine drinks and elaphine weekends.

I feel this would somehow make them better. At least it would make them sound better, which is a start. Elaphine paintballing is such an unwieldy combination that people might notice that the activity just isn't any fun. If it were we would be doing it all the time.

Elaphine derives, since you ask, from the Cervus Elaphus or red deer.

An elaphine painting

In Flanders Fields The Poppies Blow

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

I didn't realise for years that blow in this poem may actually mean bloom.  It's the second meaning of blow hidden in every dictionary.  In fact, Chambers puts it first:  blow v.i. to bloom or blossom.  Hence a 'full blown rose'.  The poppies may not be blowing in the breeze but blossoming and blooming.

"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows" in A Midsummer Night's Dream is certainly about blooming and not bending in the breeze.

Bloom is also definitely the meaning in Milton's Lycidas:

As killing as the canker to the rose,
Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,
Or frost to flow'rs, that their gay wardrobe wear,
When first the white-thorn blows;
Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.

White-thorns blow in the windy sense all year round, but in the blossomy sense they blow in May or early June, after the frosts have stopped.

Bending or blossoming? A young soldier, Cyril Allinson, who was there at the composition later reported that the poppies were being blown by a gentle east wind, but he also said that McCrae handed him the poem without saying a word. For myself, I think that a flower that blows must be assumed to be blooming, unless stated otherwise, especially in the mind of former English master like McCrae who must have been at least half aware of the echo of Shakespeare's wild thyme.

Flanders Fields is the only great English example of a rondeau. As it is the anniversary of the end of the war, perhaps you should balance Flanders Fields with Siegfried Sassoon's account of the moment that peace was announced:

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on—on—and out of sight.

Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away … O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Update: flicking through a dictionary of quotations has given me these, putting blow as a poetic term for bloom up till 26 years before In Flanders Fields:

The budding rose above the full blown...

   -Wordsworth The Prelude, Book XI 1850

Against the blown rose may they stop their nose

That kneel'd unto the buds

   -Shakespeare Antony & Cleopatra II,v

The flower that once hath blown forever dies

   -Edward Fitzgeral Omar Khayyam 1889

To me the meanest flower that blows can give

Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears

   -Wordsworth Intimations of Immortality

I sometimes think that never blows so red

The rose as where some buried Caesar bled

   -Fitzgerald Omar Khayyam 1889

O fairest flower, no sooner blown but blasted,

Soft silken primrose fading timelessly.

   -John Milton On the Death of a Fair Infant, Dying of a Cough [It wasn't the cough/That carried him off/But the coffin/They carried him off in.]