Carminative

Carminative is a terribly useful word. You, dear reader, have two options: skip down to the bottom of the post for a definition, or read this whole lovely passage from Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley. (I've put in a page break: just click on the read more below).

"One suffers so much," Denis went on, "from the fact that beautiful words don't always mean what they ought to mean. Recently, for example, I had a whole poem ruined, just because the word 'carminative' didn't mean what it ought to have meant. Carminative--it's admirable, isn't it?"

"Admirable," Mr. Scogan agreed. "And what does it mean?"

Progressive

The Miliband brothers seem to get disproportionate coverage on this blog. Here's an article from Ed:

There is a big fight on for Britain's future. The tide isn't running out on progressive ideas. People don't live in the politics of an electoral pendulum, they live in changed times where progressive values are more, not less, powerful. If we go out and make the case, we should be confident we can succeed.

The word progressive is one of my pet hates*. Everybody is progressive, we differ only on definitions of the word. Every so often I hear a politician say that he wants what's best for Britain, but they never follow this up with free whiskey for all or the humane destruction of the Cornish. It's always healthcare or further education and other ideas that wouldn't make my top forty.
 
Every policy progresses somewhere. Theocracy, communism, genocide and compulsory nudity might all be progress in somebody's estimation, though I support only two of them. Mr Miliband is right, though trite, that the "tide" can never "run out" on progressive ideas (which I suppose form the beach in which the unpendulous case-makers are fighting). Progress can never stop, but to what strange utopias it may lead, nobody knows.
 
There are three exceptions to this rule. First, progressive and regressive taxation have both become technical economic terms. The former means taking from the rich and giving to the poor, the latter the reverse.

Second, progressive tenses, of which I shall blog some other time.
 
The third is a progressive disease: the stately progress of dementia, gangrene, cancer and the like. I had a friend who went for a test for a very serious disease. He was a trifle nervous so the nurse reassured him that it would "all be positive".
 

David Miliband searching for a pendulum

 
 
* I love the idea of a pet hate. I dream of a menagerie of malevolences and I would feed them and stroke them and take them for walks and they would be the happiest hatreds in the whole wide world. They'd wake me up every morning by licking my face with their vindictive tongues.

Reform

There's a very good article on the word reform by Matthew Parris over at The Times (it's a little way down the page under the subheading Alternative view). However, it's terribly peeving to me as I had already written a near identical post. Link to The Times here.

Matthew Parris told me last summer that disinterest/uninterest was a lost cause for pedants but that begging the question could be saved. I believe the reverse.

Questioning the beggar

Euthanase

This morning I offered to euthanase a sickly and diseased young lady whom I discovered floccillating on my way to breakfast. The brave girl's only objection, uttered in a quavering voice, was that she wasn't sure that euthanase was really a verb.

So I fled to a dictionary and found that indeed euthanase is not the right word, nor does it even pop up on google. The Americans say euthanize, but according to the word of The Almighty OED we English make do with euthanatize. However, the only citation is from a Spectator of  1873:

I saw a crab euthanatising a sickly fish, doubtless from the highest motives

I also didn't realise that euthanasia meant a peaceful or happy death long before it meant deliberately bringing about such an expiration, an idea that didn't pop up until 1869. Moreover it was originally anglicized to euthanasy. The root, since you ask, is simply eu for good as in eugenics or The Eurhythmics, and thanatos meaning death, as in Aimée Thanatogenos (the heroine of Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One) whose name means death-born beloved — or as in thanatologist which is a euphemism for undertaker — or as in thanatorium which is a place people go to be killed.

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,
To take into the air my quiet breath;
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—
To thy high requiem become a sod.

Resurrected Animal Skins

As a rule Inky Fool doesn't make fun of shopkeepers' English, on the basis that I don't know how to run a shop. However, this leaflet, which I picked up in the dry cleaners, really freaked me out.

I'm off to Hollywood to pitch my new idea for a horror film and I'm never wearing my snakeskin belt again.

Hubby

There's a headline in today's Sun:

KILLER MUM 'WARNING BY HUBBY'

For some reason The Sun uses quotation marks for things that aren't quotations. Nobody said the words 'warning by hubby'. The actual quotation given in the article is:

She said: "He said to my husband and I that he was very concerned about the safety of the children in her hands."

Husband.

I have lived in Britain almost all my life. I have been all over this grey and unpleasant land. I have been to university and I have been to Asda. I have chatted to aristocrats, tramps, professors, pimps, immigrants, emmigrés, builders, bouncers, farmers, doctors, nurses, criminals and even journalists. I have been to the North and the South. I have dined at the Savoy and got drunk in the nastiest pub in Britain*. I have walked and crawled amongst the lowest of the dead, and I have never once heard anyone use the word hubby.

The word hubby is in the OED. They have citations from 1688 and 1887. And it's distantly possible that I have survived all these hubbyless years as a linguistic and statistical oddity. But I contend that this word is concoction and confection from the diseased brain of some paleolinguistic tabloid hack.

That's why the word was not in the quotation.

She said: "He said to my husband and I that he was very concerned about the safety of the children in her hands."

Oh, and it should have been "my husband and me".

A bear and her hubby

*This is a close run thing between Off The Rails on Weston-Super-Mare station and Doyles Tavern opposite the entrance to Pentonville Prison.

The Depth Charge

There was an article by Patrick Wintour in yesterday's Guardian which meandered, as Coleridge put it, with a mazy motion. It started out on Gordon Brown and co-operatives. Then, after a few paragraphs it moved on to the weekend's polls. Then there was a bit about leadership speculation. Then there was a mention of The Mail On Sunday, which claimed at the weekend to have seen a new book by Andrew Rawnsley with all sorts of lurid revelations about the Prime Minister. This is a subject that Patrick Wintour ought to know all about as he and Mr Rawnsley have consumed an awful lot of lunch together. So the most important paragraph of Wintour's article was actually the last.

The Mail on Sunday has not seen the book, not due out for some weeks. It may make uncomfortable reading for Brown, but not for reasons given by the Mail.

This technique of saving the most important or revelatory part of the article for the last sentence is known amongst the ladies and gentlemen of the press as the depth charge. Whether this is because of the delay before a depth charge's explosion, or because the revelation is deep in the article, I do not know.

There's also something rather lovely about the authority of the first sentence setting up the apophatic teasing of the second.

Lobby journalists filing an article