toodle pip!

How big are your vocabularies? No, that’s not a misprint. Each of us has at least two vocabularies: one of words that we actually use (disregarding, for now, the possibility that some of the words being used are not understood by their users), and one of words we don’t use but know the meaning of if someone else does use them. I leave aside the specialist vocabularies, more properly called jargon, in use between professional people such as accountants, lawyers and scientists, because I am looking for universal principles in the way we use our language, and bar the odd word that escapes from these rarefied confines, professional jargon is too restricted to be relevant. In passing, I might note that escapees are invariably misused in their new surroundings. A good example is the legal word ‘alibi’, which in general circulation is often mistakenly used as a synonym for ‘excuse’.

I was prompted to think about the subject that I’m about to discuss by my friend Barry, who invariably says “Toodle pip” when leaving. Now, I do know what he means, but I’d never dream of using the expression myself. I usually say “See you”, or simply “’Bye”. However, there are quite a few others that are part of my secondary vocabulary, none of which I’ve ever used as a valedictory, although I might write ‘he said farewell to…’. And if you’ve read French Letters, you’ll know why I don’t say adieu or au revoir. As for ciao, how did the Italians get in on the act?

In straightforward descriptive language, we happily interchange ‘big’ and ‘large’ or ‘small’ and ‘little’, occasionally slipping in a more unusual alternative such as ‘colossal’ or ‘minuscule’. However, when it comes to naming everyday objects or institutions, we may know of quite a few different options, but (I’m speculating here) invariably we use only one. To test my theory, I’ll start in the toilet.

Actually, I only ever use the word ‘toilet’ when I feel that I’m in polite company. My preferred option is ‘the bogs’ and has been ever since I learned a word for ‘an installation designed to facilitate the comfortable and convenient performance of essential bodily functions’. English DJ John Peel championed a punk band called Bogshed in the mid-1980s, but perhaps the band made an error with its choice of name, because its fame was strictly ephemeral, like a fart.

There are many others: WC or water closet, lavatory and convenience are neutral words that can be used in any social situation, while ‘the gents’ and ‘the ladies’ are reflective of the once ubiquitous signs indicating a public convenience in the UK. On the other hand, if I were to find myself lost somewhere in an American city and ‘highly desirous of a snakes’, to quote Barry McKenzie, I think it would be prudent to enquire about the whereabouts of the nearest john, on the grounds that the more genteel alternatives may not be understood, and the risk of misunderstanding in such circumstances doesn’t bear thinking about. The same logic would impel me to ask whether a dunnee was suitably adjacent, should I ever find myself in a similar predicament down under.

The point to note here is that these are all euphemisms. It is as if we are ashamed. And the most egregious of all is that hideous genteelism ‘loo’. And if, as I suspect, it is a portmanteau word derived from ‘lavatory’ and ‘poo’, then I am even more scornful. And don’t mention ‘latrine’, unless you’re a military man and can use the word to describe a domestic privy while keeping a straight face.

Let us move on to something altogether more enticing: money. ‘Money’ may be the formal name for the stuff, but there are a surprising number of informal or slang terms with reasonably wide currency. Here’s a selection: bread, cash, dosh, dough, loot, lucre, moolah, the necessary, readies (banknotes, but mainly used as a generic word for money), simoleons, spondulicks, wad, the wherewithal. I use none of these; instead I would refer to ‘lure’, which is part of the local dialect in my home town, the point again being that I know many but use only one.

And what about the police? The definitive name for a law enforcement agency tends to be used mostly in formal contexts, otherwise its employees are variously bears, cops, coppers, the filth, the heat, pigs, rozzers or the Old Bill. Some of these are downright insulting, which obviously reflects the status of the police in some sections of society. Others, such as ‘bobby’ and ‘peeler’, are almost as dead as the man who inspired these terms, although the chairman of the Cumbria Police Authority when I was a member in the mid-1990s consistently used the first.

Me? I prefer ‘copper’, which doesn’t make any value judgements and has the clear advantage of being an agent noun (one who cops, or arrests), which makes it etymologically more dignified. On the other hand, if I want to be facetious, I’ve taken to referring to the local constabulary, collectively, as ‘Mr Plod’, after the policeman in the Noddy in Toytown books by Enid Blyton.

We move merrily on to the condition of being intoxicated by alcohol; there are several words for this that appear to be in use only around my home town, the current favourite being ‘gassed’. And it’s worth noting that some terms are clearly genteel euphemisms—merry, tiddly, tipsy—reflecting perhaps the strength of the temperance movement in Victorian Britain. There are even formal similes, such as ‘drunk as a lord’ (perhaps at one time only the aristocracy could afford to get really pissed), and poetic phrases such as ‘three sheets to the wind’, which will mean something to you only if you also know what it is to splice the mainbrace.

So these are my contentions: (1) we may know several slang terms for something, but we habitually use only one, or at most two; and (2) the number of slang terms for something is directly proportional to the importance we attach to that thing. As supporting evidence for the second claim, I present the following list of words, some of which betray a kind of naive arrogance when used self-referentially (with apologies to my female readers, who may not use any of them; I wouldn’t expect them to regard the object they describe as that important anyway): beef bayonet, cock, dick, dong, hampton, John Thomas, knob, mutton dagger, one-eyed trouser snake, pecker, Percy, prick, privy member, pork sword, sausage surprise, todger, wedding tackle, whang, wife’s best friend…. To quote Wellington: “Ipso fatso, my case rests.”

of tablecloths and maiden aunts

If, like me, you grew up in postwar Britain, you probably had at least one formidably severe, intimidating maiden aunt by whom you were occasionally invited to tea. I had several, all great aunts and all incredibly ancient (from the perspective of a five-year-old). And only too ready to administer a sharp slap across the side of the head if you were foolish enough, cocky enough, to transgress any of her rules of polite conduct. Even if you couldn’t help it.

Take a simple situation such as spilling tea on your aunt’s (starched white linen) tablecloth. Ouch! To paraphrase George Orwell (Such, Such Were the Joys, in which he relates how being flogged for wetting the bed at his prep school ‘cured’ the problem), it is a mistake to assume that this kind of treatment doesn’t work. It does. I’m sure that there is a whole generation out there who wince inwardly every time they see someone spill tea (or anything else) on a tablecloth.

That’s how I felt on my first visit to a Chinese restaurant, soon after I arrived, wide-eyed, in Hong Kong in 1974. What’s all this? People spilling tea all over the tablecloth. I was shocked. Horrified. But then I noticed that everyone else simply ignored these flagrant violations of what I’d been conditioned to believe was polite behaviour and carried on with whatever else they had been doing. Well, I thought, if no one else is bothered, why should I be?

In any case, trying to avoid spilling tea on the tablecloth in a Chinese restaurant turns out to be almost as difficult as attempting to empty the Pacific Ocean armed only with a plastic bucket (and an infinite amount of patience). The problem is the teapots and their design. This does vary, but only within narrow limits; the fundamental form and function are always the same. And something else that is always the same: it is impossible to adequately control the rate at which the tea issues from the spout. Tip the pot so far and all you get is a trickle; only slightly further and out it comes in a torrent, overshooting the cup and saturating the immediate hinterland. This gives rise to the golden rule for tea drinking in a Chinese restaurant: never hold onto your cup when the teamaster is about to top it up.

However, some Chinese use the tablecloth for less acceptable purposes, such as a place to spit out bones. This is a by-product of the Chinese method of preparing meat: individual pieces may have quite a few bones, and the meaty bits of such pieces aren’t easily extracted with a knife and fork. The best place to separate the edible from the inedible is the mouth, from whence the unwanted pieces need to be removed periodically. I was relieved to discover that most Chinese also find the spitting method uncouth, except, possibly, in the privacy of their own homes. The polite alternative, and considerate if within sight of other diners, is to use your chopsticks to transfer the bones from your mouth to the side of the small dish upon which your rice bowl stands.

Both standards of behaviour can still be seen in Hong Kong, but nowadays what you see is heavily context-dependent. If you’re eating at a street stall, you will be sitting at a folding table with a laminated top, so it’s natural to spit any bones straight onto the tabletop. When you’ve finished, the proprietor simply wipes the table with a cloth, although it has to be said that in many establishments most of the debris ends up on the ground.

And it is possible to delineate a hierarchy of restaurants based on their tablecloth policy. In the more upmarket restaurants, you get a freshly laundered tablecloth every time, and you will never be required to share a table. Moving downmarket, you will still get a clean tablecloth, but if the restaurant is busy you may have to share a table. This presents an interesting logistical problem. Take the situation where two couples sit at a table for four. They start with a clean tablecloth, but when one couple leaves, the tablecloth is rolled up to expose half the table. A clean tablecloth is then spread across the exposed half of the table. When the second couple leaves, the old tablecloth is removed and the unused half of the new tablecloth is rolled out across the rest of the table. This process continues for as long as there are new customers.

At the bottom of the scale are restaurants where the tablecloth is changed only when it is visibly soiled. Our local restaurant, which I described in Slow Food, falls into this category. It even has tan-coloured tablecloths, which don’t show the tea stains, although I have to confess that this takes the fun out of it. You see, in what might be seen as retrospective rebellion, spilling tea on the tablecloth, which I don’t do deliberately (I didn’t then either), has become something of a guilty pleasure. Auntie Ginny would have been mortified.

french letters

English is a mongrel language. Around an original framework of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse has accumulated a vast, higgledy-piggledy superstructure of words and phrases appropriated at various times from French, Italian, Latin and Greek, liberally sprinkled with odd words from at least twenty other languages, many of which would have been seen as quite exotic when first used.

For example, coffee and kiosk were borrowed from Turkish, while caravan came from Persian, bungalow and verandah from Hindustani, bamboo from Malay, ketchup and typhoon from Chinese, tattoo from Polynesian, boomerang from Aboriginal Australian, safari from Swahili, kayak* and parka from Inuit, and chocolate and tomato from Aztec (via Spanish). You will notice that the object defined by these words didn’t exist in mediæval England, and one may assume that when that object did arrive, whether literally or in the reports of travellers, it came accompanied by its ‘name’, forestalling any possibility that a native word might be coined to describe the new arrival.

A couple of languages have been the source of more than the odd word, but these contributions have tended to be focused in specific fields. For example, Arabic provides many words related to science and mathematics, including algebra, algorithm, azimuth, cipher, elixir, nadir and zenith. This reflects the history of these subjects, in particular how the science and mathematics of the ancient Greeks eventually found its way into Renaissance Europe, via the Islamic Empire in border cities such as Toledo in al-Andalus (Spain).

Many of the technical terms in art and architecture come from the country that spearheaded the Renaissance: Italy. Examples include chiaroscuro and tempera in art and cupola, piazza and portico in architecture. The technical language of music is almost exclusively Italian, but a few terms have escaped into general circulation; examples include crescendo, maestro, tempo and virtuoso.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the heyday of Latin and Greek. Many words were imported directly from these two ancient languages, such as alibi, acumen, basis, censor, dictum, formula and terminus from Latin, and chaos, criterion, hubris, hyperbole, mentor and stigma from Greek. Not content with mere borrowings, however, writers of this period also began to assemble new words by adding random Latin or Greek prefixes and suffixes to existing Latin or Greek words, with the result that the vocabulary of English expanded hugely. Word coiners of the twentieth century were not quite so discriminating: instead of marrying Latin with Latin and Greek with Greek, they came up with such hybrids as television, which has a Greek prefix tacked onto a Latin root and Latin suffix.

At this point, you may well be wondering about the point of this essay. Ah! But now we come to French. There are probably more words in common usage in English that come originally from French than from any other foreign language. But this simple fact obscures a real problem: pronunciation. Why do most native English speakers try to pronounce these words as if they are speaking French? Is it to demonstrate their self-defined erudition?

I wince each time I hear someone say something close to “doobl ontondre” in the middle of an English sentence, doubly so if the speaker tries to include the two nasal vowels from the original French. Another egregious example is homage, often pronounced to rhyme with the ‘Taj’ in Taj Mahal. One wonders what is wrong with pronouncing it to rhyme with ‘damage’, as most people tend to do. In fact, I believe that the pronunciation of all French words should be anglicized. Words that came over with the Normans in 1066, such as beef, mutton and pork, have been around long enough to have been anglicized in both pronunciation and spelling, but a host of more recent imports retain the original pronunciation, for no very good reason.

The stumbling block would appear to be speakers of what is rather pretentiously called ‘received pronunciation’ (aka ‘BBC English’, although this phrase becomes more of an oxymoron with each passing year). Most such speakers hail from the south of England and probably look down on those of us who pronounce garage to rhyme with ‘carriage’. But cafe is already pronounced to rhyme with ‘safe’ in working-class districts of London and with ‘coffee’ in the north of England, clique is pronounced to rhyme with ‘shriek’ by some and to sound like ‘click’ by others, and most people with limited pretensions regard a poseur as a ‘poser’.

We can hurry along this process by deliberately setting out to pronounce ballet to rhyme with ‘mallet’, cachet and sachet with ‘hatchet’, debris with ‘hubris’, debut with ‘rebut’ and promenade with ‘lemonade’. Unfortunately, there is a particular problem with words that in the original contain a nasal vowel. It isn’t as if we’re consistent either. Words like cordon and coupon sound as native as beacon and season, although this could be because the nasal and oral versions of ‘o’ are quite similar. The nasal and oral ‘a’ and ‘i’ differ much more significantly, which tends to cause confusion, with the educated among the population endeavouring to get as close to the original French as they can, and those who never learned French at school simply doing their best to follow. Imagine how much easier it would be if the first four letters of impasse were to be pronounced identically to the same four in ‘impact’, in other words, as it reads.

Another problem lies with diacritical marks, which have no place in English but are retained by many writers: café, débâcle, fête and rôle can function perfectly well without the accents. However, words like blasé, cliché, communiqué, façade and protégé do present a problem, although façade is often pronounced by those who know no French to rhyme with ‘arcade’, and this may be the way forward: to pronounce as it appears to read if you’re unfamiliar with French.

A second concept that is alien to the English language is gender. However, many French words have come into English with their gender distinctions intact, including blond(e), debutant(e) and doyen(ne). It would be a big improvement if the feminine forms were to be dropped.

Finally, there are a large number of French phrases that have been imported into English unchanged. Cul de sac may be a splendid metaphor in the original (‘arse of bag’), but English already has two equivalent phrases that have the advantage of meanings that are clearly understood: blind alley and dead-end street. Why do we need another? Other French phrases that could usefully be pruned from English include à propos, bon voyage, coup de grâce, de rigueur, en masse and vis-à-vis (the full list runs into dozens).

At this point, you will probably detect a whiff of hypocrisy. I may not make a regular habit of it, but I do use the occasional French phrase myself, probably because I can’t think immediately of a native English synonym. I use Latin words and phrases more frequently, but that’s another story (I studied the language for four years at school, so this habit is deeply ingrained). In any case, as you may also have spotted, this tirade against French imports is at least slightly tongue in cheek. I’m not optimistic of success, but for those of you who would like to see the English language defrenchified, the campaign starts here.


* This reminds me of a story I heard once about an Inuit hunter out in his kayak. It was so cold that he decided to light a fire—on the deck of his little craft. The inevitable happened: the fire burned through the deck, followed by the bottom of the boat, which sank, unfortunately, thus proving beyond reasonable doubt that you can’t have your kayak and heat it.

legacy

It is now more than thirteen years since the British relinquished control of Hong Kong, but it was always a Chinese city in any case, so nothing has really changed. British influence was superficial, although Hong Kong wouldn’t have such a high proportion of its population speaking English as a second language fluently had the British never come here. Perhaps surprisingly, however, beyond the linguistic footprint, there are quite a few other permanent reminders of the former British presence.

This idea first occurred to me during the nasty illness that struck me down back in March (Sick Note). I’d been coughing badly all night, and Paula was so worried that she insisted on driving me to the A&E department of our local hospital: the Prince of Wales Hospital. Then I remembered Queen Mary Hospital on Hong Kong Island, Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Kowloon and Princess Margaret Hospital in the New Territories. There is also Queen Elizabeth Stadium in Wanchai, and Prince Edward Road and Princess Margaret Road in Kowloon (both major thoroughfares, naturally). The Prince of Wales Building in Wanchai might have retained its name, except that it was a British military installation, and one can assume that the People’s Liberation Army was none too pleased to have the name of such a symbol of imperialism on one of its buildings.

Other references to British royalty also failed to survive the handover. For obvious reasons, the Royal Hong Kong Police became simply the Hong Kong Police, while the Royal Observatory restyled itself as the Hong Kong Observatory (I have to confess that I still forget quite frequently and use the old name, in much the same way as I still refer to as Calcutta one of the Indian cities that has changed its name in recent years; old habits are hard to break). The Jockey Club, which controls all legal gambling in Hong Kong, also dropped the ‘Royal’ appellation. However, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club did not change its name—whether or not to do so was decided by a ballot of its members.

You would need to be familiar with the whole of Hong Kong’s colonial history to spot other examples. For instance, almost every nineteenth-century governor of the colony is commemorated in the name of a road. The majority of these roads are in the highly sought-after residential area of Hong Kong Island known as the Mid-Levels, which overlooks the harbour, or the even more exclusive Peak, with a few down at sea level in Central or Wanchai. I’ve no idea whether these roads were named while the nominee was still in post, but if it is the case, as seems likely, it should be possible to correlate a list of past governors with a map of the relevant roads to track Hong Kong’s urban development in the nineteenth century.

This naming practice continued into the 1920s, but only one past governor has his name on a street in Kowloon. Nathan Road (aka the Golden Mile) has a fair claim to be Kowloon High Street, running as it does three miles due north from the most southerly point on the Kowloon peninsula to the edge of the New Territories (technically ‘New Kowloon’, although the phrase is never used) at, where else, Boundary Street. Yes, I’m aware that the cognomen is misleading, but calling it the Golden League would have confused the punters.

Since the Second World War, governors have lent their names to less grandiose but more practical projects, from the highly regarded Grantham College of Education to the hugely popular Maclehose Trail, a hiking trail from east to west across the New Territories that attracts the kind of puerile ticker who walks the Pennine Way or cycles the Coast to Coast back in the UK, merely to say they’ve done it.

As far as I can tell, only one past governor has left no trace of his having been here. He is also the only past governor not to have been a knight of the realm. He probably had less understanding of how Chinese people think when he arrived in 1992 than any previous new appointee, and he probably didn’t know much more when he left. And if you expect the reputation of Chris ‘Fei Pang’ Patton with the Chinese government to be rehabilitated, to the extent that he might be considered for post hoc recognition in the manner of his predecessors, you might want to consider finding something else to do while you wait, like constructing a life-size replica of a mediaeval cathedral entirely from matchsticks.