Being a light-hearted look at the oddities and byways of the English language!
 

Readers will remember that one of the expressions featured in last month’s article was ‘French Leave’. Her is another one based on nationality – in this case ‘Dutch Courage’. This dates from the time of Charles II when the Anglo-Dutch Wars were at their peak, and the lie was circulated that Dutch crews were so cowardly that they had to be primed with schnapps before they would come out and fight. In fact at that time Dutch raids in the Thames estuary were a regular event. The Dutch admiral Van Ruyter once managed to sink practically every British ship at anchor in Chatham, while in the English Channel Van Tromp inflicted such a heavy defeat that he said to have hoisted a broom to the masthead to show he had swept the English from the seas. This practice has continued up to relatively modern times. I seem to remember seeing some newsreel film of German U-Boat crews returning from a ‘successful’ mission with a broom mounted on the coning tower clearly visible.

Send (someone) to Coventry

To refuse to speak to someone, to ostracise a person or ignore them. At the time of the Great Rebellion (or English Civil War) between 1642 and 1649, it is said that the citizens of Coventry once had so great a dislike of soldiers that a woman seen speaking to one was instantly shunned. Hence when a soldier was ‘sent to Coventry’ he would get the cold shoulder. During the years of strife between the King and the Parliament, Royalists were often attacked, and either killed or taken to Coventry, where they would be imprisoned and ostracised, because the city was strongly Protestant and pro-Parliament. Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon (1609-74), referred to Royalist prisoners captured in Birmingham who were ‘sent to Coventry’, effectively into exile.

To take this a step further, to refuse to have any dealings with a person or group of people as a means of protest or coercion is to 'boycott’ them, which dates from 1880, when such methods were used by the Irish Land League against one Captain C.C. Boycott (1832-98), a land agent in County Mayo, to try and persuade him to reduce rents.

Marigold

During one of the early Crusades, Christian warriors discovered a striking little yellow flower. They took some of its roots back to Europe and in honour of the Holy Virgin, the mother of Christ; they reverently called the plant ‘Mary’s gold’. It was used as a poultice for wounds and also as a flavouring agent for soups and stews. Slurred over in common speech, the name of the flower was abbreviated to marigold.

Spinster

Our word ‘spinster’, meaning an unmarried woman, is rapidly becoming archaic and is likely to drop out of common usage in the twenty first century.

The term hasn’t always had the application now attached to it. The original use applied to the occupation of spinning, which was a traditionally a woman’s job. In the ninth century King Alfred spoke of his descendants as those on the spear side and the spindle side – that is, male and female. ‘Spinster’ was widely used as a title of respect for both single and married women until the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

Since homemakers with families had to take on other responsibilities, spinning became increasingly the occupation of unmarried women. By the seventeenth century practically all professional spinners were unmarried. So, in the course of time, it came to be natural that women not likely to marry should be called 'spinsters'.

Crystal

Greek naturalists were greatly interested in certain strange stones often picked up from the ground. Though harder than granite the gem-like pieces were as transparent as ice. It was logical to give such a stone the same name as ice – krystallos, literally meaning ‘frozen into a crust’. For thousands of years it was generally believed that ice actually petrified into chunks of mineral when subjected to long time spans. The Latin version of the word was crystallum, and it was used by Saint Jerome in his Latin version of the Bible now called the Vulgate. Today we know that the mineral quartz is not ice, but in English we preserve the ancient name as crystal. Fine glassware is so clear and hard that it resembles nature’s own crystals. 

The journalist Auberon Waugh once received an invitation from Sengalese journal to make a speech – in French, on the subject of breast-feeding. At the time, he had been writing a column in 'British Medicine' and campaigning against compulsory breast-feeding in National Health hospitals – so it was not as unlikely as it might seem. He wrote the speech in French with considerable difficulty, only to discover, on arrival in Dakar, that his hosts were expecting a speech on press freedom!

It seems that character actor John le Mesurier (of 'Dad’s Army' fame), may have been as much of a ditherer in real life as he often was on the screen. He once received news that a friend of his was in difficulties, and was threatening suicide in some distant place. When asked by a fellow actor what he was doing about it, le Mesurier replied that he was going to ring up the potential suicide  - ‘I’ll do it after six o’clock’. ‘But why wait till then?’ the other actor demanded. ‘He might have done it by now…’ ‘Yes,’ replied le Mesurier, ‘but calls are cheaper after six o’clock...'

Gerard Hoffnung (1925 - 1959) the German born British cartoonist, musician and eccentric, gave a famous speech at the Oxford Union. One of the most remembered lines concerns letters supposedly received from Tyrolean landladies about the desirability of their properties: ‘There is a French widow in every bedroom (affording delightful prospects)…’

Describing a dish that was essentially fish and chips, a friend of mine found it translated into English on a resturant menu in France as 'battered cod pieces'. It is a classic howler - only a person absolutely fluent in English and French would be able to see the absurdity of it. A French speaker who had only studied English at school and university would think such a translation  perfectly ok.

Back in the 1920’s the sovereign of an Asian country visited these shores with much pomp and ceremony. The young Julian Amery (MP) was among the crowd gathered to see the spectacle. Nearby a couple of Cockneys watched the splendidly attired monarch alight from the train before one asked who it was. ‘That’s the king of Arfgarnistan,’ said his companion. This answer was only partially satisfactory because after a moment’s pause the questioner asked, ‘Who’s king of the other 'arf, then?’

An English rugby union team once lost a game, a little embarrassingly, to Western Samoa. One female English sports reporter on television was moved to say, 'That's really bad. Imagine if they had been playing the whole of Samoa'.

During his final illness, it was suggested to Benjamin Disraeli that he might like to receive a visit from Queen Victoria. ‘No, it is better not,’ he replied, ‘She would only ask me to take a message to Albert’.

Asked on his deathbed by his son whether, looking back on a long and crowded life, he had any lasting regrets, the actor Stanley Holloway replied: ‘Yes – the fact that I never got the Mr. Kipling Cake commercials'.
 

And here an instance of someone with an eye to business… 

Saffy knows that his musings always inspire my own thoughts. I think that there should be a word for a lexical error which openly displays the writer's total ignorance of the origin of the expression he is using. Here are two examples:

One which I think David Frost first quoted: a travel writer in a British newspaper wrote that 'Today Jerusalem has become a Mecca for Jewish tourists throughout the world'.

In the business section of a paper (not the best place to look for good English expression): 'English has now become the lingua franca of world commerce'.

I must also speak to Saffy about putting in some newspaper headlines; good ones are a favourite verbal sport of mine. When Gloria Vanderbilt was taken ill in Europe, she was flown back to the United States for treatment (her family didn't really trust European medicine).
One American paper headlined, 'Sick Gloria in Transit'.
Susan