The Social World

Tag: Language

  • What makes a ‘survivor?’

    What makes a ‘survivor?’

    Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise.

    Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,” wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual “grooming?” Are they victims or are they survivors? Or should they be neither?

    Last week, after he withdrew his name for consideration as the chair of Britain’s national grooming inquiry, the thoughtful retired policeman Jim Gamble made a comment using both terms: “The police have understandably lost the trust of victims and survivors because some were corrupt.”

    In 2021, this sense of survivor was noticed by the Oxford English Dictionary as: “A person who has experienced a traumatic event or past abuse, especially of a sexual or psychological nature.”

    In 1975 there was an example in the Los Angeles Free Press: “Welcome all survivors of rape, child molestation, welfare lines, botched abortions, unemployment and typing pools.” There’s a certain bathos in “typing pools,” oppressive as they might have been. As for victim, in the sense of “a person who has been intentionally harmed, injured, or killed,” the OED notes that “in some contexts survivor is now used in preference to victim.”

    There has been a recent trend to turn misfortune into victimhood, as in the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter campaigns. Donald Trump presents his prosecutions as evidence of his victimhood, but when a bullet nicks his ear, he brands himself a survivor.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 24, 2025 World edition.

  • Should you mix whisky and potash?

    Should you mix whisky and potash?

    “‘I am not screwed,’ replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. ‘Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.’ So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.”

    By screwed he meant “drunk” of course. The Caterpillar is the nickname of a pupil in The Hill (1905) by Horace Annesley Vachell about boys at an English boarding school, more particularly the love between them.

    The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F. Marion Crawford, in a scene in Baden-Baden, we hear of an English duke drinking “curaçao and potass water.” Crawford was an American man who settled in Italy. Curiously, potassium carbonate is used in glassmaking and his death was attributed to his inhalation a decade earlier of toxic gases at a glassworks in Colorado.

    But far more remarkable to me than that small chime of potassium references is that the word potassium derives from the earthy English word potash. “I discovered sodium a few days after I discovered potassium, in the year 1807,” Humphry Davy noted in 1812. So it is true that, as it says in the first clerihew ever composed by Edmund Clerihew Bentley:

    Sir Humphry Davy
    Abominated gravy.
    He lived in the odium
    Of having discovered sodium.

    It is not as simple as Sir Humphry Latinizing potash by calling it potassium. The leached remnants of wood or vegetable ashes were called in Germanic languages pot-asschen (Dutch) or pottasche (German). Romance languages borrowed the words as potasse (French) or potasa (Spanish). Davy succeeded in separating the metallic element potassium from the compound.

    But the symbol K for the element, short for kalium, derives from the Arabic al-qali (from qala, “to bake”) in use from the Middle Ages for potash, which gives us alkali.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s November 10, 2025 World edition.

  • Is something ‘greenlit’ – or ‘greenlighted?’

    Is something ‘greenlit’ – or ‘greenlighted?’

    “It’s got to be greenlighted,” said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using –greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the London Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when “he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb.”

    For what it’s worth, my husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit. When using a figure of speech accidentally employing the word light, such as to moonlight, then one says moonlighted, not moonlit.

    I fear language does not abide by logic. In which category would you put highlight? The verb is definitely to my mind highlighted, as the past tense or past participle. Yet the Oxford English Dictionary states that highlit is an established form of the past tense, though it gives no examples among the quotations it furnishes, while giving five quotations with high-lighted. In any case, greenlight, first recorded in 1941, had certainly acquired the form greenlit as well as greenlighted by the 1960s.

    The first references to a green light on the railways come from 1839. But then, a green light still meant “caution,” and red “stop.” White was used for “all right.” But, as colored lights de-pended on the glass fitted to a lamp, the danger remained that a red or green glass might fall from a lamp and leave a false white signal.

    A parallel case to greenlight is gaslight, which I have written about before. It derives from Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1938) and means “to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity.” It is often now reduced to meaning “disagree (with us)” or “suggest that we are mistaken.” Whatever gaslighted meant metaphorically, it was never in the form gaslit. I couldn’t greenlight that.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 27, 2025 World edition.

  • The joy of made-up languages

    I wasn’t supposed to understand Potato language. It was my parents’ speech device, employed when wishing to discuss certain apparently secret subjects in front of my brother and me. While chewing over some esoteric topic, they would suddenly lapse into Potato language, a.k.a “P-language” or just “P.” Being a young child, the subject matter didn’t interest me – I was more intent on trying to figure out why on a whim they’d switch to speaking a discordant, discombobulated version of our everyday language.

    Unknown to them, from the age of about seven I gradually became bilingual in P and by ten, I was fluent. As I grew older, I realized the point of converting to P was to discuss topics not intended for our ears.

    As neither of our parents ever spoke to us in P, we didn’t speak it to them and as a teenager I discovered, to my surprise, that my brother had never picked it up. Being sensible and slightly older than me, he probably regarded it as a linguistic abomination.

    P-language is constructed by inserting the letter “p” at strategic points in a word – generally before or after each syllable, depending on the word. The word “potato” would be spoken as “puh-po-tuh-pay-tuh-po.” Gibberish perhaps, but occasionally useful gibberish. The word “gibberish” is not, though, merely a description of nonsensical babble. It may refer to a linguistic game in which words are modified by the insertion of specific letters, as in P. Other examples are Pig Latin and Eggy Peggy.

    For more serious and practical usage, a multitude of artificially constructed languages, or “conlangs,” have been created over many years. One of the most widely used is the international auxiliary language Esperanto – a universal language devised in the 19th century by Polish-Jewish ophthalmologist Ludwik Zamenhof. It’s intended to be simple to learn, with phonetic spelling and uncomplicated grammar. Among other conlangs is International Sign Language, offering a means of communicating with those who are deaf. Polari was an argot used within the British gay community before homosexuality was decriminalized in 1967. Fictional conlangs abound within literature and film, such as Elvish in The Lord of the Rings and Klingon in Star Trek.

    In my later teenage years, I confessed to my parents my long-standing fluency in their supposed secret lingo and P has since occasionally proved handy. A few weeks ago, my mother and I were in a café when we became aware of a couple at a table a little too close to ours sitting in silence, occasionally glancing at us as we quietly mulled over an old family matter. Noticing the eavesdropping, we spoke in P only to remark on the fact of the attention before returning to chatting again in plain English about a banal subject.

    This incident was a rarity but I am keen to preserve the language within my family. My two great-nieces are aged two and three and their highly receptive brains would probably cotton on to it easily. I’m not sure what their parents would make of their great-aunt chattering in gobbledygook, so I’ll wait a few years. Their parents might adopt the “if you can’t beat them, join them” approach – or simply warn the children of an impending visit by the eccentric great-aunt, with her tongue-twisting parlance.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • What does the ‘100’ emoji really mean?

    What does the ‘100’ emoji really mean?

    When this century began, we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely.

    But now I reach for my throwing-slippers when someone on the radio says: “One hundred percent.” It can be a hundred percent, hundred percent or (in the mouth of Gen Z) hundo P.

    Even odder is the development of an emoji with its own meanings. I had supposed that 100 meant 100 percent, implying agreement. But the immediate figurative reference is to examination marks (which to be sure are 100 percent when the mark is 100). So the emoji implies full marks for the interlocutor, not absolute agreement by the writer.

    This emoji is labeled U+1F4AF by Unicode, the system that enables characters and scripts (168 of them, from Old Uyghur to Samaritan) to be used online. Unicode is also to blame for the lamentable use of emoticons online as a substitute for words. Unicode encodes 3,790 emojis, some I admit quite useful, such as the waning gibbous moon symbol.

    Arabic numerals such as 100 are already translingual. There is no need to vocalize them in any particular language: you don’t have to say to yourself “hundred” or “cien” when reading one. But the “hundred points symbol” has two main figurative meanings: either “Full marks” or “Keep it real.” If someone had said “Keep it real” to me, I’d have thought it a criticism, like “Don’t be daft.” But it is regarded as friendly support, in the sense of “Keep authentic and truthful.”

    In India, more charmingly because less familiarly, they still use cent per cent, an old-fashioned way of saying completely. The Indians speak of “a cent per cent success,” but if I said that, it would increase the percentage of blank stares I receive.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 29, 2025 World edition.

  • Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    Where did ‘husband’ come from?

    “Am I housebound?” asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role.

    “No, darling,” I said. “You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.” Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank in worth with the years, following the same path as boor, churl and peasant.

    Whereas I as a housewife enjoy a comparatively transparent label, any husband’s title is obscure. It is simply a house-bond, but the first element of husband, hus-, no longer seems like house, and the -bond element is often mistaken for a form of bond, to do with binding.

    The bond in husband derives from words in Norse languages with related meanings “to live, dwell, to cultivate, to build.” Old English had a connected word, buan, “to dwell,” and these all came from the ancient Indo-European word that gave us be, as well as the Latin fui and the Greek stem phu- (hence physics). The history of the English word be finds cousins in Persian, Russian and Irish.

    Before the Norman Conquest, bonda in English meant a freeman, like a ceorl (churl), below a noble thane but above a servile worker. After the Normans came, the churl sank from freeman to a tenant bound to a lord, and bonde in Middle English became equivalent to a villein or serf, and then to a slave. It was at this stage that the word became confused with bond as in bondage. In husband, the fossilized -band was insulated from these developments in meaning.

    Husbandry meant at first management of a household, an obsolete sense, of which we retain only husbanding of resources. Husbandry was the task of a husbandman, cultivating the soil. The husband as master of the house came to mean the correlative of a housewife, to whom he’d be married. Strangely, some men in the Middle Ages, such as Richard Husewif (1192), had the word as a surname; perhaps it was taken as a role independent of sex. My husband couldn’t be mistaken for one.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s September 15, 2025 World edition.