Lauren Gate thinks I should have issued a trigger warning last week before I quoted a complaint about people who write “utility” rather than “use”.
“Form 3P at St Cuthbert’s Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and ‘Tiny’ McGough (so called because he was 6ft 7in, huge bald dome of a head) hauled me to the front of the class for using ‘utilise’ instead of ‘use’. Tiny terrorised us into learning English and many of us still have nightmares. But our English grammar is very good.”
Some lessons taught at school never leave you. Dogmatism is a common theme when people write to us about our use — not utilisation — of English, and I’ve come to the conclusion that teachers of grammar in the old days must have been particularly ferocious.
Priorities in English teaching have changed, apparently. After last week’s column about short words, Heather Farrer got in touch: “I agree that we should write what we mean in as straightforward a manner as possible. However, pupils following the national curriculum in literacy are encouraged to use as many synonyms as possible to increase their Sats score.”
This, she thinks, is responsible for the convoluted sentences that people find irksome in news reports. It may also account for the resilience of “elegant variation”, despite the robust advice of one of my favourite style guide entries. Fear of repetition, it says, too often leads reporters to grope for alternatives, which are usually worse. “Eager not to overuse a key word in a story, they resort to a strange and jarring synonym. Thus the otter becomes ‘the popular fish-eating mammal’, a killer whale becomes ‘the cetacean’.” King’s Cross appeared in another paper as “the popular London transport hub”.
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There’s a thread on Twitter — @SecondMentions — which is dedicated to examples of elegant variation in the press. I was tickled to appear in it a couple of weeks ago because, after referring to “the mirrored top hat-wearing hero Noddy Holder of Slade”, I’d gone on to call him “the Walsall warbler”.
Robert Crampton also earned a spot recently for his description of Boris Becker — “the self-styled-strawberry-blond-but-everyone-knows-he’s-ginger” — as did Alice Thomson, whose tribute to Vivienne Westwood featured “the frugal apricot-haired eco-warrior”.
Second Mentions makes no distinction between comment articles, where poetic licence is allowed, if not encouraged, and news reports, where it is not. An example almost worthy of the style guide came up in a news story this week, when Lemsip made an appearance as “the paracetamol-based drink”.
Cheers, mine’s a pint.
Swallowed a book
Talking of Westwood, why, asks Benjamin Lloyd, are people who enjoy books always described in obituaries as “voracious readers”?
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Oh dear. That is a good point, and it’s not just obituaries either. “Voracious” and “reader” appear together with mortifying regularity in a search of our pages.
“Voracious” comes from the Latin for swallowing greedily or devouring which, I grant, makes “she read a lot” seem a feeble alternative. Difficult as these habits are to shift, there must be another word — avid? enthusiastic? — that we could fall back on once in a while.
Mole tells me
Some Christmas thank-you missives, gratefully received. Lynette Reeve wrote to say how much she appreciated the article by our food editor, Tony Turnbull — “Christmas lunch made easy — my rules”. “As it happens I can cook and Christmas lunch holds no fears, but I’m sick of seeing suggested menus where every vegetable is messed about. Who has the time or hob space to sauté a sprout or glaze a carrot? And anyway, they’re delicious just as they come.”
I couldn’t agree more, except perhaps the bit about the sprouts.
Bill Stenson of Ruislip very much liked Alice Thomson’s article about children in the social care system, he says, “but my reason for writing is that she referred to Charlie Mackesy’s book The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse and to my shame this was the first I had heard of it. I have just watched the BBC adaptation. I am 85, and the tears ran down my face. I went straight upstairs to the study, where lies the computer, and ordered three copies, one for me, one for my wife and one for my son’s family. Please thank Alice for introducing an old man to something of beauty.”
Just the tonic
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A former colleague, Tim Austin of Shere, Surrey, got in touch about the smutty advertising lampoon I quoted last week about the couple whose sex lives were saved by Ovaltine.
“I was astonished to read of the Ovaltine aphrodisiac connection. When I grew up in Birmingham in the 1950s the theme was more laxative than aphrodisiac, a paean to Eno’s Fruit Salts (still to the tune of Hark! The Herald Angels Sing); the first two couplets about Uncle George and Auntie Mabel still had them fainting at the breakfast table, then came: ‘Eno’s Fruit Salts put them right, etc . . .’ ”
Tim Gillin wrote from Chichester, “Surely it was Phyllosan not Ovaltine that put Uncle George and Auntie Mabel right. Phyllosan claimed to fortify the over-forties whereas the Ovaltineys were little girls and boys.” Yet another suggestion came from Richard Young: “When I was a medical student 60 years ago, we sang in the bus on the way back from away rugby matches, not Ovaltine but Phosferine put things right’.”
Well you took your entertainment where you could find it, I suppose. Tonic wines, usually containing 15 per cent alcohol, do seem a more feasible inspiration for rude rhymes.
