Ciaran Bruton from Galway sprung a new word on me this week. “First Max Hastings, now Matthew Parris,” he complained, had been “fumfering about negotiating with Putin”. What could this mean?
Fumfering is an onomatopoeic sort of word, so I could hazard a guess but I’d never come across it before and it doesn’t seem to appear in any mainstream dictionary. Thanks to some online resources — lexico.com, wiktionary.org et al — I now know that to fumfer (or phumpher) can mean any of the following: to waffle, to stutter, to mutter, to temporise, to putter aimlessly or to stall.
Putting aside Ciaran Bruton’s injustice to our distinguished columnists, I’m glad to have been introduced to the word. I wondered, given his address, if fumfer was of Irish origin, but I gather from the Urban Dictionary that it probably comes from the Yiddish “fonfer”, meaning mumbled or incoherent.
Annemarie McGuinness of Conwy has no time for online dictionaries. She writes that she and her husband were “filled with dismay” to read that the Concise Oxford English Dictionary has given up competing with online word searches and will not publish another print edition.
“As dedicated solvers of Times crosswords and the Polygon, we find the layout and advertising on online dictionaries irritating. We have been persevering for years with our 2011 edition of the dictionary and our current tome is hanging by a thread (and copious amounts of Sellotape).”
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I sympathise, but also wonder if being wedded to ageing print dictionaries — my shorter Oxford English, which I scarcely ever use, dates from 1986 — doesn’t mean missing out on some of the rich developments in our language. As it happens, this week the Oxford English Dictionary sent out its latest quarterly update listing the words it is incorporating this year. It arrived just in time for St Patrick’s Day, which was handy since the particular focus this time is on Irish English.
Some words will be more familiar than others this side of the Irish Sea. A chara — my friend, my dear — is a common greeting at the start of a letter — or an email to Feedback. Perhaps we could borrow it for the letters page if we ever need a unisex replacement for “Sir”.
When Michael D Higgins, the Irish president, wrote to congratulate Joe Biden on his election last year, he began, “Dear Mr President, Joe, a chara”. By coincidence, another of Oxford’s new intake words — “bockety”, meaning infirm, lame or rickety — made its first, in fact only, appearance in a Times headline during the 2011 Irish presidential election when Michael D started pulling ahead in the polls: “Election favourite overtaken by man with a bockety knee”.
This depiction of the future Irish president was, I hasten to add, borrowed from The Irish Times, as our story made clear: “Avuncular, erudite, experienced,” they wrote of him, “with the Irish gift for language and tune, a bockety knee and a whiff of diddly-aye for the Yanks.”
Ups and downs of life
Bruce Allan of Broughty Ferry was intrigued, he says, by the obituary of the industrialist Sir William Lithgow last Saturday. “Despite Sir William’s family home being at Gleddoch, which you correctly described as ‘overlooking the Clyde’ — and therefore firmly in Scotland — the obituary says Sir William ‘went up to Oxford’. Is there never an exception to the use of this term, especially when the subject lives almost 400 miles north and would have to travel a long way ‘down’ to get there?”
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This would seem to make sense, but I can’t see mere geography ever trumping the snob value of saying that you’re “going up” to Oxford or Cambridge. Corpus Christi junior common room has a crib sheet on Oxford jargon for new students, which makes clear that the tradition is alive and kicking: “Coming up — arriving at Oxford. Going down — leaving.” And, of course, if you’re “sent down” you are leaving involuntarily.
If for no other reason, tampering with this usage would cause havoc in cryptic crossword circles, where “at university” in a clue is a signal that “up” will form part of the solution.
Right to be rude
A recent notice in the Register section of the paper mentioned a recital that was to take place “in the church of the Holy Rude in Stirling”. This caused some consternation to Penelope Upton of Lighthorne, Warwickshire. “Is it a reference to naked cherubs, ill mannered locals, or the result of an overzealous spellchecker?” she wondered.
It was, disappointingly, none of these. “Rude” is how this particular church spells what we are more used to seeing as “rood”, as in rood screens. “Holy Rude”, its website explains, “means Holy Cross, giving it the same origin as Holyrood in Edinburgh.”
Cramped cruises
Our inventiveness with comparative units of measurement — football pitches, London buses, Olympic swimming pools etc — gives frequent rise to satirical comment. I’m not sure, though, that we can beat another newspaper this week, which ran a story about an asteroid “half the size of a giraffe”.
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“Which half?” wondered not a few wags on Twitter. Not that we’re in the clear on the giraffe front. Two years ago, we unhelpfully described a giant giraffe as being “the height of four minis”.
Last Saturday we wheeled out an old favourite, telling readers that a new cruise ship was 15 double-decker buses tall. We went on to say it was capable “of sleeping 6,988 passengers alongside 2,300 crew members.”
“I would have hoped,” wrote Dave McQuillen of Dumfries, “that the cost of a cruise might include just a little bit more privacy?”
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