Mind your language
IT IS funny that inmate is only used on the wireless news to refer to 1) prison- ers and 2) nutters.
It is a complicated word, probably coming from inn and mate. It originally meant a lodger or paying guest. Then it came to mean 'an associate of another or others in the same dwelling' — a par- allel to shipmate or cellmate. But the mate element seems to have lost its meaning and in has been confused with being stuck in a place.
A word that we no longer have is indweller. Rather nice, don't you think? It was used by the 14th-century transla- tors of the Wyclifite Bible instead of inhabitant. So, in Psalm xxxiijii, 8, they have, 'Of hym forsothe first ben togidre moued alle the indwelleris of the world,' where the Latin Vulgate version has `orrines inhabitantes orbem'. The King James version has 'all the inhabitants of the world'. The way things are going, we might as well speak of 'all the inmates of the world'.
By the way, I think my friend Andro Linklater (of whom my husband was an Inmate at the Sorbonne) was joking when he wrote all that stuff about T. W. Earp (the original twerp) carrying six- shooters (Books, 19 March). He still seems the best origin of twerp; better (and earlier) than those useless Antwerp pigeons (Letters, 26 March).
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
