Mind your language
I HAD MEANT to write about minims this week, but my eye was caught by a newspaper advertisement for Felix cat- food, showing a playful scamp of a piebald pussycat with the caption, 'Silly sausage'.
My immediate reaction, apart from a slight feeling of nausea, was to wonder if this term was a mumbled oath — just as people exclaim 'Oh, sugar!' on drop- ping a piece of toast on the floor, rather than some ruder expletive.
Old Partridge, that most uneven of lexicographers, wasn't much help: `Sausage; live sausage. In a sexual sense it is on the marches of colloquial and Standard English.' Well, you could have fooled me.
The second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was not much better. It gives sausage, from 1900, as 'a person easily imposed upon' — 'esp in phr silly old sausage and var'. By this time, I had said sausage to myself a few dozen times, and it began to sound peculiarly ridiculous. Like many ordinary words, its origins are obscure. There was a late Latin word salsicia, which may either be feminine singular, or perhaps neuter plural, of salsicius, an unrecorded word that could mean 'prepared by salting'. Who knows? The OED helpfully but arbitrar- ily adds: 'There are more than 150 kinds of sausage, distinguished by names indi- cating the ingredients.' Thanks. Even the pronunciation is odd. Origi- nally the last consonant was pronounced like the ch in cheese; now it is like the j in Judge, as in the unstressed syllables of cabbage, Greenwich, Woolwich, Norwich and spinach.
The great uncertainty is garage. There is a temptation to think it is a bit French, and to pronounce it like badi- nage. In 1902 the Daily Mail announced that 'the new "garage" founded by Mr. Harrington Moore, hon. secretary of the Automobile Club . . . is at the City end of Queen Victoria-street.' Those invert- ed commas suggest a still foreign word. (And, by the way, I like the hyphenation of Queen Victoria-street, which looks almost 17th-century.) For myself, what have I to say about now garage ought to be pronounced? Not a sausage.
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