Mind your language
HUGH Kenner, writing in last week's Time's Literary Supplement, offers as his own contribution to a translators' par- lour game a version of a poem by Clement Marot (1496-1544). Here it is: Hey, chick, You sick? Ungood. Rx food. Eat fruit, Stay cute, My chick.
It sounds like a Spectator competition, and the problems of translation remain ever tantalising, but what I want to pick up is the fourth line, which, Dr Kenner notes, begins with a word 'you can look at but not pronounce'.
I was surprised to see it, because I had been pondering the title of a new magazine that everyone seems to be reading. It is called Rx, and is given away free, yes free, with the dear old Sunday Telegraph. It is mostly to do with medical matters (nowadays we refer to discussion of disease as 'health con- cerns'). So I thought it might be pro- nounced recipe, since this is the word that doctors use to start their prescrip- tions, etymologically identical to Jen- nifer Paterson's receipt. Doctors abbreviate the word as R or it I was long familiar with //(before I met my husband, for it is also used as an abbre- viation for response, the counterpart to a versicle in liturgical chant.
Now, doctors, when they type their prescriptions (which pharmacists must wish they more often did), do not use the keys R and / (the oblique stroke) but Kt I don't know why, but they do. So I now believe that the fascinating maga- zine should be pronounced are-ex. In which case readers might render Dr Kenner's line not 'Recipe food', but `Are-ex food'. Neither quite fits the metre, but they fit better than a sudden lapse into silence.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
