Mind your language
THAT silly bishop who ran off with a woman who admits to being 41 and has a 24-year-old son told a press confer- ence, which he held in the garden of his Lake District hideaway, that her family had been very 'supportive'.
There's a lot of it about. Mr Steven Norris was reading from his own book on the wireless the other day, and even before his little spot of love-life publici- ty he found that his 'private office staff were brilliantly supportive'.
Note that these two usages are slightly different in meaning. Neither attributes to the family or the staff the sort of sup- port that you'd get from a football sup- porter. The family wasn't cheering on the sidelines: 'Come on, bish, score!' The staff were just doing their yes-min- ister jobs; they might not support their boss in the polling-booth or in his love affairs.
Supportive is a generally tea-and-sym- pathy term which is annoyingly over- used at the moment. (Like `get a life', which is generally on the lips of people whose lives are pretty shallow in the first place.) But it is impossible to con- demn supportive as a meaningless vogue word, for the helpful OED records its use in 1593. In his dedication to Christes Teares over Jerusalem, that conduit of lantasticall satirisme', Thomas Nashe, declares that 'to the supportive perpetu- ating of your [Lady Carey's] canonised reputation, wholie this booke have I destined'.
This is an inventive Elizabethan metaphorical use of the word which continues in our own time to have a lit- eral, physical meaning, as in supportive stocking. It took our friends the shrinks to put the metaphorical sense into widespread circulation. 'It is necessary that the anxious individual have avail- able a supportive pattern of relation- ships to depend upon through the learning period,' commented the Ameri- can Journal of Orthopsychiatry caringly in 1954.
By 1980 the Daily Telegraph had begun to notice the trend: 'Most Ameri- can psychotherapists now advertise themselves as "supportive".'
Since then, supportiveness has spread to within range of every microphone trespassing on private emotion. It's almost insupportable.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
