Mind your language
SOMEONE wrote to blame me for being too soft on the use of the word issues, which he suggested could never be about things, only from them or of them, because issue itself means 'something that comes out of things'. If only it were that simple. I agree that English is suffering from the chronic disease of prepositionitis, but I am not much annoyed when I hear under the circumstances instead of in the circumstances.
Some of you appear to be in a permanent state of distress at the iniquity of other speakers of English. One otherwise peaceable woman from Norfolk writes to ask me why everyone says myself now; whatever happened to me? I shall inquire, but if it is a solecism, it is not one that has so far caused me sorrow.
But then, don't I get tetchy when people get quotations wrong? Not always. People so very rarely quote anything but television now, and I seldom recognise the reference. I noticed recently that every youngish person had started using sweet where last year they would have used cool. That is fine by me, but not if they are doing it just because Jamie Oliver says it. It is bad enough having his apparently swollen face on the packaging of sprigs of expensive foreign mint from Sainsbury's. I wash it very carefully.
Among established tags of quotation, 'Fresh fields and pastures new,' is just as good as the 'fresh woods and pastures new' that Milton wrote. Also from Lycidas is 'That last infirmity of noble mind' (not 'minds). Do you mind?
As for the Bible, it is quite impossible to get the quotations right, so used are we to the wrong versions: 'In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread' should be `sweat of thy face' — at least so it says in the Authorised Version, as indeed in the Vulgate, which has vu/tus. But in the translation of the Bible that he made just after the second world war, Ronald Knox, I have just discovered by looking up Genesis iii 19, settles for 'brow' after all, making art, as it were, follow nature, even if it is fallen nature.
The biblical 'I am escaped by the skin of my teeth' (Job xix 20) should be 'with the skin' in the Authorised Version of 1611. In any case, that phrase seems like a mere calque from Hebrew. 'There are left onlie lippes about my teeth,' says the Douai version of 1609. It seems to me that people use the phrase as a synonym for 'by a hair's breadth' and have no inkling that it is anything to do with poor old Job bemoaning his shrunken body. That's enough for now.
Dot Wordsworth
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