Mind your language
'DOUBLE helix, double helix,' sang my husband to the tune of 'Bread of Heaven' in what he imagined was a light baritone. He was provoked by an announcement by Michael Buerk on the news that the use of crack cocaine is spiralling. You can't blame him, Michael Buerk, for saying spiralling, I mean; he didn't write the script. It was intended to denote increase, yet spirals (like share prices) can go down as well as up.
But though it be illogical, the metaphor is not a brand-new one. We find The Spectator using it in 1958: 'The twin threat of a renewed world currency crisis and a spiralling of trade restriction.' W.H. Auden, if not quite in propria persona, retailed it in 1944: 'Even the problem of Trade Cycles And Spiralling Prices are regarded by the experts as practically solved.'
The verb to spiral had earlier been adopted by heavier-than-air fliers to describe their downward circular gliding. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1834, where the spiralling does not imply movement at all, merely a geometric disposition: 'We began to ascend the narrow corkscrew path that spiralled through the narrow grass-piece.'
A spiral need not refer to solid geometry. Thomas Hobbes in 1656 described the 'spiral of Archimedes' as 'the continual diminution of the Semidiameter of a Circle in the same proportion in which the Circumference is diminished'. But if you advance a point tracing a curve along a cylinder or cone, you get a threedimensional spiral or helix. Indeed, some strictly distinguish a spiral, around a cone, from a helix, around a cylinder.
Spiral first entered English in the 16th century as an adjective, deriving from the mediaeval Latin spiralis, a word which the OED helpfully turns up from something written by Albertus Magnus in 1255. (Albert, C. 1200-80, taught Thomas Aquinas and outlived him, although I find that he wasn't canonised until 1931.) In classical Latin the noun spira referred to spirals and all sorts of twiddly shapes, from intestines to knots in wood. The Greek was speira, and this, too, could refer to a coil in the convolutions of a serpent, which in English is called a spire. But this must on no account be confused with the word spire meaning 'steeple', which comes from a word of Norse family meaning 'spike of grass'. Church spires were spoken of surprisingly late, only at the end of the 16th century, a bit later than spiral. I should never have found that out if my husband hadn't started his silly song.
Dot Wordsworth
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