Mind your language
I hear Veronica saying such odd things that I am almost reconciled to the rate of change in language which will surely make Shakespeare as obscure to us as Chaucer in a couple of generations.
'I know I shall lose the train,' says Lady Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds (1873). If anyone said that now, we'd think him (or, yes, her) a foreigner. Trains, as Lady Bracknell feared, are to be missed, not lost. The OED lists this meaning of lose under sense 7a, devoted to losing auction lots and 'also, to fail to catch (a train etc.)'. It doesn't instance the etc. (a boat or omnibus presumably; did it survive till aeroplanes came in?), and it examples the lost train only with a quotation from 1884. So there is no indication whether it was thought new in 1884 or whether it was beginning to drop out of the language.
Miss in the train meaning is also noted by the OED, in sense 9b. The single citation is from 1886, about Parnell missing one at Crewe. A good crop of citations is included for the figurative sense of miss the boat, from 1929 onwards. Strangely the figurative sense of missing the bus is recorded from earlier. John Morley is quoted as using it in 1886, or rather, combining formality and informality in the same phrase, he writes that Mark Pattison, unlike John Henry Newman, 'missed the omnibus'.
In the literal sense of 'missing something one would prefer to catch', we find Tennyson in 1842 urging 'Put your best foot forward, or I fear/ That we shall miss the mail.' You might think mail here would today sound like an Americanism, in place of the British English post. But it wasn't the postal collection that John and James in the poem wanted to catch but the mail coach itself, pulled by three piebalds and a roan.
Anthony Trollope should know about post, since he served the Post Office, or it him, in his primary profession. But in The Eustace Diamonds again, here's 'pillar letter-box', These iron receptacles, remember, had been introduced with his support. Yet we call the slot in the front door a letter-box, though it be no such thing, and are so familiar with pillar boxes that we use pillar-box to designate a shade of red (to the puzzlement of green-boxed Irish decorators). The OED cites pillar-box from 1858, and one single example of pillar letter-box, from 1880, from The Duke's Children —by Anthony Trollope.
Dot Wordsworth
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