Mind your language
WE ALL MAKE mistakes. Although I am not quite prepared to admit it in this case. I was interested in the couple of dozen letters you sent me about carnY or carney, which, you may remember, was Mrs Erin Pizzey's father's name.
I identified two meanings: a disease of horses (obsolete), which need not detain us; and cunning, wheedling or sycophantic, like Waugh's word Jagger- ing. As it happens, Mrs Angela Culme- Seymour, who in the Thirties was married to Lord Kinross, or Patrick Bal- four as he then was, kindly wrote to say that Miss Jagger, who gave her name to the term, was 'just always there in a rather boring way and did a lot of bor- ing things, like going to book tickets for you'. Sounds rather useful. Anyway, the derivation so many of you had for carny, meaning 'cheap and showy' was from carnival. I learn that Peter Guralnick wrote in Last Train to Memphis: 'Parker must have sensed in him the potential that he was looking for, because he went into show business now with the same creative, full-bore intensity that had always marked him ul the carny world.'
So, carnival, carny, showy, tawdry.
Tawdry, as we all know derives from St Audrey or Aethelthxyth, the daughter of Anna, King of East Anglia, who suf- fered a tumour in her throat as a pun- ishment for wearing jewelled necklaces. A fair was held at Ely around her feast on 17 October and tawdry-lace meant a silk neck-scarf. Some of it must have been a bit carny. On the subject of mistakes, another reader asks if Dr Alan Watkins, the lawyer and author, and our own dear Anne Applebaum are wrong to use the word wreaked. Should it not be wrought? Well, no, I don't think it should. Wrought was formerly the past tense of work. Now we restrict it to senses such as wrought-iron. Wreaked is a similarl): regularised past tense of wreak, 'inflict or, obsoletely, 'drive out'. It also used to have a strong form of the past tense, wrolce, and it is connected with the Latin urgere. It is also connected with wreck and wrack, but not with rack, to stretch or torture', though possibly with rack, 'a driven mist'.
As far as I know, Miss Applebaum and Dr Watkins have never wrought a carny sentence in their lives.
Dot Wordsworth
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