Mind your language
A RATHER unpleasant flavour of the month is stalker — the sort of man who'd rape you as soon as look at you, but against whom the police are appar- ently powerless to act. This shadowy fig- ure is (thank God) largely non-existent, but that does not stop him frightening old maids bringing in the washing on a dark winter's evening. Stalking has not always been used pejoratively, though.
To stalk is a good old English word, meaning to walk softly or secretly, whether for good or bad. The root seems to be connected to steal and stealth. Writing in about the year 1000, the agreeable Aelfric, whose saints' lives are now unfortunately read, if at all, more for their linguistic than their homiletic riches, pictures somebody stalking like a wolf — an image of dan- ger. But in a book of devotion from the 14th century, How to Hear Mass, we find: 'Whom he [the priest] hath waschen . . . prively and stille he stalkes to his auter ageyn.' This is no predatory behaviour.
When we hear of people stalking about we might have in our imagination an idea of some wading bird. Indeed, in the early 17th century, Florio in his dic- tionary explains fuscello as meaning 'a sprig, a stalk . . . also spindle shanks or stalkeing legges'.
Of course one kind of stalking bird is the stork, as in Edith Sitwell's 'Old Sir Faulk, tall as a stork'. But stork has no connection with stalks or stalking, though some people think it is connect- ed to storgos, the Greek for 'vulture', though I can't think why. Or stork may derive from a Teutonic word that also gives us stark. No one really knows.
So, next time you see a stalker in the street you might care to give him the ciconia — a gesture of ridicule made with the forefinger, popular among the ancient Latins, supposed to resemble the neck of the ciconia, stork — and see what he makes of it.
Dot Wordsworth
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