Mind your language
`Very in-your-face,' said the man on Radio Three about the music for River- dance, the popular entertainment.
Yes, three days into the New Year and up had popped one of the sugges- tions for banned words of 1998 with which you readers have kindly been showering me. I hadn't mentioned in- your-face in my little minatory homily to end 1997 because I hadn't realised that it was in use at a formal level. I had thought it belonged to the world of Reeves and Mortimer and Men Behav- ing Badly.
Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, as some bright spark has named its new edition, lists it under face, the latest Concise Oxford under in-your, adding that it derives from a 'derisive insult', the import of which it does not explain, though I can only too easily imagine what it might be. Its rapid promotion to a term of musical criticism is in my view undeserved.
Another curiosity, though not a com- petitor for the 1998 Chamber of Hor- rors, turned up on the television news, which I find I watch less to discover what Cabinet ministers' sons have been up to (though it was interesting to see that the Home Secretary's son wears a ring in the side of his ear — not that that makes him more likely to have committed any crime, of which I am sure he is as innocent as the Mirror is printed in black) than, if you follow me, to catch reporters speaking the lan- guage that men do use, rather than journalists' jargon. Anyway, what the television reporter said was: 'the gov- ernment's chest-beating attitude'.
The reference was clear in his metaphor. It was taken from the behaviour of the higher primates — the hairy kind, not the ecclesiastical — as popularised by Tarzan films. But if the word had been breast instead of chest, the meaning would have been reversed. Funny language, English. Translators beware.
Dot Wordsworth
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