Mind your language
'IT'S a wonder anybody dares take any medicine at all,' said my husband, as he chuckled over the warnings of dizziness, night sweats, insomnia, dry mouth, anorgasmia, postural hypotension, anxi- ety, general malaise and flatulence promised as possible side-effects by a commonly consumed remedy.
It is not just on the back of the medicine bottle that we are confronted with monitory and minatory notices. They are everywhere.
`Care must be taken when using deckchairs,' says the back of the hire ticket at St James's Park. 'They can be dangerous if used incorrectly.' True, no doubt, but is the sort of person who abuses deckchairs likely to read the small print?
The syntax of public notices is queer too. 'No smoking' or 'Silence' are sim- ple enough formal exclamatory impera- tives, but modern warnings put things in this sort of way: 'Trip hazard zone'. This piles up nouns, some of which act like adjectives. It is the method often used in newspaper headlines such as `Bank probe threat', and it leads more to ambiguity than elegance, as with the chestnut: 'French push bottles up Ger- man rear'.
I saw that 'Trip hazard zone' on a building site opposite the Millennium Dome. The dome itself has plenty of zones, among which is the so-called Spirit Zone, which church leaders had worried would remain a 'cross-free zone' until Mr Mandelson's men assured them a big cross would be included to reflect what the millennium was, after all, about.
Zone has become a vogue word. I do not know if it is the influence of The Twilight Zone. Boyzone is the feeble pun name of a popular singing group which, Veronica tells me, is 'finished'. Historically, although poets spoke about virgins' belts as zones, from the Greek zona, the word was first used in M,„ English in the early 16th century in the geographical sense. Classical and medi- aeval geographers believed there were three zones of the Earth uninhabitable by men: the polar zones (more properly caps) and the torrid zone. Nobody who was even half educated thought the Earth was flat. It was the burning equa- tor not the edge of the world that was the hazard zone.
Dot Wordsworth
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