Mind your language
LAST WEEK I was complaining that the heat had made me crabby. That is nothing to what it has made some of you. Among the bags of kind letters from readers that I have received recently, two stand out for intemper- ance that would make crabby an insult to crabs.
`Dotty Wordsworth has betrayed The Spectator and the English language: she has made a mockery of her column being called Mind Your Language, and after her latest exhibition of ignorance it is your duty to dismiss her,' wrote some old fellow from Florence to my beloved editor. At least I suppose he is old. He sounds it.
Another codger, from Putney this time, writes: 'I can only suppose that the solecism is the result of what appears as a current editorial campaign to banish the sub in favour of the PcW.'
And what is this solecism, so appalling that it makes my dismissal a moral imperative? To have written 'a friend of my husband's who lives in Nor- folk'. Never mind that this construction has been used by the best writers from the 14th century to the present day; the board-school pedants of Putney and Florence won't have it. Chaucer, for example, wrote, 'A friend of his that called was Pandare'; Shakespeare wrote, 'Looke, here comes a Louer of mine.'
If a copy of the Oxford English Dictio- nary is to be found in Putney (I am sure there is one in Florence), it will be easy to refer to the 44th sense of the word of, `followed by a possessive case or an absolute possessive pronoun'. This con- struction, we learn, was 'originally parti- tive, but subsequently used instead of the simple possessive (of the possessor or author) where this would be awkward or ambiguous'. Precisely. It is not my husband who lives in Norfolk, but a friend of his.
Now, to cheer us all up, let me report a development on the moles front. One reader has told me that a dialect word for the creatures is ounts, another that it is hunts. This is slightly different from the word that Jessica Mitford's maiden aunt was said to have heard.
Have (or has, as the Putney pedants would say) any of you more information on this important matter?
Dot Wordsworth
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