Mind your language
WHEN my husband makes a medical mistake, you find the result in the ceme- tery; when I make a grammatical mis- take, the consequence is in the post.
A fortnight ago I wrote that some- thing sounded like it was in The Archers. Kind readers have pointed out in a more-sorrowful-than-angry manner that like should have been as if. One man asked if I did not find my usage ugly as well as incorrect. To be honest, I do not. I probably would not have written it if I did not habitually say it, which only goes to show that I often speak ungrammati- cally. I shall still continue to say, 'It looks like it's going to rain.' I shall try not to write it.
Quite frankly, grammar frightens me. Did you see that piece in the Daily Tele- graph this week on the gerund? Too clever by half for me.
Another clever suggestion comes from a reader, Barbara Segal, who sug- gests an etymology for the phrase plum in the mouth. She suggests it might come from the 18th-century word plumper, a ball of cotton or cork that women once used to plump out their sunken cheeks.
A nice, or rather an unpleasant, thought. No one who has read Swift's `On a Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed' can forget what puss did with her plumpers while she lay asleep. Oh dear.
The trouble is that the dictionaries agree in making a plum in one's mouth a 20th-century, or at earliest a late 19th- century, phrase. And plum is a plum.
Historically plummy seems to be related to the richness you might expect of a plum pudding. The OED says, 'Of the voice, then of sound generally: thick-sounding, rich "fruity"; indistinct; with bass predominating'. Its earliest citation is from Punch of 23 July 1881: `The same aged lover was bidding, with rather a "plummy" voice, the More- than-Middle-Aged Heroine "goodbye for ever".'
It seems that plum (as in mouth) and plum (as in a plum job) have infected each other's semantic fields. That is .not surprising, since Jack Horner's literal exploit did after all metaphorically refer to a rich prize.
It seems, for all the connotations, that the plum in the mouth figure of speech is related more to the Demosthenes technique of public speech training than to the desperate 18th-century measure of cosmetic plumping.
Dot Wordsworth
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