Mind your language
YOU DON'T let up. Here is a pet hate from Olivia Bell, from Oxford. 'I have a linguistic bugbear: the phrase "he was diagnosed with cancer, whooping cough, etc.". Surely he was diagnosed with a stethoscope or thermometer?'
Yes, I have been annoyed by that too. Professor R.W. Burchfield, in his revision of Fowler, has got as far as acknowledging, if not approving of, the usage of diagnose with the patient rather than the disease. I mean 'she was diagnosed as having cancer', instead of 'cancer was diagnosed'. Per- haps 'as having' is thought too cumber- some; and there is an ideologic revulsion at identifying patients (or people) by their disease, so we are not allowed to say 'she was diagnosed as a leper' or 'as riddled with cancer'. I fear `diagnosed with cancer' is one of those diseased usages that will be hard to cure.
A more pleasant word from the high- water mark of the philological seaside is binnacle. There has been no develop- ment here for about 150 years, but I have only recently caught up with its origin. For those of you who cannot tell a binnacle from a barnacle, the for- mer is a box on the deck of a ship near the helm, in which the compass is placed. The word originates from the Latin habitaculum, 'habitation, lodg- ing'.
The English version of habitaculum in the late Middle Ages was habitacle. In Caxton's version of The Golden Leg- end he says: `Thenne went cristofer [the saint] to this ryver & made there his habitacle.' In a 15th-century trans- lation of the Imitation of Christ we read the prayer: 'Bring out of the habitacle of myn herte all maner of derkenes.'And if a little house for the compass to live in seems to make it too anthropomorphic, one should be aware that habitacle also meant a canopied niche in a wall, for a statue, or to serve as a tabernacle or an aumbry.
In any case, it seems most likely that seafarers picked up an Iberian develop- ment of habitaculum, the word bitacula (Spanish) or bitacola (Portuguese). There are parallel words in Provençal (abitacle) and French (habitacle). Among English sailors the version bit- tacle remained in use until the mid- 19th century, but by then a corrupted form, binacle or binnacle, had for some reason been in use increasingly for a century. These things happen; I cer- tainly don't want to turn a binnacle into a bugbear.
Dot Wordsworth
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