Mind your language
JUDGING by your letters nothing annoys you more than a neologism. It does not even have to be a real neolo- gism. Someone wrote in to complain of oversight being used in the sense 'super- vision'. That can hardly be called new, having been used ever since the 14th century, when it was spotted in the unreadable poem 'Cursor Mundi', and then by Chaucer and all the most prop- er authors.
But neologisms do provide undug ground in which to plant new distinc- tions of U and non-U usage. Many of these, as I suggested last week, seem to depend on U and non-U things. It is quite all right to refer to your Burbeny, not at all all right to reach for your Pak- a-mak (if that is how it is spelled).
It is particularly galling when one is tricked into adopting the marketers' own new words. The process is observ- able in railway travel.
What we used to call a season ticket is now called a travel card, and since that is the term you have to use at the book- ing-office window (or the travel-centre desk), that is the name that sticks. All the same, it is not the done thing to say, `Me and the kids are off on an awayday tomorrow.' An awayday ticket is what used to be called a cheap day return, but awayday has been extended in the most enthusiastic demotic use from the ticket to the excursion itself.
`Let's go for a McDonalds,' used to be the parrot-cry of the easily manipulated. I detect, though, a change in the air. Think of poor old Woolworth's, which, while being perfectly clean, safe, honest, good value and so on, became a byword for the tawdry.
And I cannot rid my mind of a tri- umph of the advertising neologist's art. It was in a television advertisement for washing powder. There was a constant repetition of the previously unknown word understains. This brilliant coinage, with its connotations of underclothes and seepage from beneath every leaking orifice, was so powerful that it provoked a natural reluctance on the part of the washing public to use it in speech, at least not in serious speech. But the memory lingers on — though I've for- gotten the name of the powder.
Dot Wordsworth
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