Mind your language
`YOU'LL know this,' said my husband in a challenging tone of voice. 'Kursaal. A kursaal. There's one in Southend. What's it mean? Is it Dutch?'
I did not know, and thought it might be Dutch, what with Southend being on the east coast and my not knowing Dutch. But it is not Dutch; it is German, from kur or cur 'cure' and saal 'room or hall'. At Southend it means a sort of entertainment arcade, but the German name must have been adopted before the first world war.
Sure enough, the big Oxford English Dictionary has a quotation which is spot on, from the Westminster Gazette for 14 September 1902: 'Margate and Southend Kursaals, Limited'. Not that this is exactly illustrative of the mean- ing, which the dictionary gives as: 'A public building at a German health resort, provided for the use and enter- tainment of visitors; hence, sometimes, a similar building at an English water- ing-place.' The earliest citation is from Thackeray's Pendennis (1849).
Perhaps soon Mecca (as attached to ballroom or bingo hall) will be as obso- lescent as kursaal. Muslims in Luton have objected to the name of the Mecca leisure centre there, though the name had originally been devised by the proud owners of the new Mecca Smok- ing Café in London in 1884. The way things are going, smoking in any café will be as dead as the pleasantly named cigar divans that sheltered Victorian smokers. Trollope left a memorable image of the innocent Mr Harding try- ing to fill in time in London and finding himself in a cigar divan.
Divan itself is a venerable ramified word of Persian origin taken up first by the Arabs and then the Turks and then by many European languages. It original- ly meant a pamphlet, thence a collection of poems, a military paybook, an accounts office, a custom-house (hence, eventually, douane in French), a council of state, and the cushioned bench on which it sat. Hence too the same divan or bed on which Tiresias foresuffered all.
I would imagine that divan would to most people today no more suggest a smoking booth or tobacco shop than kursaal does a pleasure-pier arcade. Who's for the hummums, then?
Dot Wordsworth
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