Mind your language
VERONICA's godmother suddenly said to her as we chatted round the kitchen table, 'Hanged, dear, not hung.' I can't say that it was the sort of advice that I had expected her to give when she joined us at the font, but I did not poke my oar in.
The context was criminal. It is strange, though, that we are so fond of insisting on hanged. There is no etymo- logical justification for it. And pedants generally admire irregular or strong verbs (sing, sung, sang; strive, strove, striven and so on), rather than the regu- lar formations. But hanged it must be as far as they are concerned.
There is a public house called the Hung, Drawn and Quartered, opposite All Hallows by the Tower (also known as All Hallows Barking, though it is not at Barking. It was built on land given in 675 by Bishop Eorconweald of London as an endowment for an abbey at Bark- ing, Essex, founded for his sister Ethel- burga.) Pepys observed from the church tower the pigeons getting their feathers singed in the Great Fire. On the wall of the pub is another entry from his diary referring to the hanging in question. He wrote hung not hanged.
I was reminded of this in reading Phineas Redux. Trollope always uses hung not hanged. Phineas Finn, in jail, says to his friend Mr Low, 'Oh, yes, I can be a man. A murderer, you mean. I shall have to be — hung.' It is not a class thing, or a Hibernianism (since Phineas comes from Ireland), for the Duchess of Omnium says, 'If that man is hung — I shall go into mourning myself.'
By the way, as an historical curiosity, Trollope uses a strange construction when referring to a flat (the place to live). Mr Maule, a selfish clubman, 'lived in chambers on a flat in Westminster'. (I am assuming on is correct, not in; i and o are next to each other on a typewriter, but the edition I was reading was the old World's Classics version, which would have been typeset from a printer's case where i and o are not adjacent.) Phineas Redux was published in 1876 and Trollope catches the word flat in a transitional stage. It had simply meant a floor or storey of a building, and at the end of the 19th century the Oxford English Dictionary noted that 'the word was until recently peculiar to Scotland'. Walter Scott had written in 1804: 'We chose to imitate some of the conve- nience of an English dwelling-house, instead of living piled up above each other in flats.' Now we poor English city-dwellers are forced to ape those primitive Scottish ways.
Dot Wordsworth
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