Mind your language
KNEELING on the drive and pulling up bits of chickweed that have needed little encouragement from the sun to devour the gravel, I heard Veronica, having been asked to pop into the butcher's to collect some kidneys, saying, 'Cool.' I am sorry to say I ungratefully shied a lump of gravelly weed at her retiring form. Yet I do not mind sweet so much, in its own new sense (9 February). Perhaps that is because it follows strands of meaning that have been present in its history for some time.
Jonathan Beels writes to tell me that in the early 1980s 'the great Superbowlwinning Chicago Bears running back. Walter Peyton, was nicknamed Sweetness because of the fluidity, grace and power of his play'. Mary Wright suggests that the new usage is consistent with the term sweet spot for the place on the tennis racket that sends the ball where you want it without jarring your wrist and hand. Both she and Barry Gabriel say that sweet has been used as an exclamation like 'Great!' or (urgh) 'Cool!'
Russell Furzer from Coif's Harbour, New South Wales, says that sweet has for the past 30 years been used in contexts such as the following: 'When one expresses concern to one's builder that a construction looks shonky, he will reply, "Nar, she's sweet, mate."' Catharine Jessop has a husband who is a former rally driver, who as far as I know is a native British speaker of English, and he says sweet has commonly been applied to engines that are well tuned or running smoothly.
Well, it was (in an old sense) sweet of you all to write. And it was nice of Professor Ken Young to write from the strangely named Queen Mary, University of London. His subject is Nice, as the acronym for the National Institute for Clinical Excellence, and he reminds me that Nice was the name for the wicked totalitarian National Institute of Collective Experiments in C.S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength (1945): The Nice marks the beginning of a new era — the really scientific era. Up to now everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science on a scientific basis ... there are going to be 40 interlocking committees sitting every day, and they've got a wonderful gadget ... by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment in the Analytical Notice Board every halfhour ... a glance at the Board shows you the policy of the whole institute actually taking shape.
As the novel develops, Nice is exposed as not at all nice, or sweet.
Dot Wordsworth
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