Mind your language
`I SHOULDN'T like them to go into care,' said a grandfather about his motherless grandchildren on the wire- less the other day.
Thus our social conventions devalue the meanings of words. Care — if only it were.
The peculiar dreadfulness of urban life these months has given another semantic kick to our language. The delightfully named Mrs Vivien Stern, of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, was talking about bored kids on the block. She said that part of the problem was that they often wanted to distinguish themselves by being badder than their rivals.
Badder? Surely the comparative of bad is worse? But then, worse has conno- tations of being less good at doing something. There is a gap in the seman- tic quincunx for a word meaning moral- ly more wicked. Badder fits the hole. It's here already; I think we shall be hearing more of it.
Dot Wordsworth
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