Mind your language
A READER, Mr Harold Braham, writes from Spain quoting a sentence in The Spectator by Sir David English: 'The entertaining of ministers by the press has now reached such orgiastic propor- tions that I cannot understand why nei- ther Blackpool nor Brighton has not seen fit to construct a municipal vomito- rium' (Diary, 16 October).
His complaint is about vomitorium. The meaning intended by Sir David is listed in the Oxford English Dictionary as `erroneous'; its earliest citation is from Aldous Huxley in 1923. In the first edi- tion of the ()ED this sense was not recorded at all, only the 'real' meaning of 'a passage or opening in an ancient amphitheatre or theatre, leading to or from the seats'.
Oddly enough I had just come across this usage in Cardinal Wiseman's amus- ing novel, Fabiola (the title of which, I learned on page 17, is accented on the second syllable): the crowd in the Coli- seum, 'after it shall have been gorged with blood and inflamed with fury, will melt away once more, and rush out in a thick continuous flow through the many avenues by which it entered, now bear- ing their fitting name of Vomitoria; for never did a more polluted stream of the dregs and pests of humanity issue from an unbecoming reservoir, through ill- assorted channels, than the Roman mob, drunk with the blood of martyrs, gushing forth from the pores of the splendid amphitheatre'. Wiseman uses the plural vomitoria, the only form recorded in Latin.
Not one person in a hundred, I sup- pose, would use the word in this sense. And if the Chairman of Associated Newspapers casts his lot with Huxley rather than Wiseman, what chance has the mob got?
Dot Wordsworth
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