Mind your language
THE Daily Telegraph has been getting terribly excited by a new dictionary that says, if reports are to be believed, it doesn't much matter if you use infer to mean imply. The dictionary is called Chambers 21st Century Dictionary, and it is not published till the middle of September. I should have thought the whole point of a dictionary is that you can be told the difference between infer and imply if you are in doubt, but I hope to return to Messrs W. and R. Cham- bers' futuristic offering a little nearer its appearance in the bookshops.
In the meantime here's a puzzler from the agreeable 18th century. A couple of months ago, Victoria Glendinning reviewed in The Spectator a collection of letters with the snappy title, The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to his Daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin 17416-1752 (Lilliput, £35, pp 530). The good Bishop of Elphin (all the Synges seemed to be Protestant bishops at that time) warned his dear daughter that if she drank too much spa water, she would have to 'spend a penny' on the road.
Now the Oxford English Dictionary confidently derives the expression spend a penny from 'the former price of admis- sion to public lavatories'. They did not have public lavatories of that kind in 18th-century Ireland, so we must seek a different derivation. Can anyone help? It is important to iron this out, for it seems that anomalies of any kind enrage you beyond endurance. I have recently received two letters complaining of the usage half-ten to mean 'half past ten'. The OED isn't much help either. It notes that in Scotland half eleven can mean 'half past ten' (as in the German halb elf), but it then quotes Francis Grose, from his collection of essays, Olio (1796): `C: Pray, what's o'clock? W: It will be half ten.'
Now Grose was from Middlesex, not Scotland. His father was Swiss (and fitted out King George III's Coronation jew- els). What time did he mean?
Dot Wordsworth
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