Mind your language
IT IS getting more and more difficult to listen to the news on the wireless with full comprehension. I don't think it's just me.
In one bulletin the other morning the BBC had three unusual usages, of which the first was oddest. They announced that it was hoped the United States would soon ban the setting of 'dumb mines' by their own forces (except in the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea).
Well, I thought, I suppose most mines are dumb till you step on one, when it becomes uncomfortably noisy. But then the newsreader began to talk about much more friendly mines, called smart mines. These (like some carrier bags) would biodegrade after a few years in the earth and prevent future cows and peasants losing their limbs in decades to come.
The dumb mines are just stupid, after the American usage, which is related to German, dumm, or Dutch, dom.
The smart in 'smart mines' seems to be an extension of the 'smart missiles' of the war in Iraq, which, we were told, could practically turn left or right at traffic lights. And now we are threat- ened with smart cards, which at the moment can be used to get a cup of coffee or open an automatic door for those entitled to possess them, but in future will have programmed onto their little magnetic strips all the medi- cal and civic details which we might prefer those set in authority over us not to know.
The other two peculiarities were comments on the appointment of the first Australian aborigine to be made a judge. It is odd that it is now accept- able to call aborigines aborigines (but not natives), to call American Indians Native Americans, but certainly not Red Indians. I think I remember the time when it was more polite to call aborigines Aboriginals. Abos is still def- initely out.
The third remarkable utterance was someone saying that the new judge had 'a fine forensic mind'. And they meant it. Usually forensic evidence is used, or misused, to mean scientific evidence; during recent discussion of traces of explosives found during trials of IRA men it was used all the time in this way. But in origin forensic comes from the Latin, forensis — 'to do with a court'.
It did surprise me, though, to hear a word used 'correctly'. I quite forgot to listen out for the weather forecast.
Dot Wordsworth
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