Mind your language
DOWN TO fundamentals this week, I'm afraid. Mr Thorbjoern Berntsen, the Norwegian environment minister, famously called Mr John Gummer, his British counterpart, a drittsekk. This has been rendered in English shitbag. Par- tridge, in 1937, gives this word as mean- ing the belly; by 1961 in his supplement he includes the signification an unpleas- ant person.
But the first element of Mr Berntsen's insult is only the same as our word dirt, which until the 16th century was pro- nounced chit. Its transformation by metathesis is one of those mysteries of philology. Admittedly its primary mean- ing was excrement. Wycliffe in his 1388 translation of St Paul's Epistle to the Philippians has: 'All things ... I deme as drit'; in his version six years before he had rendered the same word (in Greek skubala) toordi,s, as in Private Eye's famous pop group, The Turds. The word dirt has been cleaned up a bit since then.
Bag derives from unknown sources, whereas Mr Berntsen's sekk comes from the Latin saccus, just as our sack does. And a practically identical word is found in Aramaic, Syriac and Assyrian, which are not of course Indo-European languages. Oddly enough our phrase to get the sack, which is clearly what Mr Berntsen wishes for Mr Gummer, is found as early as the 17th century in French: 'On luy a donne son sac', a phrase familiar to such Eurocrats as M. Jacques Attali.
Dot Wordsworth
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