Mind your language
On 25 November 1894 in a chapel in the rue du Bac in Paris was first celebrated the feast honouring devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary through the ‘Miraculous Medal’, which depicts her as sinless from the time of her conception. This was all to do with some visions enjoyed by Catherine Labouré 60 years earlier.
And now from rue du Bac writes a Spectator reader, Mr Roderick Coupe. (I think it’s Roderick; his signature possesses different letter-forms from those in his cursive script. Indeed he employs at one point the R form of the small r, which suggests to me his early education was influenced by Irish teachers.) His topic is not visions but brunch.
‘Do you recall,’ asks Mr Coupe, ‘in which novel of Trollope’s the word brunch occurs?’ No, I don’t. Perhaps I haven’t read that one. Mr John Major once claimed to have read them all, so he might know. ‘I had always,’ continues Mr Coupe, referring to this pre-Trollopean life, ‘assumed it was 1920s or 1930s, but I distinctly remember its being used by Trollope.’ Not distinctly enough, I fear, though I know what he means. I distinctly remember putting my purse on the kitchen table, but I’m blessed if I can find it there now. I hope it hasn’t been interred in the compost heap.
As for brunch, I was also surprised to discover it was a 19th-century word. It has been rather tarnished in my eyes by urban professionals slopping about in cafés at Sunday lunchtime. But on 1 August 1896, two years after those first celebrations in the rue du Bac, Punch published the following: ‘To be fashionable nowadays we must “brunch”. Truly an excellent portmanteau word, introduced, by the way, last year by Mr Guy Beringer, in the now defunct Hunter’s Weekly.’ I know nothing more of Guy Beringer, but I am suspicious of neologisms being attributed to specific persons. T.W. Earp (who matriculated at Oxford in 1911) was said in passing by J.R.R. Tolkien to have been the original twerp, and so he might. Anyway, the OED asserts that brunch was originally university slang. The term portmanteau word was invented by the Christ Church don Lewis Carroll, and explained in Through the Looking-Glass (1872). Trollope died in 1882, so perhaps we should be looking at the novels of his last decade, though of course a portmanteau word could be contrived before the term for it had been invented. But now it’s time for lunch and I haven’t even peeled the potatoes.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
