Mind your language
THOSE Cerberuses of the small screen, the Broadcasting Standards Authority, have noted how many people are offended by profanities (`Jenis', and so on, taken in vain). But I was surprised to find that one of the words objected to was hell; perhaps the complainants were devil-worshippers. And perhaps Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was just making to himself friends of the Mammon of unrighteous- ness when, on Today on the wireless the other morning, he used this odd phrase- ology with reference to Mr Bill Cash's Bill on Europe: 'It hadn't a snowball's chance in Hades of becoming law.'
Hell is a Teutonic word dating from heathen times; Hel was also the Scandi- navian goddess equivalent to Proser- pine. Hades is a pagan word too, used by Homer as the name of the god of the underworld, and later transferred to his kingdom. It was not unnaturally used by the translators of the Old Testament into Greek as a rendering of the Hebrew Sheol. In the New Testament, which was written in Greek, the word Hades is used.
When the committee appointed by King James came to translate the Bible into English they chose hell rather than the unfamiliar and rather classically Greek Hades. But when the revisers of the Authorised Version went about their work in 1881 they decided Hades was better after all. (Among later trans- lators, Knox [1945] has 'the place of death' and Moffat [1913] has 'the grave' in Acts 2:31, which reverts to the 16th- century Geneva version, but I don't think we need worry about these.) None of this explains why the devil, hell and the infernal fires should still be regarded as taboo words. John W. Clark in his thorough study The Language and Style of Anthony Trollope finds hell as• a profanity only a couple of times in all his novels, but sensibilities were softer then. In Ayala's Angel (1878) we find: "I call that an infernal nuisance," he said to his aunt. "My dear Frank, you need not curse and swear," said the old lady. "Infernal [said Frank] is not curs- ing nor yet swearing." ' Frankly, Frank is in the right, but while some people don't give a damn, others go a heck of a long way to mum- ble their oaths.
Dot Wordsworth
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