Mind your language
ONE OF THE criticisms of Jean Chre- tien, the new Prime Minister of Canada, is that his use of French is rather feeble. I was interested to find in my Cham- baud's Dictionary (1784): 'Parlez Chre- tien (dit-on a tine personne qui se sert de termes embarrasses & obscurs): speak plain.' It adds: 'You must talk like a Christian, if you'd have me know your meaning.'
Not that M. Chretien is exactly a cretin. Cretin comes from Swiss patois, crestin, creitin, 'a Christian': 'One of a class of dwarfed and specially deformed idiots found in certain valleys of the Alps and elsewhere,' as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it. The OED sug- gests that they were called Christians to indicate that they were really human, despite looking like beasts. I prefer to think that, as in other peasant societies, idiots were regarded as sacred to God.
And it was a surprise to find that the English word Christian is of quite recent origin; it is earliest recorded in 1553. Before the Renaissance the usual word was cristen. Shakespeare of course uses the new form, as in The Merchant of Venice. Hugh Latimer had used the composite Christian name, to mean the proper name for a thing, in a sermon as early as the reign of Edward VI. It still seems to have applicability: `Nowe a days they call them gentle rewards. Let them leaue their colourynge, and cal them by their Christian name Brybes.'
Dot Wordsworth
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