Mind your language
A READER from South Africa has invited me to ponder the changes to English wrought by the prudery of the Victorians; as an example he instances wheatear, the form of the name of a bird that conceals its having been once noted for its 'white arse'.
You cannot blame the Victorians for that one. The wheatear's name does indeed come from whit 'white' and eeres, ers 'arse'. Indeed the Cornish are still supposed to call the tasty little creature (once renowned as the ortolan of Eng- land) whiteass; elsewhere it has been called white rump or witto/ Cwhite In France it is known as culblanc, but we do not seem to reckon cu/ as rude, calling, as we do, our dead-ends cul-de- sacs, 'sacks' bottoms'.
Anyway, by the end of the Middle Ages the first part of the name whit- was still being pronounced more or less as it had been since Saxon times. It sounded like the word wheat as it was pronounced today. The second bit -eres, -ers, sounded like a plural, which could be turned into a singular by dropping the -s.
Though that white rump still stared hungry travellers in the face, they began to find their own etymology for its name. The eccentric John Taylor (the so-called Water Poet from his profession of boat- man) wrote of them in the middle of the 17th century: 'The name of Wheat ears on them is ycleap'd, / Because they come when wheat is yearly reaped.' Thomas Fuller, whose biographical Worthies was published in 1662, still refers to it with the -s on the end, and attributes its name to its being `fattest when Wheat is ripe, whereon it feeds'.
The bird's name was still not quite fixed; an anonymous compiler, under the initials B.E., of A new dictionary of the terms ancient and modern of the cant- ing crew, some time after 1700, calls it `Wheatgear, a Bird smaller than a Dot- trel', which it is, though that is scarcely its distinguishing feature. The form wheatear, though, was standardised well before the end of the 18th century, before Victoria was even conceived.
I do not in any case think the Victori- ans were particularly prudish. Trollope was, for example, quite happy to use the word bastard in its technical sense in Is He Poppenjoy? If he sometimes employs, or let the printers employ for him, a dash in devil and damn, it was not sexual prudery that motivated him or his readers, but rather restraint in religious language.
Meanwhile the wheatear had turned up its tail at its pursuers and flown from one semantic field to another.
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
