Mind your language
`ANYTHING interesting in the post?' asked my husband, while dropping the reply envelope for the telephone bill carelessly into the marmalade.
`Mwuh?' I said, distractedly. 'Oh, yes, a letter from an American falconer. He has written several books and is being driven nuts by his fellow falconers.'
`Why's that?'
`He says that they write mew for the place where a hawk lives, when it should be mews. The last straw for him was when the copy-editors of a book by a friend of his — a retired Afghan prince — changed all the mewses into mews, if you see what I mean — mew instead of mews.'
`Who's right?'
`Well, he says the Oxford English Dic- tionary backs him up. I'll check. Hang on.'
But the OED didn't back him up. Mr Falconer said the mews was where the hawks mewed or moulted. True enough. But the original form of the noun is mew. Goodness knows that falconry is peculiarly choosy in its usage, but the historical record seems clear.
To mew comes from mutare (Latin for `to change'), via the French muer, 'to moult'. The earliest citation for the verb in English is from about 1380, in the form _Y-muwed. But from about the same time we find the noun in a passage where a woman is called 'as demure as a girfauk or fawkon to lure, that out of muwe was drawn'. And in this way the noun has been used through the cen- turies. The OED goes only as far as 1820, with Sir Walter Scott, but it does not indicate that the word is obsolete.
For mews as a plural noun construed as a singular, the dictionary gives only the stabling or lodging senses, derived from the royal stables at Charing Cross in London, so called because they were built on the site where the royal hawks were once mewed.
Take the parallel of stables. Where there is one stable you often find another, and the owner goes down to look at his stables. But that does not mean that the horse cannot bolt from just the one stable. You may have more mews than one, but a falcon can still fly from her own mew.
By now my husband had moved my handbag on to the heavily marmaladed envelope, or so I discovered when I was pursued by wasps on my way to Waitrose.
Dot Wordsworth
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