Mind your language
'SEVENTEEN!' cried my husband, stirring triumphantly in the confines of his armchair like a pig that has just uncovered a windfall apple in the straw of its pen.
'I won't ask, darling,' I replied, 'because you are going to tell me anyway.'
He did. For the 17th time in a week he had heard someone say sweet in 'that peculiar new way'. The occasion prompting his public exclamation was hearing the strangely shaped survival expert Ray Mears, who is forever gnawing at muddy roots and tying knots in vegetation, describe a birch-bark canoe as 'sweet'.
During my sentient life, sweet has rubbed along with a selection of connotations founded on the sense of taste. One does come across usages that are not current but are comprehensible, such as sweet water, meaning 'fresh water'. And there are plenty of obsolete meanings, such as 'unleavened', as used by the biblical translators Tyndale and Coverdale.
And then there is a line in Shakespeare which I have only just understood aright, to my shame. In Twelfth Night we find:
In delay there lies no plenty, Then come kisse me sweet and twentie: Youth's a stuffe will not endure.
It is the Clown singing to Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and since he has just come out with the sentence. 'I did impeticos thy gratillity; for Malvolio's nose is no whipstock; my lady has a white hand; and the Myrmidons are no bottleale houses,' I was content to let sense look after itself. But I discover that 'sweet and twentie' is not a phrase addressed to a sweet girl of 20, but that twentie is an intensive to go with sweet, or whatever else it intensifies. Thus William Rowley, a contemporary of Shakespeare, writes, Godyegodnight and twenty, sir.'
In my own day, sweet has been hardworked as an epithet for kittens, little children with bouquets, and endearing utterances. It fills the semantic space of the American cute. This is not how Mr Mears was using it. He meant something like 'neat', 'well-knit', 'good', 'serviceable', 'agreeable'. Used of persons, it does not imply any mawkish cutesyness. One can see the word becoming an all-purpose term of approbation.
Who is responsible for this development, I cannot say. I suspect it has been on the damp lips of Jamie Oliver, but he must have caught it somewhere. No doubt, if it is a catchphrase from Friends or EastEnders or some such unvvatched programme, someone will write to tell me.
Dot Wordsworth
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