In John Wells‘s blog today, he talks about the interjection (or should that be exclamation?) most usually associated nowadays with Homer Simpson – variously spelt doh, d’oh or duh. He quotes from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, and says this may be the only dictionary to include the word. In fact it is also in the 10th edition of the Concise Oxford (1999), Oxford Dictionaries having researched its origins, and taken it back at least to Laurel and Hardy films, in which the word is often to be heard, in very much the same context as that in which Homer uses it. The definition in COD, at DOH(2) is “exclamation, informal, used to comment on a foolish action”, but the only pronunciation given is more suitable for the spelling duh. At DUH, we are told it is an alternative spelling for DOH(2).
But, as John says, duh is a comment on someone else’s stupidity, while DOH admits that the speaker has been stupid. Oxford has not grasped this difference (or at least it hadn’t when it published the 10th COD. Perhaps the 11th, which I haven’t seen yet, has got it right).

What is the plural of diocese? Easy, you might think – it’s dioceses. Ah yes, but how do you pronounce it? Until 1999, and the tenth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, no help was given by most ‘ordinary’ dictionaries. They said nothing at all about the plural, with the implication that it was regular: di-o-ce-ses (4 syllables). This is still the case for the English Pronouncing Dictionary, and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. However, starting in 1990 with his first edition, John Wells noted in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary that an alternative was to make an analogy with analysis ~ analyses.

An older spelling for diocese was ‘diocess’. If we had kept this spelling, perhaps the plural, ‘diocesses’, would have stood more chance of surviving. We already have abscess ~ abscesses, and process ~ processes.

A few weeks ago, just after we changed the clocks to GMT, Fi Glover, presenting ‘Saturday Live’ on Radio 4, referred to the ‘moniker’ “Spring forward, fall back”. What she meant was mnemonic (pronounced ‘neeMONNik’). None of the possible scenarios I can think of as the reason for this mistake reflects very well on her. Was it wrongly written in her script, was she unable to pronounce the word, or did she genuinely believe that this was the correct term or pronunciation for this sort of aide-mémoire?

I have been reminded of this as I read Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. This is a book crammed full of facts about the lives of poor people in London at that time, including comments on the weather conditions on particular days, but there is a curious mistake that keeps appearing: the word pre-requisite, where perquisite is clearly intended. For instance, in the chapter entitled “Sleeping Rough”, we find the following sentence:

“At night, cleared and disregarded, the bulks [wooden shelves that stuck out over the pavement in front of shops], formed a convenient shelter for the homeless, an almost traditional prerequisite of the poor.”

The required reading here is definitely perquisite, or its modern abbreviation, perk. The same is true for most of the other instances I have so far come across. One however, is ambiguous:

“Even parish paupers demanded fresh linen every week, and its provision formed one of the most substantial prerequisites of domestic service.” (p.100)

Does this mean that it was necessary to have enough linen for a fresh set every week in order to be employed in domestic service, or, more likely, that as a consequence of being employed in domestic service, fresh linen was provided every week?

Once more, the reason for this mistake is unclear. Does Prof. Hitchcock really believe that ‘perk’ is an abbreviation for prerequisite? Does his spell-checker automatically ‘correct’ perquisite to prerequisite? Does the fault lie with Prof. Hitchcock’s editor or proof reader at the publishers (Hambledon Continuum)? Does no one at the publishers bother to check the copy before publishing it?

I’ve been reading some Defoe novels recently, and it’s surprising how many ‘mistakes’ in grammar he makes that are frequently seen these days and attributed to the poor teaching of English over the last half century: confusion of who and whom; using I in contexts that clearly demand me; and these sort of … are three that I particularly remember. The editions that I’ve been reading are all reputable ones, so I don’t think we can attribute these to printers’ errors. For those in any doubt of the antiquity of these ‘mistakes’, Defoe died in 1731.

What are we to make of this? I think we have to say that at all stages in the life of any language there are points of grammar that cause problems for even the best writers. Defoe came of a fairly well-to-do family, and received a good education, so his ignorance cannot be ‘blamed’. Since the loss of case as a regular feature of English, the remnants, in the form of the personal pronouns, have been under threat in all but the most obvious contexts, and the phrase ‘sort of’ seems to behave as a compound adjective rather than anything else, leaving the determiner ‘these’ to agree in number with the following noun (which is usually plural).

Samuel Johnson famously defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”, and there were a few other semi-humorous comments in his dictionary, including the non-definition of ‘trolmydames’: “Of this word I know not the meaning”.
Chambers (or, as it used to be called, Chambers’s) Dictionary is well worth reading like any other book, or at least browsing from one entry to another, because it has some light-hearted definitions in its pages. I am rather sad that the definition of ‘lunch’ no long includes the phrase “a restaurateur’s term for an ordinary man’s dinner”, that was in the Mid-Century edition, but ‘fog’: “thick mist” and ‘mist’: “thin fog” are still there, as are ‘middle-aged’: “between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner” and ‘Agapemone’: “a religious community of men and women whose ‘spiritual marriages’ were in some cases not strictly spiritual”.
Chambers is not the only dictionary to repay a close reading. Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English Dictionary, of 1965 (published by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, and The University of Wisconsin Press) has, at the word ‘kansjke’: “perhaps, maybe: … kanskje blir vi ferdige med denne ordboka en gang – maybe we’ll finish this dictionary sometime”.
Professor Gregory James, Head of the Language Centre at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has published a weighty tome on the making of dictionaries in Tamil which all hinges on the way ‘rice’ is defined: most of the Tamil dictionaries, while paying lip service to the principle that a dictionary should never use a word in its definitions that is not itself defined elsewhere, call ‘rice’ “an esculent grain”, but never define ‘esculent’. (A History of Tamil Dictionaries, Gregory James, ISBN 81-85602-76-X)

An open letter to the BBC suggests that it needs a Language Advisor, not (according to the interview Ian Bruton-Simmonds, one of the authors, gave to the Today programme this morning) to shame broadcasters publicly about their poor English, but to have a quiet word with them, so that they don’t do it again.
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