30 1GM Saturday August 1 2020 | the timesComment
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1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GFentity called Merseyside then, nor
would there be until 1974 when the
Local Government Act of 1972 came
into force, combining parts of
Cheshire and Lancashire. Until then
Merseyside merely described areas
by the banks of the River Mersey.
Joseph Paxton would not have
recognised the term as anything but
a geographic feature. My mother was
proud to come from Birkenhead —
and Cheshire — and would have
frowned upon this solecism.”
I wonder if we really needed either
Cheshire or Merseyside — doesn’t
everyone know where Birkenhead is?
— but that’s what you get for trying
to be helpful. Richard reminded me
of the (probably apocryphal) story of
an FA Cup Final supplement in
which the sports editor headlined a
feature “The Road to Wembley”, only
for the sub to change it to “The Road
to Wembley, Middlesex”.Not taking the medicine
M
ichael Medalyer of Chigwell
claims to have found a howler
in Monday’s cartoon. “Boris
‘Mary Poppins’ Johnson presumably
meant to ask the nation to cut out
those spoonsful of sugar, not
‘spoonfuls of sugar’.” No, he didn’t.
This is classic hypercorrection.
Cameron Beattie wrote about a
fact box last Saturday. “You describe
an 80 million-strong swarm of
locusts that can only manage to
consume 423lb of plant material in a
day. Are they on a diet?”
That would solve a lot of problems,
but, sadly, we meant 423 million lb.Scotland ‘to haver’ has always meant
to talk nonsense, not to find it
difficult to make a decision.”
True enough, and I don’t think
we’ve been guilty on this front lately.
Not so with the bee in Lin Totton’s
bonnet. “I wish your writers would
learn that ‘blousy’ is not a substitute
spelling for ‘blowsy’; every year we
have a crop (!) of blousy blooms in
the gardening articles, and ‘blousy
prints’ on the fashion pages.”
We’re bang to rights on that, sorry.Which way is north?
A
lison Gibson wrote from
Dundee, “Could your
crossword setters be made
aware that your paper is published in
the UK? While ‘Cumbria’ might be
accurate enough if considering only
England, I would regard Caithness
or Sutherland as the answer to the
clue, ‘a northern county’. The
number of letters is a bit of a
giveaway and we Scots are
accustomed to working out whether
England or UK is meant, but greater
accuracy would be appreciated.”
This is interesting and, I would
say, slightly unfair. Would someone
in Cornwall have reason to complain
if the answer to “western county”
was Devon?
In writing about the importance of
urban green spaces, Richard
Morrison mentioned that the world’s
first publicly funded civic park was
created by Joseph Paxton in 1847, “in
Birkenhead, Merseyside”.
Rab Way from Dullatur, Glasgow,
points out that “There was no civicA
rnie Wilson wrote last
Saturday from Haywards
Heath, “Please Rose, could you
discourage your colleagues from
using the ghastly but ever-more
popular phrase ‘blown away’, as in
today’s paper, ‘a book that blew him
away’. It’s near the top of my all-time
pet literary hates.”
I’m afraid Mr Wilson vastly
overestimates my influence but in
any case I’m not sure I support him
on this. “Blown away” may seem to
be on the increase, and I’d agree it’s
too colloquial for a news story, but it
has a perfectly respectable pedigreeWe can’t all be
blown away by
popular phrases
as a means of expressing surprise or
revelation. No one would say that
something blew their mind
nowadays for fear of sounding like an
unreconstituted hippy, but blown
away seems like much the same
thing without the hallucinogens.
An earlier version of this concept
is, surely, “Blow me down”, a
favourite of my mother’s along with
“You could have knocked me down
with a feather”. Disconcertingly I
found, having posted it into the
archive search, that “Blow me down”
was rarely off the lips of Enoch
Powell, though I believe that was all
the two of them had in common.
At the risk of making it sound as if
she was in a constant state of
astonishment, my mother also
used to come out with “Well, I’m
blowed”, or “Well I’m jiggered”. The
latter, although I’m sure she didn’t
know this, derived from “jiggered”
spirits, illicitly distilled and sold,
and presumably liable to knock forsix anyone who drank them.
Perhaps we’re harder to impress
these days, or possibly more reliant
on emojis to describe our reactions,
but I’m finding it quite tricky to
think of many more contemporary
expressions in this area — printable
ones anyway —which may explain
our overreliance on “blown away”.
Certainly “It does my head in” lacks
the expressive power of “Heavens to
Betsy” or “Oh my stars and garters”.Crammed with rams
I
mentioned last week our
difficulties telling “sliver” from
“slither”, prompting Nuala Lonie of
Linlithgow to ask, “When did train
carriages and similar become
‘rammed’ rather than crammed? The
first time I saw this was when Jeremy
Corbyn claimed to find a train so
‘ram-packed’ that he had to sit on
the floor. Ever since, ‘rammed’ for
‘crammed’ keeps popping up, even in
The Times. I think the thought lurks
that if you ram things in, a thing
becomes rammed. A further casualty
of this merging is ‘jam-packed’, which
was perhaps the expression Mr
Corbyn was looking for.”
It might have been but, strangely, I
find the logic for “ram-packed” easier
to follow than “jam-packed”. There
doesn’t seem anything very wrong
with rammed, anyway.
Ron Wilson of Edinburgh wrote,
“While we’re on malapropisms, can
we have a look at the verb ‘to haver’?
There seems to be a distressing
tendency to use ‘haver’ when the
perpetrator clearly means ‘waver’. InRos e
Wild
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