Every Sunday I take the Sunday Times. After a week’s perusal, day by day, of two Scottish newspapers, I feel the need to acquaint myself with the thoughts of our cousins south of the border. And besides, the prize crossword is very inventive. I’ve been submitting it for months now, so far with no success, which makes it all the more astonishing that the one and only time I sent in the Financial Times crossword, which indeed was the only time I ever did it, I won it. The FT sent me How to Sound Really Clever by Hubert van den Bergh (Bloomsbury, 2013), a lexicon of unusual words and phrases that I suppose was considered would be of interest to the cruciverbalist. Actually the words therein are not that unusual. I’ve just opened it at random and come across farrago, a hodgepodge, apparently from the Latin farrago, farraginis, a mix of grains for animal feed. Mostly now it is used figuratively, hence (Chambers) – a disordered mixture; a confused mass of objects or people. Now it so happens I’ve been acquainted with the word farrago since I was a child, because my father had a colleague who was terribly fond of purple language, and I remember him making reference to “a farrago of heterogeneous irrelevancies”. I think my father would have called it “a load of old codswallop”. I don’t remember which example of waffle, obfuscation, or frankly bullshit he was referring to, but nowadays when I hear a politician on the Today programme dodging a question by answering another one of his own choosing, I’m inclined to mutter into my muesli, “That’s another FHI.” I won a prize at the end of Primary School, and on my father’s colleague’s recommendation I got Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases which is a much longer version of How to Sound Really Clever, a compendium of synonyms and, arguably, something of a farrago.
So I’ve always been interested in dictionaries, lexicons, thesauri, and encyclopaedias of one sort or another. I acquired the complete Encyclopaedia Britannia in the early nineties, and supplemented it with the annual year books, and associated publications, up to 1999 which must have been around the time Encyc. Brit. stopped appearing in print. From a similar era I’ve got the complete Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in a single volume, the perusal of which requires a magnifying glass. Then I have Chambers, the thirteenth edition and also the fourth edition crossword dictionary, Bloomsbury, the shorter Oxford, Collins German dictionary, and Churchill’s medical dictionary. I so much prefer leafing through a tome to searching for something online. It just seems a much more human, and humane, activity, than staring at a screen. Granted what you read is a snapshot in time, but at least you have the sense it is peer reviewed. Lexicography online is the Wild West of total anarchy, you might say a farrago.
I’m frequently impressed not only by the exactitude, but also the imagination of dictionary definitions. It can’t be easy to sum up succinctly the many-splendoured connotations of a word, for example, like love. It might be an idea to incorporate the skill of definition into the school curriculum. You would have to manifest clarity of thought to define, in a closed book exam setting, words of an abstract nature.
Words carry baggage. It’s never a wise thing to utilise a new addition to one’s vocabulary, based on a dictionary definition, without first acquiring a feel for its use. OED is most useful here, in basing all its definitions on usage from literature. But I venture to say, it is salutary to find that the dictionaries don’t always get it right.
Salutary (Chambers) adj promoting health or safety; wholesome; containing, bringing etc. a timely warning
And Chambers Crossword Dictionary, itself a kind of Roget’s Thesaurus, provides synonyms:
Salutary good, timely, useful, healthy, helpful, hygienic, sanitary, valuable, practical, wholesome, beneficial, profitable, refreshing, advantageous, health-giving, invigorating.
But these definitions don’t seem to me to capture the chastening effect of any salutary experience. A salutary lesson is like a rap on the knuckles.
Another example where it seems to me the dictionaries fall short is “invidious”.
Invidious (Chambers) adj likely to incur or provoke ill-will or resentment; likely to excite envy; enviable; offensively discriminating (L. invidiosus, from invidia envy).
If somebody says “You have put me in an invidious position”, such a position is far from enviable. Quite the opposite, it is unenviable. And it is unenviable not only because it is likely to provoke ill-will or resentment, but because the position has the nature of a “damned if you do damned if you don’t” Catch 22 situation. You are on the horns of a dilemma, and it doesn’t matter what you do; there is no escape.
Such musings tend to imply that each and every word carries a resonance that extends beyond its dictionary definition. The resonances change with time, place, and person, and perhaps that is why we so often founder in our efforts to communicate with one another.
But why this preoccupation with words, and why has my perusal of the Sunday Times restricted itself to the prize crossword? Why have I returned to this my cobbler’s last? What, amid the other column inches, is making me fretful?
Well, the Sunday Times seems unusually preoccupied. Headlines will suffice:
Page 1 Payoff of tens of thousands for Mandelson
Page 4 Running out of road… Keir Starmer is a dead man walking…
A holdover from a dying politics, Starmer can only watch as life drains from his premiership
Page 5 The solution to the crisis can’t be a soft-left coup. Voters won’t stand for it. Starmer is done…
(continued from Page 1) Mandelson secured pay-off of tens of thousands of pounds
Page 6 “I’m scared (Epstein’s) around every corner”: forgotten victims relive their agony
Ghislaine Maxwell inherited millions from secret trust set up by her father
Page 7 Charles pays for Andrew’s new home to “contain” him and keep him out of trouble
Andrew “ruthlessly” exploited trade role
Page 12 McSweeney blamed for Mandy job
Page 17 What drove Epstein… He charmed and blackmailed the venal elite
Page 20 Shorn of its moral purity, what is Starmer’s Labour now for?
Page 21 (cartoon) Sir Keir Starmer “Withering Heights”
For once the PM dared to think outside the box and it may end him
The Tale of Keir and the Tarnished Peer – no, not that one
Page 23 They were meant to be the nice party but Labour can’t maintain that pretence now
Page 24 (at last) Puzzles page
There appears to be only one show in town. ’Nuff said. I’m sure Sir Keir is finding it all a salutary experience. But he finds himself in an invidious position.
I have a routine of listening to the news on the radio just before I post this blog, just in case events have moved on. When I started writing this, one senior staff member at No. 10 had just resigned; and now as I end it, another. It’s a House of Cards. What a farrago.
jamescalumcampbell 