English wonders

 

The English language is a truly wondrous thing. Its highways and byways catch you sometimes with surprise and oftentimes with pleasure.

Take collectives, for example. We all know about a pride of lions and a herd of elephants. But how about a “murder” of crows or a “parliament” of owls. I looked up some more for your delectation: an eyrie of eagles, an ambush of tigers, a confusion (or argument) of architects, an army of herrings, a bale of turtles, a battery of barracuda, a bellowing of bullfinches, a bevy of swans, a bloat (or crash) of hippopotami, a boil of hawks, a bubble of divers, a celebration of polar bears, a clowder (?) of cats, a coalition of cheetahs, a commonwealth of bees, a conflagration of arsonists and a converting of preachers – and all of this without going past the letter c.

There are also plenty of odd words describing one specific thing. “Dottle” is a good example. Dottle is the remaining plug of unburnt tobacco and ashes left in the bottom of a tobacco pipe when it has been smoked (precise definition from Wikipedia). Not something you need in everyday conversation but delightfully precise.

Take a word like “hull”. It means the husk or shell of a seed or fruit but in its verb form it means to remove a hull. So, for example, digging out the green leafy stem of leaves on a strawberry is called hulling the strawberry. I’m curious about the strawberries and cream which apparently are a feature of watching Wimbledon live. Do they have an army of minions (or indeed Minions) hulling thousands of strawberries every day of the tournament? What an extraordinary thing to put on your CV; “I hull strawberries at Wimbledon”.

Then there are words which have multiple meanings, some of which are odd. For example, if you are dressmaking, you “set” a sleeve into a bodice, vastly different from “setting” something down or “setting” something up. Which reminds me of the school age mantra: Flu breaks out, a thief breaks in, school breaks up and a car breaks down.

How about the odd use of simple words. Take “neck” for example. It is used perfectly sensibly for the bit of your body which attaches your noggin to your torso. But we also say “which neck of the woods do you come from”. And there’s “nick”.
It’s often used for a small cut. But we also say “in the nick of time” or “I’ll just nick out to the shops”.

You are supposed to eat “a peck” of dirt before you die, and you sing to your grandchild: “I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck.” Both peck and bushel are old imperial measurements up there with guinea (one pound one shilling) and a “baker’s dozen” (13). The Britannica tells us that there are a few theories as to why a baker’s dozen became 13, but the most widely accepted one has to do with avoiding a beating. In medieval England there were laws that related the price of bread to the price of the wheat used to make it. Bakers who were found to be “cheating” their customers by overpricing undersized loaves were subject to strict punishment, including fines or flogging.

Even with careful planning it is difficult to ensure that all your baked goods come out the same size; there may be fluctuations in rising and baking and air content, and many of these bakers didn’t even have scales to weigh their dough. For fear of accidentally coming up short, they would throw in a bit extra to ensure that they wouldn’t end up with a surprise flogging later. In fact, sometimes a baker’s dozen was 14—just to be extra sure.

The word “hawk” is another example of weirdly different meanings for same word. Of course it’s the name of a bird of prey and, not too distantly, describes a person with bellicose views. It also describes carrying goods around for sale and it’s the word for expectorating or clearing one’s throat and bringing up phlegm.

If you’ve got any favourite examples of English at its best and most peculiar do let me know; you can share it with everyone.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations.

Donald McGill, British comic postcard artist: “Do you like Kipling? “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”