Dunnies

Dunnies on the highway 500 miles north of Perth

In bogs and dunnies, lavs and loos.

Crappers, cans, johns and jakes,

A man's got to do what a man's got to do,

Wherever, whenever, whatever it takes.

A reader was curious about the dunny mentioned in the comment by Grumblebum McWombat in my post on Gender Identity Battlefields. She may be sorry that she asked. Don't read on if you are squeamish.

A dunny is an Australian outhouse.

The first of these I really remember, at five years old, was along the back fence, a long trek from the house, furnished not with toilet paper but squares of the West Australian attached to a nail in the wall by a loop of string. Why was the dunny out the back against the fence? Well, sewage had replaced an earlier system of collection by the nightcart man who would travel along the back lane, stop at each house, and open a little trapdoor to remove, empty, and replace the dunny can which resided beneath the toilet seat. Not the most enjoyable job. So in the nineteen-forties we could "pull the chain" to flush the toilet, but the dunny remained an uncomfortable distance away from the house if you were caught short. In fact, one of my earliest memories is being admonished by my grandmother for peeing in the drain just outside the back door.

As time passed in suburban Australia. the dunny moved into the house, perhaps spending some time on the back porch, and then finding its place in or next to the bathroom, where it was politely known as the Lav.

At six years old, I entered First Bubs at the primary school. There, the dunnies were out in the playground, the urinal a vast, black concrete wall against which we would see who could pee the highest. And on some visit to the cubicle I must have seen on the wall that piece of dirty doggerel known in one of its many versions to every Australian boy: about what Captain Cook did behind the Dunny Door.

Later, I learned an expression to describe a prodigious stench. The WACA (pronounced Wakka) was the West Austalian Cricket Ground where major cricket and football matches were played.

It stinks like the dunnies at the WACA at halftime.

You wii have gathered that "dunny" (or "dunnies"), like the terms in the verse above, is rather a loose term, and might apply to the facilities in general or the WC in particular. But the true Australian dunny was to be found in the outback or the bush or on a farm without a sewage or septic system, set well away from the house, with good reason. Typically, the small shed was made of corrugated iron, cold in winter, stinking hot in summer, or rather stinking and hot, and the flies were satiated and abundant. The visitor "sat" on the toilet seat above the box-like structure hiding what was beneath.

The dunny was rather like a Canadian biffy, but with a very significant difference: instead of the long drop, it was often a very short drop indeed, into the dunny can, which if full could result in an unfortunate splash, so that the occupant was forced to do a kangaroo, that is, squat at some height above the toilet seat and hope for the best. Sorry for the detail, but you asked.

This was the true, and original dunny, "dunny" from "dunnekin", English dialect for "dung house".

Gender-Identity Battlefields

Sometimes the comments on an article in the Guardian are as interesting as the article itself. In one that I read recently, they were more interesting. They were easier to understand as well. In a comment on an article by an Australian academic, entitled “Public bathrooms are gender-identity battlefields”, a reader wrote: 

I fully agree with the sentiments expressed in this article, but sentences like “the positive reinforcement of gender-neutral language and pronouns works with designs for lived experiences of gender that exist outside the male and female binary” need to be taken out and shot.

The writer was arguing that symbols of the conveniences within should replace words or even the typical pictograms of men and women in the signage on public toilets, and that persons should make their choice accordingly.

The ever-inclusive Oak Bay United Church in Victoria felt this way as well. For a time, the traditional Men’s and Women’s signs on the toilets were replaced by graphic representations of cubicles and urinals. One would enter a door marked either with two cubicles, or two urinals and one cubicle. 

Fortunately, a year or two later, common sense prevailed. The Men’s and Women’s signs were back, along with an appropriate welcome to persons of either or neither gender. Perhaps one of the 98% of the population happy to self-identify as male or female had felt left out when the traditional signs were taken down. I for one am always happy to see written signs, for I can read but have difficulty with symbols, and have walked into the wrong washroom on occasion.

Writers of articles in favour of eliminating toilets exclusively for men or women dismiss the argument, supported by J. K. Rowling in the recent controversy, that women feel safer when persons of masculine appearance cannot enter their space. But many of the comments on this article, made in polite and articulate language, argued in favour of facilities for women only. 

However, the most practical comment, written in a better style than the article itself, was from Grumblebum McWombat, . 

As long as the dunny works, I'm happy.

Children’s Truce Terms: Fainites and Barleys

Happily, the Deaf Old Buggers are still three in number. Recently, one of them was recalling his days at the orphanage in England in the nineteen-forties. This was not an institution for the faint-hearted, and fights among the boys were not uncommon. There was, however, a certain code of honour. You could not hit your opponent when he was down; you had to wait for him to get up again. And it was possible to call a truce at any time: “Fainites,” you would cry.

This reminded me of my days as a child in Australia where we too would fight from time to time, and  would have a call for truce, although perhaps it was more a call of surrender. When your opponent had you on the ground in a neck-hold, if you managed to gasp out “Barleys”, he would have to release you.

I remember on one occasion, one of us cried “Barleys”, and the victor retorted: “You can’t say ‘barleys’ when the Japs are after you.” This was a legitimate remark in Australia just after the Second World War.

“Barleys” and “fainites”, and their variations, are but two of many truce words used in children’s games, according to the authority on this topic, The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren by Iona and Peter Opie. In some cases they date back to the  Middle Ages.

In answering a question about the origin of “fainites” in the Guardian column “Notes and Queries”, Meff Lewis writes:

The word itself derives from the 14th- century "feine" or "faine", itself deriving from the Old French se feindre meaning "to make excuses, hang back, back out (esp. of battle)". The "nites" part may have originated in "faine Sir Knight", a medieval truce in non-mortal combat or jousting. JRR Tolkien points out the Chaucerian usage where, in the Clerk's Tale, a servant says "that lordes heestes mowe nat been yfeyned", meaning that his orders could not be treated with a "fain I" (I decline) but must be obeyed.

As with “fainites”, “barleys” dates back to the Middle Ages as well, appearing as a truce term (barlay) in the 14th century poem, “St. Gawain and the Green Knight”. The possible origins of the word are fascinating. To cry barleyfummilin in old Scots is to ask for a truce. In an old English and Scottish chasing game Barley Break, the action seems to have begun with the cry, “Barley Break” to end the barley or parley, that is, the preliminary talking, and to start chasing. Could a participant then cease the action, by crying, “Barley”? This seems to me the most likely origin of the term, from the English word parley, from the French parler.

In a discussion of the word “barleys” in the online Australian MacQuarie Dictionary, contributors reveal that this was the truce word used universally across Australia, not so much in a fight as I remember it, but as a call for a pause in any game such as chasey (tag) if you had to dash off to the dunny (loo). Perhaps our simple Australian  game of chasey could be traced back to the more elaborate Barley Break. Sometimes “barleys”, or “barlees”, or   “barleese”, for as part of the oral tradition it was never written down, was stressed on the first syllable, sometimes the second, and in Australian fashion, sometimes it was shortened to “bars”.

We may be near the end of an oral tradition extending back hundreds of years. As with skipping rhymes, we never picked up these terms from our parents, but from other kids. They were passed on, as children’s subculture, not from generation to generation, but within generations, from older to younger kids. A little girl ventures out onto the playground and is invited into the game, perhaps to make up numbers. She absorbs “the lore and language of childhood”. Sadly, this tradition may be dying as children play more “sophisticated” electronic games and text instead of talk.

These are only two of many terms discussed in the interesting article in Wikipedia, “Truce Terms” from which I have gleaned much of this information. The third of the DOBs, who was a young kid in the late nineteen thirties in Ontario, had no recollection of any such words. They may not have caught on in Canada. Perhaps readers will share some memories from their childhood. For another of the DOBs’ excursions into language, see Deaf Old Buggers in a Subjunctive Mood.

Woke: an Old Word with a New Meaning

I’m only an ordinary bloke

And used to think the word “woke”

Was just the past tense of a verb, nothing more.

But now it’s a new adjective

Applied to folk sensitive

Who social and racial injustice abhor.

At times a militant Woke

Will cancel an ordinary bloke

Who offers a different opinion than he.

Offence may be quite unintended

But the very least said, soonest mended,

Oppositional viewpoints not accepted, you see.

(Ordinary bloke protests)

“It was only my personal view,

And nothing to do with you, 

It was certainly not my intention to slight.”

(Militant Woke responds)

“Despite your earnest confession,

Twas an act of microaggression,

To not be offended, that is my right!”

Down with Singular “They”

I hope that I’m not cancelled by the Woke community for expressing this opinion. It’s not just J. K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood or Steven Lewis who face the threat of cancellation for expressing an opinion that inadvertently offends someone; humble folk like me can be cancelled as well. A friend’s daughter feels threatened, not even because she disagreed with an opinion on Facebook, but because she failed to support it. If I lose even half my readers for committing a small act of microaggression, I will have only three left.

But I must speak out against the general use of the singular “they”. Recently I was reading a story about a mail deliverer who encountered a savage dog. I read that they managed to escape the dog, and I thought, whoops, I didn’t realize there were two of them. I must have missed the appearance of a second person. But no, it was a singular “they”.  There was only one person. For some reason the writer was reluctant, or even afraid, to identify the mail deliverer as male or female in the beginning and then use the masculine or feminine singular pronoun thereafter.

There has to be a balance, doesn’t there, between discretion and clarity? Perhaps the writer thought that the sex of the mail deliverer was irrelevant, or perhaps the mail deliverer had not wished to be identified as either male or female, but the reader needs to know whether there was one person, or more. Unfortunately, we don’t have a singular pronoun in English that will stand for a person of either or neither sex, but please, let’s not use the pronoun “they”, which for many of us still denotes (and connotes) plurality. In the story that I read, if the writer had not wished to specify the sex of the mail deliverer, the writer could have avoided the pronoun altogether by repeating the noun, as I just did. A bit awkward, but better than confusion or misinformation. But 98% of the time, the subject of the story will be happy to be identified as he or she, so why not relate that information to the reader?

Some people may wish to be referred to as “they” in the singular, and that is fine with me, but in other circumstances, where it’s possible and appropriate to use “he” or “she”, let’s do it. I know that Shakespeare is supposed to have used a singular “they”, but I’m sure that Hamlet would have said:

To yield or not to yield, that is the question.

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

These foul abuses of our native tongue,

Remaining mute, forsooth, in fear of being 

Cancelléd, in consequence of having caused

Offence, however inadvertently,

To Someone with a Different Point of View. —

Or to take arms against Grammatical

Absurdity, like Plural Pronouns forced

To play a different role against

Their very nature: a Singular

Obscenity, Unnatural and Foul.

Language Evolves

My eleven-year-old granddaughter made my day. “Did you have a fun time at the cabin?” someone asked. “I had lots of fun,” she replied. 

We had spent a delightful day at the family’s cabin at Nora Lake. An idyllic spot overlooking the water, inaccessible by road until a few years ago, off the grid, no wifi, no cell phone reception unless you climbed a hill searching for a click. You enjoyed yourself in old-fashioned ways: hiking, swimming, sitting, reading, thinking, and eating and drinking. There were mosquitos, of course, and fierce, biting flies, but after all, this was Manitoba. No poison ivy though, and as yet, I haven’t pulled off any ticks.  The silence was palpable, broken only by the rumble of CP trains crossing the viaduct between the lakes.

This was cabin-living as it used to be, as far removed from modern cottage accommodation as you can imagine. Everyone slept higgledy-piggledy in a a wooden shack built almost a century ago and little changed since then. The lights and stove were fuelled by propane, water was drawn from the lake, and the calendar on the wall gave you the date in 1963. A few steps up he hill was a charming, sweet-smelling biffy, a place for silent contemplation, a room with a view.

But I digress. Did you have a fun time at the cabin?” someone had asked. “I had lots of fun,” my granddaughter replied. “‘Fun time’ doesn’t sound right,” she said. “No,” said my daughter, “that’s because ‘fun’ is a noun, not an adjective, although some people use it as one.” (My daughter is a grammarian, but also a psychiatrist, so she is in no way judgemental, like me.)

I was interested. “Your brother,” I asked, “The other night, he sneaked, or snuck, out of the house?”. “Snuck,” she said. Ah. “And he dived, or dove, off the rocks?” “He dove off the rocks,” she said. Well, at least he didn’t dive off of the rocks, I thought.

I am happy to know that “fun” hasn’t gone totally gone over to the other side, and along with a few of my peers I will continue to use “sneaked” and “dived” as the past tense and past participles of those verbs, but perhaps when I do, people of my granddaughter’s generation will say to themselves, “Silly old fart. Didn’t he learn any grammar at school?” Language evolves.

Donald Jr’s Apostrophe Error Corrected

Ever alert to ignorance in high places, such as the Royal Mint’s folly on the ten pound note, the Guardian gleefully noted the apostrophe error in Donald Trump Jr’s new book, Liberal Privilege: Joe Biden and the Democrat’s Defense of the Indefensible.

As the Guardian points out, “Donald Trump Jr appears to have forgotten one of the cardinal rules of the apostrophe: it comes after the “s” when the possessive noun is plural.” Unless he is referring to only one Democrat, of course.

The error is enough to make a serious writer hang his head in shame, but perhaps Donald Jr will accuse the Democrats of hacking into the Publisher’s computer and introducing fake punctuation.

They say the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, so we wouldn’t expect Donald Jr to be grammatically competent, but how did that error get past editors and proofreaders?

For a piece of Democratic folly, see A Colonoscopy of Democrats. And for more on the apostrophe error, including the Guardian’s own mistake, see Apostrophes —  Possessive Plurals. 

Update

It seems that Donald Jr has corrected his apostrophe error, and is now directing his attack at more than one Democrat. The Guardian reports that he has reissued images of his book cover, with the subtitle now reading:

Joe Biden and the Democrats’ Defense of the Indefensible

But in announcing that the book is now available for preorder, he writes, and those are not my errors:

Sleepy Joe wont like this one. But lets be honest he probably doesn’t keep up with current events.

The book will do well. The Republican National Committee is buying copies in bulk, and offering them to donors who give $75. What a bargain!

Behaviours. Ugly Words No. 2

Recently, I wrote about a truly ugly word, fulsome. Here’s another one, a word with a touch of superiority, a whiff of academia about it, a word that has been expropriated from its professional field into everyday vocabulary by people who wish to elevate their discourse a little. Or it may have slipped in unawares. It’s a word necessary and acceptable in its singular form, but, unless you’re a scientist in the lab, to be avoided in the plural — behaviours. It is, of course a favourite word of politicians. Lord Bethell, the British Minister of Health, commented today on the likelihood of a second wave of the Virus:

Track and trace on its own, with or without an app, is not enough to prevent a second wave. The only thing that can do that are the behaviours of the British people themselves, and a commitment to hygiene, distancing and isolation are the best [protections] we have against this horrible disease.

The plural is quite unnecessary here, and using the singular would have removed one of the two subject-verb disagreements in the paragraph.

The question is, of course, why does “behaviour” need a plural?

Here are two definitions of behaviour from our venerable Canadian Oxford Dictionary, the last edition before former Prime Minister Harper, in his ignorance, cut its funding.

Behaviour 1 a The way one conducts oneself; manners. b the treatment of others; moral conduct. 2 The way in which a vehicle, machine, chemical substance, etc., acts or works. 3 Psych. an observable pattern of actions of a person, animal etc., especially in response to a stimulus.

The plural is justified, if at all, only in the third meaning: if the subject of the experiment displays different patterns of action to different stimuli, then these might be called different behaviours. 

But when a teacher tells parents that their child is displaying anti-social behaviours, isn’t he, as Australians would say, a bit up himself? The student's actions would constitute behaviour under definition 1. No need for the plural.  Nor is it necessary in describing the actions of the British people in the extract from Lord Bethell’s speech, which should have read:

The only thing that can [prevent a second wave] is the behaviour of the British people themselves.

Unless you are an experimental scientist in the lab, use behaviour only in the singular.

Mixed Metaphor

Elsewhere in his comments, Lord Bethell uses a interesting mixed metaphor. He must have borrowed a lever from Mike Pence’s toolbox, but instead of using it, he looks at it:

The particular lever that we are focused on is trying to get our message out to hard-to-reach communities who may not have heard the important messages on hygiene, on social distancing and on isolation....

Imagine a peer, peering through his monocle at a long lever: at one end, the government pushing down; at the other, an important health message being thrust into a-hard-to reach community. It’s like a cartoon from Punch.

Never mind that the hard-to-reach community is more likely a hard-to-comply community; a denser population forced to work in low-paying jobs in crowded conditions.

For other unusual metaphors, see climate change action lens and a Colonoscopy of Democrats.

Zeugma

Alexander Pope

One finds eighteenth-century literary devices in unusual places.

Recently, I was captivated by a line in a message from my Australian friend, George. In describing his wife’s activities, he wrote,  

She walks vigorously with purpose and sometimes with friends.

Witty fellow though he is, he may not have realized that he was employing a variation of the classical device known as zeugma. The word in Greek means “yoking”. Zeugma is the linking of two nouns with a common verb — or in this case, a verb with a preposition, “walk with” — for comic or satiric purpose. 

Usually, the verb is used in a different sense with each noun, as in the example,

She lost her keys, and her heart,

and this provides the ironic effect.

Perhaps the most famous example of zeugma is to be found in Alexander Pope’s mock heroic poem, “The Rape of the Lock”, the “rape” being the seizing of a lock of hair from the heroine, Belinda. (The word “rape” comes from the Latin rapere, meaning “to snatch, grab, carry off”, and this is its earlier English meaning here.)

Throughout the stanza below, Pope mocks his heroine by juxtaposing the trivial and the profound, suggesting that to her they are of equal importance: a China jar or her chastity, her honour or a dress, her prayers or a masked ball. 

Whether the Nymph shall break Diana's Law, 

Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw, 

Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade, 

Forget her Pray'rs, or miss a Masquerade, 

Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball....

Through the zeugma in the third and fifth lines, Pope makes fun of his heroine. George was merely being witty.

Have your friends been using the device lately, zeugma, I mean?

The Winnipeg Roundabout

A Winnipeg roundabout

In my long life, I have found that things happen inside every institution that people on the outside just wouldn't believe. In the photo to the left, the ugly brick and concrete blob, surmounted by ugly traffic signs inscribed with ugly graffiti, is a Winnipeg roundabout. It has replaced a set of four-way stop signs. It’s not exactly the grand rond-pont at the Place de l’Etoile in Paris, is it? Nor is the structure atop the blob the Arc de Triomphe.

Roundabouts are commonplace in Europe, ideal for dispersing lots of traffic at major intersections. At the Place de l’Etoile, for example, twelve avenues lead into the Place and distribute traffic which circles the Arc de Triomphe until it manages to find an exit. It’s an unforgettable driving experience!

I don't think roundabouts have really caught on in Canadian cities. In Victoria, we have one on the Pat Bay Highway near the airport, which was very confusing to motorists at first, and took some getting used to. It is said that one driver went round and round in circles for several days, unable to find his way out. Winnipeg never had a roundabout at all. Its most famous intersection, Confusion Corner, where six roads meet, would have been well served with one, but Winnipeggers were confused already, and the authorities worried that drivers wouldn't have been able to handle it.

The great Canadian traffic controller is the four-way stop. It is perfect in every way, and typically Canadian. It is polite. At the intersection of two streets in a residential neighbourhood, stop signs halt the traffic on all sides. Cars stop and cross the intersection in the order of their arrival. Each driver observes to the split second whether he or she arrives before the car on the left or right, and waits or moves across, accordingly. It sometimes happens that two drivers arrive at precisely the same time, and there's a little hesitation and perhaps a false start, but all is resolved with a friendly wave. Yes, there is the occasional yob, who cheats and doesn't wait his turn, but he's probably from another country. Undoubtedly, the four-way stop sign is one of the reasons we have less road rage in Canada, for it calms the driver.  Slow down, come to a complete stop, pause for reflection, and calmly cross the intersection.

The four-way stop sign is perfect in every way. Why mess with it?

The four-way stop signs in the quiet residential neighbourhood where I am staying were working perfectly well. They controlled and calmed the traffic. They slowed the cars down in an area where people were walking and children were playing.There were no collisions. Pedestrians crossed in safety. Nobody complained. They were perfect in every way. So why mess with them?

Well, in every institution, if things are working perfectly well, a new administrator isn't going to make a name for himself, since he wasn't responsible for things working perfectly well. So, he has to make a change, to innovate. And then things don't work perfectly well any longer. This happens in education all the time. And I suspect that this is what happened to the Winnipeg four-way stop signs.

Now, many of the four-way stop signs in the quiet residential neighbourhood where I am staying have gone, replaced, at huge expense, by ugly concrete blobs, around which cars swerve as they cross the intersection, or hug, as they turn tightly to the left.

Every vehicle has a turning circle, which determines how tightly it can turn. Someone must have forgotten to calculate whether vehicles with a wide turning circle could turn to the left around the roundabout. They can't. (Just as someone forgot to calculate whether the Bombardier trains could fit into French railway stations. They couldn't.) A larger vehicle, such as an RV or delivery van, perfectly legitimate traffic in a residential neighbourhood, can not make the left turn in one go, and has to stop, back up a little, and then move forward again to leave the roundabout.

The roundabout at the Place de l'Etoile
where traffic circles the Arc de Triomphe

But if the intersection is clear, instead of stopping as they were wont to do, giving a friendly wave to the driver on the left or right, the cars barely slow down, give a little wobble to the right as they pass the dollop of concrete, and then speed on, arriving at the destination a few minutes earlier than before. And the neighbourhood is less calm and less safe. Such is progress!

Going Forward: a Cliché, a Dangling Participle, and an Incomplete Nominative Absolute, All in One

A set of spanners from Mike Pence's tool box

Remember when everyone was moving the markers forward, and ideas had legs? Clichés come and go, and now, everywhere, everything seems to be going forward.

The towers were characterised by having common lifts and common walkways, and they presented an "acute challenge going forward".

There will be more gut-wrenching volatility, going forward.

Going forward, buyers will likely be examining their purchases just that little bit more closely.

And we would expect Vice President Pence to speak in clichés.

”Well, the president said today, we just don’t want the guidance to be too tough,” Mr. Pence said. “That’s the reason why next week, the C.D.C. is going to be issuing a new set of tools, five different documents that will be giving even more clarity on the guidance, going forward.”

Cliché

Pence would have done well to have followed one of George Orwell’s rules for good writing:

Never use a simile, metaphor, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

He uses another cliché as well. Like the Road Map, the Tool Box is the politician’s metaphor of the moment. But a set of tools is hardly an effective image for the documents to be issued by the CDC. What picture does it conjure up?

Dangling Participle

What exactly is going forward? The challenge? Volatility?  Buyers? Guidance?  These are the nouns next to, and therefore, seemingly modified by, the participle (verbal adjective) “going”. But no, “going” is in fact a dangling participle, left dangling,  because the noun it is really modifying has disappeared. And what is that noun? This is where it gets a bit esoteric, grammatically speaking. Your eyes may glaze over here.

Nominative Absolute

There is a rather unusual construction in English called the nominative absolute. This imitates a more famous Latin construction, called the ablative absolute. Both of these constructions are free-standing phrases, usually at the beginning or end of the sentence, set off from the main clause. The construction is called "absolute" because it is independent of the rest of the sentence, "nominative", because it is in the nominative (subjective) case. Here are some examples of the nominative absolute:

The weather being sunny, we decided to go for a swim.

or

They decided to sell their stocks, share prices having risen.

or, from my favourite novel, which I happen to be rereading.

The whist party soon afterwards breaking up, the players gathered round the table, and Mr, Collins took his station between Elizabeth and Mrs. Phillips.

"Going forward" seems to be part of  a nominative absolute construction, where the noun has been omitted, but is vaguely understood, as in [the situation] going forward, or [events] going forward, or simply [time] going forward.

In brief

The cliché "going forward", which flows so easily from politicians' lips, is a dangling participle, and an incomplete nominative absolute.        

Precarity

Nu to Yu Thrift Store on Pender Island

I came upon a new word this morning, well, new to me, anyway, like the clothes at the Pender Island Thrift Store.

It was in a column in the Guardian.

In the last few years, Lynn Steger Strong has built a wide audience with her compelling essays ... about the precarity that can coexist with privilege in America, indictments of a country where getting an education or having a child or a long illness can in an instant turn a stable financial situation to an unstable one.

I would have used “precariousness” myself. But a search revealed that “precarity” appears in an article in the Guardian every month or so, and seems to apply particularly to the precarious existence endured by people without job security in uncertain financial times. Another word has arisen to describe this particular social class: the precariat. As Hamlet would have said about both these new words: On horrible, oh horrible, most horrible!

The word “precarious” comes from the Latin adjective, precarius, meaning “obtained by entreaty or prayer”, and I suppose that if you are clinging to a cliff in a precarious position, you may well entreat divine intervention. The word “prayer” itself comes from the same root. But the noun “precarity”, meaning the state of being precarious, is a neologism, not to be found in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary of 2004.

Almost any adjective can form a noun ending in “-ness”, meaning the state of being that adjective, even if it’s a bit cumbersome, like “precariousness”. Less awkward are the nouns ending in -ity like loquacity instead of loquaciousness, or ambiguity rather than ambiguousness. Analogous with these is “precarity” instead of “precariousness”.

The word has found its way into contemporary dictionaries, but only time will tell if it will survive. I don’t think the noun will be used often enough or widely enough. The adjective will always be necessary to describe someone in a difficult emotional or physical or financial position, barely hanging on. It’s a great word — precarious — almost onomatopoeic, its polysyllabicity, with the stress on the long, harsh second syllable, almost reinforcing the meaning. And if we need the noun, precariousness stretches out the predicament — barely hanging on, heart thumping, nails scratching the rock — whereas precarity leaves us unmoved. It's a word without flesh and blood, coined by an academic who likes words to be neat and tidy.

Reading with a Yawn

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!

These are the words that appear on the English £10 note that celebrates the author Jane Austen. It’s a quotation from the most-loved of Austen novels, Pride and Prejudice. Now who could have uttered those profound words?

Of the Bennet family it certainly couldn’t have been Kitty or Lydia, who were quite open about their disdain for any thing intellectual. They would prefer to be chasing soldiers. They take after their mother, who would have discouraged reading as a pastime unlikely to win her girls a husband. Elizabeth would have been the most serious reader, and Jane would have read whatever was prescribed for young ladies, but neither of them would have been crass enough to boast about it. Nor would Mr. Bennet, even though he spent most of his time in the library to escape his wife and three of his daughters. Mary is the most likely candidate, for she is vain, and walks around with a book in her hand. But it wasn’t her. 

Who else could it have been? 

Jane Austen reserves the line for a character who would expect to live in a house with a fine library, but would never have read any of its books. Caroline Bingley is vacuous and vain, a conceited snob. It’s a delicious irony that Jane Austen gives the line to such a shallow character. 

It’s a further irony that the line should appear on the bank note, the government apparently unaware that the author used the line, not to praise reading but to mock the superficiality and conceit of a character who probably didn’t read at all. It’s a classic example of a quotation taken out of context, not in this case from some ulterior motive, but from ignorance. Here is the quotation in context:

Miss Bingley’s attention was quite as much engaged in watching Mr. Darcy’s progress through his book, as in reading her own; and she was perpetually either making some enquiry or looking at his page. She could not win him, however, to any conversation; he merely answered her question and read on. At length, quite exhausted by the attempt to be amused with her own book, which she had only chosen because it was the second volume of his, she gave a great yawn and said, “How pleasant it is to spend an evening in this way! I declare, after all, there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

The Guardian, which covered the story at the time, speculated that perhaps a Bank of England employee, given the task of choosing an appropriate line from Jane Austen, found it in a dictionary of quotations, without having read any of the novels.

For another controversial issue of  British currency, see the Oxford Comma.