The English language can be graceful, majestic, cheeky and downright ugly. I thought of this while passing the obligatory 15 minutes of recovery time after my jab. As well as noticing the highly organised procedure that collected names of next-of-kin (ominous), provided the facility for sanitising the hands (ample) and numbered seating for orderly succession (luxurious), I found myself feeling like a recruit in the ranks facing a drill-sergeant. I also found time to scrutinise the notices and to admire the performance of the back-room boys and girls who brought all this into being. ‘Nothing comes of nothing,’ as Maria said – or sang – and to conjure an operation of this scale from nothing that had existed before is something of a masterpiece.
I also reflected on the word ‘jab’. Like the best of our words, it is a monosyllable. King James’s translators, who chose ‘charity’ where Tyndale had ‘love’, chose wrongly. Their choice may be more euphonious but the direct four-letter word has an abrupt energy that is missing in the seven-letter word. English, they tell me, resembles Hebrew in approving earthy words rather than abstractions. I like that.
Jab is one of the things an older generation was taught to do with a bayonet. It is also a word as familiar to a boxer as the word ‘hook’ or ‘uppercut’. A similar word figures in street-wise English in idioms such as ‘better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick’. (English has its fair share of black humour.) Remember a pig in a poke and a Cockney’s dig in a grave? We have to remember too that the AV had a different threshold for its choice of words from what polite society decrees. Its language for natural functions is as boisterous as the words that came naturally to Chaucer. Majesty has its place but we are not always well advised to be prim rather than pungent.
The best of the government lockdown slogans are monosyllabic. It makes me think that one of the favours we could do our friends and neighbours is to express the Gospel in monosyllables. We sometimes forget that words like ‘epiphany’, not to mention ‘pentecost’ and ‘redemption’ are stumbling-blocks for those not familiar with Christian family jargon. The lock-down slogan-makers know all about this. We should be ready to play catch-up.
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