Mind Your Language

Wednesday, 11th March 2009

Dot Wordsworth looks into quantitative easing

‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’

Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with the body politic. Even by the time he published Humphrey Clinker, in 1771, the year of his death, he had not vanquished his habit of presenting bodily distress as an object of humour.

In the novel, a trick is played on a fat, high-living magistrate called Frogmore, whose drink is doctored. When he gets up from bed with belly-ache, he finds his waistcoat won’t meet across his stomach and he fears mortal bloating, unaware that the garment has been taken in while he slept. Smollett constructs a scene where he is straining at stool, attended by a parson holding his nose. ‘The doctor, entered the chamber at this juncture, and found Frogmore enthroned on an easing-chair, under the pressure of a double evacuation. The short intervals betwixt every heave he employed in crying for mercy, confessing his sins, or asking the vicar’s opinion of his case.’ Very funny, I’m sure.

I do not know if Alistair Darling or Mervyn King practise their debasement of the currency while enthroned on easing-chairs or whether they merely hire agents from some well-known house of easement. In any case, quantitative easing just missed the OED when it revised its entry for quantitative in December 2008, even though the term had already been uttered between groans by desperate economists. The OED did pick up quantitative research, undertaken in 2005 by some investment bank.

Quantitative refers, plainly enough, to an amount of stuff. In English the adverb quantitatively appears first, in the 16th century, in something written by Thomas Cranmer about transubstantiation. The word merely represented the late Latin adverb quantitative, which was used in British works written in Latin in the 13th century.

The modern cliché of calling someone ‘a bit of an unknown quantity’ derives from algebra. In the Cyclopaedia published in 1728 by the energetic Fellow of the Royal Society Ephraim Chambers, it is explained that the root of an equation is its unknown quantity. As is the effect of this current outburst of economic easing.

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