Liz suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value reader offers and events

Click here for the latest Spectator Wine Offers

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Dot Wordsworth looks at superwords

‘What’s so super about these superdelegates?’ asked my husband from the other room, while I was washing the Jersey Royals.

I do not intend trying to explain the American political system here. These delegates are not necessarily super at all. I wonder what connections superdelegates suggests in the American mind. If it suggests superman, the reference is likely to be the cartoon hero who first made his appearance in 1938, ‘champion of the oppressed, the physical marvel who had sworn to devote his existence to helping those in need’. That hardly sounds like a description of the Democrat politicians who may have to devote their existence to deciding whether Hillary Clinton should be their presidential candidate.

I was surprised to find that no earlier occurrence of superman in English has been traced than its use by George Bernard Shaw in his play Man and Superman (1903), in which he also included the word superhumanity for good measure.

Superhumanity translates the German Übermenschlichkeit, just as superman translates Friedrich Nietzsche’s Übermensch, who had appeared 20 years earlier than Shaw’s play, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, a book without pictures. In our own time über-, usually without an umlaut, has become an annoying vogue prefix meaning ‘very’, as in uber-trendy. There is an unrelated word, uberate, listed in The English Dictionarie by Henry Cockeram (1623, meaning ‘to fatten with the breast’ — from the Latin uber, ‘breast’ or ‘udder’), but the term never caught on; indeed I don’t know any written record of it except in dictionaries. But if ever a prefix was uberated it is uber-.

Shaw also provided a preface to a far more entertaining book, Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by W.H. Davies, which appeared in 1908. In 1970 a pop group adopted the name Supertramp, apparently with some knowledge of Davies’s book, though it cannot be likely that such knowledge extended far among fans of their successful albums, such as Breakfast in America.

Since they sit above the common progeny of primaries and caucuses, perhaps the so-called superdelegates should be called supernal delegates.

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

Print this article | Email to a friend | Permalink | Comment