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Thursday 20 November 2008

And Another Thing

Splendours and miseries of the Queen’s English in the 21st century

The wonderful thing about language, and especially English, with its enormous vocabulary, is the existence of groups of words with broadly similar meanings but each of which conveys something slightly different. Such subtle distinctions add to the richness of meaning, in speech and writing, and to the pleasure of using words. And the sense changes over time, as historic events add moral overtones or undertones to particular words.

Take, for instance, the group of words meaning ‘friend’, of which there are about 30 or 40. None is exactly interchangeable. Many have undergone osmosis even in our own lifetime. Some are mysterious in origin and malleability. Crony, for instance. The word became pejorative in the 19th century, first in America (I think) in the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–37), which also gave rise to the related ‘spoils system’. The implication is that there is something financially improper about the relationship, a whiff of jobbery. The big OED is unsatisfactory on this term: ‘an intimate friend, an associate, a “chum”’. It does say ‘formed first after 1660... a term of university, or college slang’. It says it has nothing to do with ‘crone’. Well, obviously. The root must be Greek, cronos, time. A friend who has a gift for words says it was indeed university slang, but much earlier, Athenian, cronios, ‘long-continued’. A crony was someone you knew from schooldays or undergraduate frolics. Significant that the word is never used of female friendships. Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings, Duchess of Marlborough, were in fact for a time cronies, but that is not the word one would use. There is no female equivalent. Nor is there much prospect, now, of the term being decontaminated and restored to its original, innocent meaning.

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