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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 3rd October 2007

Dot Wordsworth on language

The range of Mr Daniel’s foraging is wide. He even includes tontine, a scheme introduced to France by a Neapolitan banker, Lorenzo Tonti (1630-95). It features, you will remember, in that enjoyably farcical novel by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, The Wrong Box. A tontine fund goes eventually to the last man alive among the original investors. Mr Daniel says tontines are now back in fashion. In France perhaps, but I thought they had been made illegal in Britain, because of the temptation to murder.

During his circuitous linguistic promenade, Mr Daniel goes so far as to suggest a French word that English might borrow. The purpose is to name the @ sign on the typewriter, the key that, since the invention of email, has come from behind in the keyboard popularity stakes. After mentioning cochlea, the Latin for ‘snail shell’, which Martha Barnette discusses as a suitable term in an essay in her book Dog Days and Dandelions, he proposes that the French limaçon, meaning ‘cochlea’ or ‘spiral stair’, be adopted as the name for this sign. Do we need it? We do already call @ ‘at’, as we call h ‘aitch’. Sensibly, Mr Daniel concedes that ‘linguistic natural selection’, will take its course. I hope he realises this is not always the survival of the fittest.

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Asher Tarmon

October 14th, 2007 6:41pm

Attention: Dot Wordsworth Apropos your mention of naming the sign @, (Spectator issue 6/10/07) you might be amused by the fact that here in Israel everyone calls it "strudel" - the Viennese rolled apple pastry which it resembles when sliced. Though the Hebrew Language Academy has tried to introduce a newly invented word for it, popular resistance prevails and "strudel" it remains!

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