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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from the Psalms, about the Lord as a rock, a stronghold, a fortress. But this is not the case.

The phrase is fairly new and American. The word place itself, by contrast, is old. It is found on the vellum of the Lindisfarne Gospels, which were written out in the early 8th century, though the English words were written as a gloss between the lines a couple of hundred years later. It comes in St Matthew’s Gospel (vi 5), where Jesus speaks of people who love to pray ‘on street corners’, in angulis platearum as the Latin says, or in Old English huommum thara plæcena. The late Latin platea, which the English borrows, could mean ‘street’, ‘market-place’ or ‘square’. The even older Old English word was stow.

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