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Mind your language

Dot Wordsworth

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Adam Jacot de Boinod (surely a pseudonym) is at it again.

Now, in Toujours Tingo (Penguin, £10.99), Mr J de B gives us tartle, a Scottish word, he says, meaning ‘to hesitate in recognising a person or thing, as when you are introducing someone whose name you can’t quite remember’.

What are his sources? Perhaps ‘Models of Ecological Rationality: The Recognition Heuristic’, by Daniel G. Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer (Psychological Review, 2002) which says that you tartle when you ‘recognise another’s face but cannot remember anything else about him’. Or the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: World of Odd (1996), which prefers: ‘To momentarily forget the name of the person you’re talking to.’

These writers mistake the real meaning: not to forget a name, but to boggle or fail to recognise something or someone. John Jamieson (1757–1838) in his Scottish dictionary (1825) gives distinct meanings: ‘to boggle’ (as a horse does); ‘to hesitate’; ‘to be uncertain in recognising’. The stuff about forgetting names is embroidery.

Mr J de B might like another meaning of tartle for his next volume. It is Scottish too and means ‘a lock or tuft or hair or wool at an animal’s tail that has become matted with excrement’. It is from a diminutive of turd, the Old English tyrdel, and can be used of any ragged tassels or fringe. It might well be applied to the fashionable ‘bed-head’ style of hair achieved with spray-on gel.

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