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Friday 5 September 2008

Mind your language

A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb

By the 19th century the word was applied to anyone from prosperous stockbrokers (whose houses would constitute the stockbroker belt) to the pantomime broker’s man. As Dickens put it, ‘a broker’s man’s is not a life to be envied ...people hate and scout ’em because they’re the ministers of wretchedness, like, to poor people’. (Note the use in this dialogue of like, which some of you have grown to hate so much in our own day.)

Odd examples of participial adjectives or verbal nouns in the form brokering lurked from the 17th century, but nowhere in the six million quotations gathered for the Oxford English Dictionary was there a hint of broker as a verb, nor was it mentioned in the dictionary’s second edition in 1979. Then, in 2006, work in progress at Oxford turned up instances of broker as a verb dating from the 17th century. True, the first two centuries only glean brokered as a past participle or in the unusual construction ‘he is to be brokered out of only fifteen laks of rupees’. But a Chicago paper was using brokered in the regular financial sense by 1901.

Might I suggest that the past tense of broke sounds a little odd as broked since it fights with the strong past tense of break? This might help explain brokered as a coinage more euphonious to the uncertain. Anyway, I’m afraid that, for all our blasting, we’re stuck with it.

More articles from: Dot Wordsworth | this section

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