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Thursday 4 December 2008

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordsworth celebrates an anniversary  

When I read that the Queen has cancelled a deferred party at the Ritz intended to mark her diamond wedding anniversary, I wondered who had first come up with the name diamond for the 60th anniversary.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines diamond wedding as ‘a fanciful name for the celebration of the 60th (or according to some, the 75th) anniversary of the wedding-day’. Who are the ‘some’ insisting that it’s the 75th anniversary? The opinion is attributed to Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates in its edition of 1892, but five years later Queen Victoria celebrated the Diamond Jubilee of her reign, and that certainly cemented the meaning of diamond for weddings too.

Before Victoria had persevered so long, the term jubilee had sufficed to signify ‘50th regnal year’. Tennyson wrote for the jubilee of 1887 a poem called ‘On the Jubilee of Queen Victoria’, not one of his best — ‘Fifty years of ever-broadening Commerce!/ Fifty years of ever-brightening Science!/ Fifty years of ever-widening Empire!’ No golden was necessary. That is ultimately because Leviticus (chapter 25) specifies that the jubilee be kept every 50 years. Chaucer’s summoner speaks of a sexton and an infirmarian who make their jubilees of 50 years in the job.

The designation of wedding anniversaries as golden and silver was borrowed, it seems, from Germany, where the 25th anniversary was called silberhochzeit or silberne hochzeit. In a novel, The Initials, by Baroness von Tautphoeus, published anonymously in 1850, comes an exchange: ‘Perhaps you have no golden or silver wedding in England?’ ‘I confess I never heard of any thing of the kind,’ said Hamilton.’ Ten years later The Illustrated London News was still explaining to its readers what the ‘golden wedding’ of Prince William of Hesse and the Princess Charlotte signified.

For the past 70 years or so, shopkeepers have been trying to sell presents to mark intermediate anniversaries between first and 60th. It is pretty well agreed that years one to three go: paper, cotton, leather. After that it gets a bit shaky. The more certain anniversary names are ruby (40th) and pearl (30th). The 20th seems to be china, but the 18th is said to be bismuth, a kind of metal, used medicinally in compounds.

My husband is out, or I’d ask him about it. I find that that Pepto Bismol contains Bismuth Subsalicylate. My husband and I are past our 18th, but he forgot to give me any Pepto Bismol, I’m glad to say, on that occasion. Or anything else.

Dot Wordsworth

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