A London gallery had a spot of trouble with the police when someone complained about a picture of Leda and the swan. ‘As the exhibition was already over,’ said a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.’ Ravaging? ‘Thou still unravaged bride of quietness,’ as John Keats might have written, on his own Grecian theme. Perhaps the Vikings first suggested the confusion. J.R. Green in his Short History of the English People wrote of the Danes ‘ravaging along Loire as they ravaged along Thames’. But even if rape went with pillage, they were distinguished even then.
We all use one word sometimes when we mean another. This morning on the wireless I heard prevaricate when the speaker meant procrastinate. Some malapropisms become so popular that they generate new words irresistibly. Careen (from the Latin carina, ‘keel’, the part of a ship visible when you turn it one on side to clean or caulk the hull) has been used so often in the sense career that it has become quite established, at least in the United States. The Oxford English Dictionary names the guilty man first known to have committed this crime. ‘The cruiser “Vanator” careened through the tempest,’ wrote Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Chessmen of Mars (1922). This was the fifth of his novels about the adventures of John Carter and family, the same John Carter who has just lost Disney so many millions by flopping in the cinema. It need not have been a disaster, for James Cameron, the film director, said that in Avatar he had intended ‘something in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mould, like John Carter of Mars’. Avatar careered towards the box-office records; John Carter careened while critics picked barnacles off its bottom.
But there are less obvious shifts of sense that seem inexplicable to me. Another newspaper report mentioned a pub’s customers being ‘reassured that it is open despite flooding’. It meant assured. Just at the moment reassure is popular with PR companies that write weaselly letters to ‘reassure clients that our first priority is to meet the challenges going forward’. Not at all reassuring.
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