Mind your language | 3 April 2010

Hot cross buns we now get all the year round, but it’s funny how unaware we are of the Christian origins of ordinary words.

Hot cross buns we now get all the year round, but it’s funny how unaware we are of the Christian origins of ordinary words. Criss-cross is in common use since it handily expresses a specific meaning. I’ve seen it recently in a piece by Frank Gardiner about being shot and a travel article about Venice (where canals do the criss-crossing). Foreigners have to be less specific I think, with sillonner in French using the metaphor of ploughing, as surcar does in Spanish, which also uses cruzar like to cross in English.

Criss-cross is nothing but Christ-cross, as it used to be spelled. The reference is to the cross at the beginning of the alphabet on a child’s horn-book. The cross was usually a cross patté, like a Victoria Cross. From it, the alphabet took the name of Christ-cross-row. ‘Must we forget Christ’s Cross, as soon as past the Alphabet?’ asked a homilist in 1659. Puritans recoiled from it as from a mince-pie: ‘The beginning of the letters is that most profane, superstitious and Antichristian Letter which they call Chriss-Crosse.’ Wordsworth in ‘The Excursion’ wrote of ‘Infant-conning of the Christ-cross-row’, but the usage went out with the horn-book. The wooden horn-book, with a handle at the end, held the alphabet behind transparent horn.

Thomas Morley in A plaine and easie introduction to practicall musicke (1597) gives this little rhyme: ‘Christes crosse be my speede, in all vertue to proceede, A, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, & t, double v, v, x with y, ezod, & per se, con per se tittle tittle est Amen When you haue done begin againe, begin againe.’