‘You rocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,’ exclaimed my husband, misquoting Shakespeare as though it were an improvement. In English a rock is different from a stone and it can be annoying when news reports, especially on radio and television, speak of crowds throwing rocks.
This Americanism has not yet ousted stones in British English. ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the dialect of the people in the westernmost states, to call small stones rocks,’ wrote the Revd Samuel Parker in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838).
My husband had been set off by a report from France. During the disorder there, the offices in Nice of the leader of the Républicains, Eric Ciotti, were attacked. In a rather mangled sentence, the BBC news website reported: ‘Mr Ciotti said people threw rocks at his office overnight on Twitter.’ What Mr Ciotti had said on Twitter is that his offices had been caillassée, ‘stoned’. There was a picture of a broken window to prove it, and a message scrawled in marker-pen: ‘La motion ou le pavé.’
Reuters reported that his office ‘was ransacked overnight and tags were left threatening riots if the motion was not supported’. I’m not sure it was ransacked, which implies entry causing damage. And the statement that ‘tags were left’ must have puzzled readers who had not seen the picture of the scrawled message. A tag is an identifying mark written as the signature of a graffiti artist; the same word is used in French.
The reference in the Nice message to le pavé was translated in some reports as ‘paving stone’. In English that suggests a slab of York stone paving. In French street-protest culture, the stones normally used as missiles are smaller squared stones, properly called setts in English, but referred to sometimes as cobbles, which really denotes rounded stones.
What worries me is that rock as a label for a throwing-stone (like cooking-wine) is gaining a foothold that will lead to its wider use. Soon it may be: ‘Sticks and rocks may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.’ When that happens, words jolly well will hurt me too.
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