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On the spine of From Bonbon to Cha-cha shines the silhouette, in gold leaf, of a dancing couple, which makes the volume look a little vulgar on the shelf. This is no mistake. The Strictly Come Dancing triumph of celebrity over expertise is to be applied to marketing dictionaries. The first edition of this item was published in 1997 as The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases. That’s too dull a menu to entice today’s drinkers of machiatto and chompers of ciabatta.
Books on words are big business and there is a dictionary war between rivals. Oxford, with a history of subsidising lexicography, more or less willingly, now seeks to monetarise its computerised verbal capital. It draws on a database that includes a two-billion-word corpus of English usage (of which 100 million are the word ‘the’).
To harness the facility and resources that computerisation brings, Oxford has made great efforts in popularisation, hiring fluent writers to make daunting subjects palatable (Simon Winchester on the Oxford English Dictionary; Michael Quinion on obsolete words; Jeremy Butterfield on current usage; Countdown’s own Susie Dent on lexicographical developments).
This bid for popular appeal is discernible in From Bonbon to Cha-cha, with entries such as the jocular nil carborundum illegitimi, a cod-Latin phrase that we learn, not all that enlighteningly, ‘was in circulation during the second world war, though it may possibly be of earlier origin’. Another new entry is in less fishy Latin: e pluribus unum, which is ‘the motto of the United States’. We are not told that the phrase appears (almost) in a pseudo-Virgilian poem of the first century on the making of a sort of cheese and garlic paste: ‘color est e pluribus unus, / nec totus viridis’ — out of many comes a single colour, not entirely green. This is not to suggest that the committee of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that met to contrive a seal for the United States had that Latin poem in mind. Franklin wanted the motto ‘Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God’, which would suit al-Qa’eda just as well.
In any case, in 21st-century Britain, though we no longer understand Latin, we can comfortably put our tongues to a name for the paste in that Virgilian poem. Pesto we call it (a contraction of the Italian pestato, ‘crushed’, as with a pestle), unless we take our holidays in Provence, in which case we call it pistou.
Fashions in food change as quickly as those in dress. Pashmina figures in this edition, though absent in 1997. The big 20-volume OED has caught up with it too, fetching from the archives an advertisement from the Times of 1865 for ‘the poshmina cloth coat’. Poshmina is nice, a version tailored for Mrs Beckham. All this pashmina philology is just in time, for I saw two pashminas for £5 being hawked hopefully from a barrow off Oxford Street for the austerity Christmas market.
Because you read about non-fiction
Also by Christopher Howse
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