Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 26 February 2011

Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below average,’ the agricultural news used to say, when papers ran such items.

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David Cameron’s mind, though, runs more on technological than agricultural metaphors: ‘We must think in terms of an escalator, always moving upwards, lifting people out of poverty,’ he said in 2006. In that year, Labour claimed already to have lifted 700,000 children out of poverty. But, since the measure of poverty was relative, their little heads kept sinking down again beneath the surface, like lost souls in Dante.

Being lifted sounds a very passive experience for the potato or for the escalated pauper. It is reminiscent of being pulled from the rubble. That is what happens to people, or victims, after earthquakes, if they are lucky, sometimes a week or more after hopes have faded.

Pull is a funny word, being related to words, in a tangle of Germanic languages such as West Frisian and Faroese, meaning ‘to shell peas, finger, poke around, rummage, pluck’. The Icelandic form of the word could also mean ‘to have sexual intercourse with’. That sense of pull is in common use in America, although in Britain it tends to denote the preparatory stage of picking up a suitable partner.

I have not read of anyone being pulled from poverty, although some are apparently pulled down by poverty. Perhaps being pulled from anything is too violent for comfort. If you remember the scene in Man of Aran (1934) where the man catches his wife by the hair to stop the wild sea washing her away, he later apologises for pulling her by the hair. She tells him not to mind, but one can’t help wondering whether the poor would be so understanding, while the pulling from poverty was actually going on.

No, the hoped-for effect for the poor is more like that experienced by Sydney Fletcher (Bristol-bred) of the Eurydice in Hopkins’s poem about the loss of that ship, when ‘a lifebelt and God’s will/ Lend him a lift from the sea-swill’.

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