As I hear... Apsley House and a rat

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32430, 17 October 1970, Page 15

As I hear... Apsley House and a rat

(By

J.H.E.S.)

When I last appeared here I flourished a new naughty word: “jumboise,” to enlarge the capacity of a ship. It had been discharged at Ampol shareholders in a report of their directors. This drew me to consider other malformed wmrds, and such I others as the over-used and abused escalate, the precise: meaning of which is seldom: clear, as it is used. To widen?; To raise? To intensify? To ' have adopted this word from military jargon is to have given us a vague word instead of half-a-dozen plain and precise ones. Today I saw in a shop window a placard announcing the “de-es-calation” of prices floor by floor. Were; the prices to be lower, floor; by floor, the highest at the; top? So, lower and lower, as ■ you came down (“de- • escalated”). I don’t think so. I’m sure the notion was, lower prices on all floors. But then “de-escalation" on all floors meant no more than lower prices everywhere; and the metaphor of a ladder, a descending scale from floor to floor, perished. So why not say in plain English lower prices everywhere.

I have been rereading The complete Memoirs of George Thurston by Siegfried Sassoon; and somewhere I came on his reference to the horrible jargon in which military reports and instructions were conveyed. We owe it a lot These “break - throughs,” major and minor, and so on. And in this context I tangentially fastened on “closure.” I found the word in an industrial supplement to “The Press,” in an article about a new sort of capsule, applied to a second or closing cap or a new sort of seal. This word “closure,” I was told, was the word given by the manufacturers to this closing cap. I was aghast; I was flabbergasted. Closure, for a final cap. You see, this word pretty well died in English, having meant something like “enclosure,” and it was

1 drawn up from the past when the House of Commons, last century, found the need to terminate time-wasting, repe'titious debate and devised a procedure to do it. A name Iwas required for this procedure; and somebody had the brilliant notion to revive the old word, “closure,” last used by Chaucer and Caxton. ISo “closure” it was; and I until recent years this term has been used in its parliamentary sense, and in that only. But the decay of language and profligacy of those who professionally use it, always preferring the long to the short word and leaning to an unfamiliar one without regard for its special sense, have brought it about that “closure” is now current in the press where t “close,” “closing,” “stoppage,” “shut-down,” or the like would have been obviously right. So you may read of the closure of a mine or a road or a dispute or a boxing-match. I deplore this, because it destroys the special sense of a word and gives us no compensation. * » *

A young man I know was recently in London, where he visited Madam Tussaud’s wax works, and observed that Sir Keith Holyoake’s mask of 1968 “still showed unwrinkled skin” (which I suppose to imply the thought that the wrinkles must by now be appearing), and Aps-

ley House, the mansion of the first Duke of Wellington. Remarks: “Plenty crockery and silverware, and Dutch seventeenth century paintings ... I like that form of painting. Silk ‘wall-paper.’ Gilt ceilings and lovely chandeliers. I can understand why Wellington was peeved with cost over-runs on its remodelling, for £42,000 is a solid excess cost (The U.S. Army is clearly not the originator of military white elephants.)” Why Apsley House? Because it was originally built (1771-8) from designs by the brothers for the Lord Chancellor Apsley, the second Lord Bathurst. In 1808 the Marquess Wellesley acquired the house; and in 1816 his brother, the Duke, began to live there. This house is (or was) sometimes called “No. 1 London.”

I now come in my lethargic way to the reason why I quote and supplement my correspondent’s notes on Apsley House. The reason is a happy coincidence. I laid down the letter and turned back to my rereading of Kingsley Martin’s “Editor” and as I turned the page I came on this:

According to the story, the aged and formidable Duke of Wellington once told the Mess that during the Peninsular war his servant had opened a bottle of port and a rat had jumped out. The awe-struck silence was broken by a young officer, more valiant than discreet. “It must,” he murmured “have been a very large bottle.” “No,” said the Duke, *it was a damned small bottle.” “Then,” said the trembling officer, “no doubt it was a very small rat?” “It was a damned large rat,” roared the Duke. I append a note to his story. I read Kingsley Martin’s version of it to a friend with whom I converse on the telephone. When I closed, as above, she said: “And what happened next?” Am I right in concluding that women are never satisfied by the end of a story but always want to know the sequel? « * » I heard from a bloke in dirty jeans, with shoulderlong hair, this observation on international affairs: “So Nasser’s in the cold, cold ground.” Noel Coward could not have put it better.