Dulce et Decorum?

Our honorary-officer group occasionally takes time off from holding drunken meetings and counting vultures and gets down to serious work. Just the other day, we wandered through indigenous forest, arduously identifying trees.

As we were so employed, one of the chaps stopped and, in triumph, pointed at a tree, shouting, ‘Podocarpus latifolius!’

‘Are you all right, old chap?’ I said. ‘Have you been at the Harry Potter again?’

‘A real yellowwood, you can tell by the leaves’, he said, looking at me as if I were an imbecile.

While I’m conscious of the possibility of getting into seriously hot water with the Garden Club, let me make my point: what’s wrong with calling a real yellowwood a real yellowwood?

Botanists have not yet relinquished their Latin taxonomy. They argue that Latin is essential for communication between practitioners speaking different first languages. It is also important for classification. Inexplicably, lawyers claim the same thing, which is complete rubbish: they speak Latin because they love pretentiousness.

When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they established French as the language of court, destroying, almost overnight, the good work of Alfred the Great. English evolved anyway among the commoners, but the beau monde looked down at any upwardly mobile nob speaking anything but French.

More than three hundred years later, Henry IV was the first king since the Conquest to use English in all official communication, but it wasn’t until 1525 that a second powerful fetter on the language’s progress was finally broken, when William Tyndale translated the Bible from Latin into English. I know, I know, he was burned at the stake for his efforts (in my case, the bien pensants of the Garden Club may not consider that a bad idea).

Are all people who speak French or Latin either snobs or religious despots? Of course not, but I remain resolutely suspicious of attempts to use either when a perfectly good and intelligible English equivalent is available. It nearly always is.

Juliet told Romeo that ‘that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’. Whether we call it Solanum mauritianum or bugweed, it would stink as much.

For my part, ceteris paribus, I shall continue to tell parsley trees, starry rice-bushes, and horsewoods, not just by their leaves, but also by their wonderfully descriptive, English names: ‘tis the sweet and noble thing to do.