The other day MEP Godfrey Bloom lost his UKIP whip for referring to a group of female party activists as ‘sluts’.
Since I wasn’t there I didn’t have a chance to verify the validity of that description. However, my previous observations didn’t give me the impression that UKIP conferences are ideal hunting grounds for good-time girls.
However, if Mr Bloom has information to the contrary, he’s duty-bound to post the names and phone numbers of the ladies in question on his website, to enable the lads with conservative, anti-EU leanings to authenticate or disprove his claim.
It turns out Mr Bloom didn’t mean it the way it sounded. “It was a joke,” he said, “and most people in Britain have a sense of humour.”
I must belong to the humourless few, for I can’t for the life of me see how calling someone a slut is funny, justified or not. What’s the joke, Godfrey?
Now we get to the crux of the matter. It transpires that Mr Bloom is an etymologist of no mean attainment. He used the word not in its current meaning, but in the original one, dating back to the early 15th century, when it was spelled ‘slutte’. “It means you’re untidy, you leave your kit lying around,” he told BBC’s Newsnight.
This makes his invective less offensive, though it still falls short of being a knee-slapper.
Anyway, the whole thing got me interested, and not just because both meanings of the word presuppose a lady ‘leaving her kit lying around’. You see, in my student days I was made to take an exam in the history of the English language, which was the only exam in six years that I failed and had to re-sit.
The examining professor gave me an English word, can’t remember what, and asked me to identify its origin. I was then supposed to show how the word evolved from Old English to Middle English to our time, specifying the exact time and cause of each change.
My answer demonstrated a great deal of creativity but precious little knowledge. The professor commended me, somewhat facetiously, on the former and failed me for the latter. Having then spent a few sleepless nights swotting up, I managed a B in the replay.
In spite of that traumatic experience, I share Mr Bloom’s keen interest in comparative etymology. His predicament got me thinking.
What is it about the combination of the letters s and l? Many languages use them in words conveying something or someone dirty, both in the hygienic and amorous senses of the word. Some of those words are clearly cognates, but most aren’t.
Just look at English. We begin with ‘slovenly’, ‘slime’, ‘sleaze’, ‘slush’, ‘slob’, ‘slop’ and proceed to ‘slattern’, ‘slapper’, ‘slag’ – and of course ‘slut’.
Now the German for ‘slime’ is Schleim, which is an obvious cognate. However, I can’t discern an immediate link between ‘slattern’ and the German Schlampe, which means the same thing and features the same two letters.
Or look at French. The word for ‘dirty’ is sale, and the one for ‘slapper’ is salope – the same two offensive letters keep cropping up, and in the same sequence. Add to this the Russian word for ‘slag’ (shlyukha), and one becomes really puzzled.
Someone who, unlike me, passed the requisite exam in one go and then developed his interest professionally may have all the answers. I don’t. I just wonder if there exists some hidden onomatopoeia to which we aren’t privy.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the phonetic shape of a word has an intrinsic link to its meaning. This may or may not go back to the Indo-European protolanguage, whose existence has never advanced beyond being an interesting hypothesis.
Or if one is so inclined, one could trace the whole thing back to God who must have created language roughly at the same time he created man.
Of course men then used language for sinful purposes, such as chatting up women in the hope of turning them into, well, sluts. God got angry and scattered them all over the world, with the subsequent disintegration of their single language: “Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.”
This may be a loose interpretation of Genesis, and even a looser one of historical linguistics. But this is as far as I can go. Any further attempt to slake my thirst for arcane knowledge, and I begin to slouch in my chair, my jaw goes slack and I fall asleep. Slowly.
And then I see a Sloanie slut in my slumber.