Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

Would you care to re-phrase that, George?

Michael Rundell

I was having a conversation with some teachers in Poland recently, and we got onto the subject of cultural allusions. English has quite a collection of names for 'amorous' men, all of them based on real or fictional characters such as Casanova, Lothario, and Don Juan. But the name of Romeo is also lumped in with this disreputable posse of seducers, and – as one of the group pointed out – this is hardly fair. As noted in the excellent Oxford Dictionary of Allusions (OUP 2001), Romeo's name 'can be used to denote a young man in love, though it is now frequently, and somewhat unjustly, applied to a womanizer'. The corpus data backs this up:

McCammont was convicted of manslaughter after Hove Crown Court heard she stabbed Joanne Thorns, 18, when they argued over Scottish romeo Paul McKeown.
Young's career is on a high this week as her new film comes out. But when she resisted the charms of Hollywood's legendary romeo [a reference to Warren Beatty] it hit an all-time low.
"I saw Slater heading out the door with some rug-chested young Romeo," Mr Hunter said as they got to the second-floor landing.
You could splash out on a kingsize Strata waterbed costing around £2,800. The firm has already offered Coronation Street romeo Reg Holdsworth one for his honeymoon.
Obviously he assumed that she had picked up some instant Romeo, and it was clear from his tone and expression that he condemned her as cheap and shallow.

For headline writers in particular, 'Romeo' seems to be interchangeable with 'Casanova':

Tyson's "ex" KO's romeo: JAILED boxer Mike Tyson's ex-wife knocked a foul-mouthed Casanova out cold.

All of which goes to show that language evolves in ways that are beyond our control. Romeo's name has undergone 'pejoration' (that is, it has acquired a more negative meaning than it originally had), a process that occurs quite often with more general vocabulary: a commonly-quoted example is the change in the meaning of 'knave' from Old English (cnafa), where it simply means a young man, to its later meaning of 'rogue'. In much the same way, Mickey Mouse, the lovable and blameless cartoon character, now works adjectivally, as a synonym for 'insignificant', 'inferior', or 'not worth taking seriously'. A badly-organized company, for example, might be described as a 'Mickey Mouse outfit'. (The character of Noddy has followed a similar trajectory.)

In the case of Romeo and Mickey Mouse, it is not too difficult to trace the development of the newer, less flattering meanings. But it is much harder to see how the cowboy – that rugged and independent hero, once an icon of the old West – has now (in British English at least) become synonymous with dishonest practice and shoddy workmanship, especially on construction sites and in car repair workshops:

[The new law] is unlikely to deter the cowboy builders who "happen to be in the area" and take cash upfront to 'replace' your garden path or garage driveway
…all the latest on cowboy construction methods, including the three fail-safe ways of dealing with all building problems - stick Polyfilla in it, wrap Sellotape around it, or leave the problem alone
The Office of Fair Trading plans to speak to drivers who have evidence of rip-offs and shoddy repairs in an effort to put cowboy garage owners out of business
The Government has dropped legislation targeting cowboy hauliers and the dangerous 'death trucks' they operate.
The OFT might consider giving trading standards officers more powers to put the worst cowboys out of business
Prof. Erzinclioglu said cowboy forensic scientists were allowing the guilty to walk free and undermining the integrity of the criminal justice system

In British texts, cowboy collocates with builder almost as often as with boots and hat, and the collective noun bunch (a right bunch of cowboys) is well-attested.

In much the same way, words can undergo 'amelioration', acquiring more positive connotations than they started out with. 'Buccaneers' were once synonymous with 'pirates' (whose modern incarnations – though non-violent – are definitely outside the law), but the word now suggests someone who is bold, flamboyant, and adventurous: someone like 'Richard Branson, Virgin's buccaneering founder' (BNC). Which brings us to an interesting (and very topical) variation on this theme – a word whose current personality is wildly at odds with the historical facts.

Within a few days of the 9/11 disaster, George Bush reflected on the task that now faced the United States:

This crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while, but we will rid the world of the evil-doers

The president's choice of words could not have been more ill-judged, and he was soon obliged to retract the word 'crusade'. Yet – loath though I am to make any excuses for Bush – his use of crusade is understandable enough in terms of its usual connotations in the Western world. 'Crusade' of course originally referred to a Christian holy war ('a war for the cross'), and the image of the historical crusaders remains a very positive one. This has infused the word's more recent usage: a crusade now means a determined campaign to achieve something that you believe to be morally good. Corpus data provides plenty of evidence of crusades for peace, liberty, reform, justice, and democracy, and against poverty, drug barons, corruption, crime, and fascism. Nothing sinister here. We generally admire 'crusaders', who are typically characterized as 'tireless' and 'dedicated'. (Batman, of course, is also known as the 'caped crusader'.) Only a minority of instances hint at a religious dimension. Most crusades are motivated more by notions of equity and social justice than by religious conviction or fanaticism, and some verge on the banal:

The Campaign for Real Ale embarked in the early 1970s on its crusade to preserve and promote our disappearing beer heritage.

Yet the word does retain vestigial traces of its murky history. The adjectival form 'crusading' seems to enjoy the company of words like 'zeal', 'passion' and 'fervour', hinting at something more than simply 'fighting for a good cause'. For in reality, the original Crusades were not the romantic adventures that folklore suggests. As Bush's aides might have told him, these aggressive expeditions, though ostensibly aimed at recapturing the Holy Land from Islam, were in reality little better than expansionist adventures marked by genocidal atrocities on the Christian side. In the 11th and 12th centuries, it was the Christians who were the crazed, intolerant fundamentalists wreaking violence and slaughter on anyone of a different faith. By contrast, when the Muslim leader Saladin recaptured Jerusalem, he decreed that there would be no revenge killings and 'proclaimed the freedom of the city for worshippers of all faiths' (The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Tariq Ali, 2002: highly recommended). Indeed, just two or three years before Bush ill-advisedly spoke of a crusade, the Pope had publicly apologized for the Crusades of medieval times.

Now Bush has settled on a simpler formula: the 'war on terrorism'. Though – as we will probably find out before long – neither of these nouns is quite what it seems either.

Michael Rundell (michael.rundell@dial.pipex.com) is a lexicographer, has been using corpora since the early 1980s, and has been involved in the design and development of corpora of various types. As Managing Editor of Longman Dictionaries (1984-94) he edited the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Longman Language Activator. He is now an independent consultant, and (with the lexicographer Sue Atkins and computational linguist Adam Kilgarriff) runs the Lexicography MasterClass Ltd (www.lexmasterclass.com) , whose activities include workshops in corpus lexicography (www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/lexicom) and an MSc course in Lexical Computing and Lexicography (www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/MScLex) He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners (www.macmillandictionary.com).