Long Live Television

As a paedagogue - it is a glib profession - I used glibly to ridicule 'mongrel' words, partly Greek (for example) and partly Latin. I remember pontificating to my IV Latin Set 1 (the only Lower School teaching I condescended to do in my grander latter decades) on the iniquities of "Television". "It should", I cheerfully asserted, "have been either Proculvision or Teleopsis". (Quick as a whatsit, a perky little Hebrew chappie from the ghettoes of Hove raised his hand: "Father, I shall always say Proculopsis". Needless to say, three years later he was snaffled up by Balliol.) "Homophobia", of course, had me in paroxysms of fury.

Now I've got my comeuppance. I've just been browsing, in the Classics department of Blackwell's, through a new book on the Greek of the Papyri. One of the collected papers surveys mixed-race words; and, apparently, there were an awful lot of them. hyponotarios; vexillophoros; protopatrikios; architabullarios; you name it. A sugkellios was apparently a monk who shared your cella -; that sounds like a slanggy short-cut, even nearly two millennia later, doesn't it? And there were plenty of Latin words in composition with with the Greek apo-, meaning an ex-. So I suppose I should start describing myself as an apopaidagogos. Perhaps even apoanglicanus.

A perennial disease of language is to forget that some word already embraces a particular notion and to add that notion anew and superfluously, thereby creating a dittography in sense (e.g. people forget that 'return' means 'go back' and so they add another lexical ingredient to convey the sense of 'back' and say 'he returned back to London'; or they 'reiterate again'). We get that in the papyri in coinages like sugkollegas.

Perhaps the people who did the Vatican Lexicon Recentis Latinitatis should have been more sympathetic towards the possibility of this sort of flexibility. I find it a diappointing book; too often it provides, not a deft one-word coinage but a cumbersome periphrasis ("machina quae does-something-or-other"). Just as, I feel, it is misguided for those concerned with the wordbag of 'Celtic' languages to feel they have to coin authentically 'Celtic' terms instead of just going-with-the-flow and adjusting appropriately the orthography of 'international' neologisms. That is what Middle Cornish unashamedly did, as anyone who peruses the Ordinalia or the Tregear Homilies will witness.

Vivat igitur Televisio.