A Dog’s Life Our new humbled PM may be mincing his words
Something’s happened with humble. ‘I am absolutely humbled and honoured,’ said our nice new prime minister when he got the job. Really? Let’s begin with humble pie.
As every schoolboy probably doesn’t know, to eat humble pie is to grovel. It is to admit one’s fallibility and seek forgiveness. And it has nothing to do with humble.
Humble pie began as umble pie, with umbles being the less culinarily attractive parts of a deer — the entrails and organs. So servants and their ilk ate umble pie while their lords and masters ate the venison. It is understandable, then, how the word acquired an etymologically unjustified.
The true humble derives from the Latin humilis meaning lowly. And it retains exactly that meaning in English when we talk of someone of humble origins; they come from lowly stock, and have no advantages of birth,
An extension of that idea is the second meaning of humble, which is modest. Humble people don’t think especially well of themselves, don’t put themselves above their rightful station. Indeed they tend to do the opposite. Humility is having a realistic estimate of one’s own importance or influence or talents. It’s an attractive quality
(In contrast, is the ironic use of humble. When anyone begins ‘in my humble opinion’ they don’t mean it. They think they’re right. They’re just pre-empting a charge of arrogance. This is false humility. Tricky thing, language.)
Directly from the Latin comes the verb humiliate. To humiliate someone is to lower their status, cut them down to size, to embarrass and reduce them. Similarly from the English comes the verb to humble, and it means pretty much the same thing. “The Crusaders humbled the Highlanders in a 10-try romp,” reads the usual headline. To humble isn’t quite as fierce as to humiliate, but it’s pretty darn close.
With all that in mind let us now return to the words of our jaunty new prime minister. (They used to say you knew you were getting old when policemen looked young. What about when prime ministers look fresh out of school? His nickname, Chippy, seems bang-on. He reminds me a little, and in an entirely agreeable way, of Alfred E Neuman. And as a former redhead,
I must congratulate him on his hair. When I was his age, mine was already a memory.)
Chippy has achieved the aim of everyone in politics, whether they admit it or not. He’s mounted the throne, become number one, ensured his name at least a mention in the history books, and thus achieved a form of immortality, and we all seek immortality in one way or another.
He has good reason to be proud. He came of humble origins — Hutt Valley, state education, no hint of a silver spoon — and his peers have elevated him to the top job. He has been honoured, as he acknowledged. Yet he also claimed to have been humbled, and humbled, as we have seen, means lowered in status, beaten down, humiliated, which is the opposite of what had just happened. What on earth can he have meant?
Well now, he isn’t the first to do this. People receiving awards are often heard to say they are humbled. The reasoning, I suggest, goes somewhat like this.
They have heard of people visiting a paediatric ward, say, and seeing little children with cancer or disabilities cheerfully making the most of the little they’ve got and the visitors saying, rightly, that they feel humbled. In other words, the visitors realise their own low moral status when compared with the courage and determination of the afflicted children. It’s a legitimate use of humbled.
A just-appointed prime minister, or a just-awarded actress, however,
"He has good reason to be proud. He came of humble origins — Hutt Valley, state education, no hint of a silver spoon — and his peers have elevated him to the top job. "
does not feel of lowly moral status. They feel exalted, elevated. At the same time they are aware, and admirably so, that though they have the right to crow, and indeed are crowing internally, it is unseemly to be seen to crow. Nobody likes a boaster. To boast, as Trump does without fail and without justice, is to put yourself up and your audience down.
So the speaker fumbles for a way to avoid looking smug and reaches for a formula that they have heard before. They say they are humbled. They aren’t. They just want to appear modest. The intention is wise, but the English is plain wrong.
I wish the new prime minister well. I hope the role he always sought proves to be all he hoped. But I also hope he takes a little more care with his words.