No prosecco? Inconceivable

Forget Brexit. If only, I hear you sigh… Nope, it appears that the latest battleground between Britain and its European neighbours – or at least one of them, sunny Italy – is the wine cellar. Or the prosecco store, to be more precise.

Forget all that heart-warming, reassuring stuff about taking a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and other such selectively-comforting quotes from the Good Book. Wine and most other kinds of booze, being composed largely of sugar and fruit acids and other such treacherous ingredients, are increasingly terrible for teeth, mollicating molars with every swirl round the hitherto unsuspecting gums of this great nation of ours.

British dentists, it would appear, have taken a particular scunner at the fizzy Italian favourite, probably because it is currently outselling everything else on the market for fun beverages and holds the top spot as the go-to booze for women and young people, who, as we know, cannot be trusted to know what is good for them unless they are told forcibly from above.

This has even been described in some quarters as an “Anglo-Saxon crusade”, which is a phrase to make you grind what remains of your beleaguered gnashers, if ever I heard one. Now, I have a lot of time for dentists and take the view that one should do anything and even pay anything to keep one’s own teeth; and I can quite see that an acidic modern diet plays its part in the wearing down of one’s choppers over time. But singling out poor old prosecco, mainly on the grounds, I suspect, that it could loosely be described as foreign muck, is a bit strong, don’t you think?

Other kinds of tooth-rotting, enamel-stripping thirst-quenchers are, after all, available. We have, on this subject, little or no room to talk.

I have one word to say to all this. Vimto. I rest my case. Or crate. Depending on how you order your tooth-rot of choice.

What’s in a word?

I know nothing about finance. It’s one big, scary mystery to me. My own paltry arrangements are complex enough so when it comes to getting my head round the notion of the public purse, I haven’t a hope.

I am right at home calculating the value and meaning of words, however, and it tickles me no end to see how the use and misuse of descriptions and applications can end up twisting and outright changing what someone is trying to say. Or maybe not trying to say…

There’s a lovely scene in a great film called The Princess Bride, where the villain cannot accept he is being foxed at every turn and reacts to every set-back by labelling it, loudly: “Inconceivable!” His henchman, a depressed Spanish swordsman played by the magnificently world-weary Mandy (he’s a bloke; it’s short for Mandel) Patinkin says to him: “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Imagine my joy, then, when I discovered that there is a technical term for one word that has two completely opposite meanings. (I’ll get back to the financial connection in a minute; stick with me here.) It’s a contronym or a Janus word. Examples include left (meaning either remaining or departed); dust (you can remove dust or add it); oversight (you can look over something or overlook it) and cleave, where you can cut something open or bind it together. It comes over, I have to admit, as the kind of verbal equivalent of disappearing up your own exhaust. Particularly aptly in the times in which we live is sanction – either to give permission for something or impose a penalty – so I suppose that gets me back to following the money. I told you I’d get there in the end.

What actually brought all this musing to a head was my deep confusion over the use of the word “competitive” in the world of business. Being competitive is usually regarded as a good thing and a state of affairs to which all would-be wealth creators in the great global economy should aspire.

But it’s another of these terms that appears to me to be full of contradictions and that’s something that those who bandy it about freely, when talking about livelihoods and living conditions, never seem to be able to – let alone want to – address.

Competitive – in relation to reward, pay, wages, salaries – has two completely different meanings and applications. At the lower end of the scale, it means having to accept less money and worse conditions, the excuse being that businesses must keep costs down at all, if you’ll pardon the almost-pun, costs. At the top end of the scale, however, it seems to mean a builtin entitlement to more money and better conditions as an incentive to attract “the best people”. How did that happen? Strikes me, in a jaundiced kind of way, that a bit of creative role reversal might not go astray. Or at least a recognition that the contradiction exists and needs straightening out.

But then, maybe that word doesn’t mean what I think it means…

British dentists, it would appear, have taken a particular scunner at the fizzy Italian favourite...

Picture: Getty Images. If the negative press on prosecco is to be taken as some kind of “Anglo-Saxon crusade”, we must surely resist.