Crystal clear and semiotic
AWORD protector I may be, but I don’t see it as a sign of impending doom when people refer to this column as the “Pendant Class”. Far from being offended, I find it rather flattering.
The word “pendant” comes from the Latin pendere , “to hang”, which also gave rise to pending, impending, depending and appending. In the 1550s, “pendant” began to be used to describe the dangling part of an earring, or a gemstone attached to a necklace.
So I’m not going to be precious or pedantic about the difference between pedants and pendants. I like to think of people hanging on my words, although I’d rather not have them hanging from my ears. I also like the idea of being strung with gems. (Best boiled and mashed with butter, I find.)
Speaking of precious, now there’s a word that has suffered badly, mostly at the hands of writer JRR Tolkien, movie director Peter Jackson and actor Andy Serkis, who provided the voice of Gollum in the blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings.
It is almost impossible to say the word precious anymore without hissing. Saying it the way Gollum did — “We wants it, we needs it. Must have the preciousss. They stole it from usss. Sneaky little hobbitses. Wicked, tricksy, false!” — turns precious from a word meaning dear, beloved, of great worth, into something far more sinister. You could speak about your precious children with great affection, but saying, “My precioussssss children” makes you sound like the witch from Hansel and Gretel.
There is, of course, the other side of precious, which, in the marvellous tradition of English inconsistencies, means the opposite of valuable — as in: “There’s precious little of that doughnut left” or “Take your precious cubic zirconia and shove it”.
Then there is “semi-precious”, a word that deserves compensation from the international word crimes committee for the abuse heaped upon it. “You aren’t good enough to be precious, but tell you what, we’ll make it up to you by calling you semi-precious. Maybe no one will notice.”
“Semi” is a ridiculous prefix for things that can’t decide whether they are semi-Arthur or semiMartha. How can a house that is firmly attached to another house be “semi-detached”? A semi-circle is nothing like a circle. It’s a halfmoon. Why not just say so? Calling a gemstone semi-precious is as insulting as calling a person semiskilled or semi-literate. You might as well just say “useless”.
It is probably too late to save precious and semi, but something can surely be done for diamonds. I don’t know about you, but they are not my best friend. I’d feel like a bit of a pathetic loser if they were. Nor are they for ever. You might give them away, sell them, drop them behind the fridge by mistake, get tired of them and develop a liking for emeralds, or even start wearing useless stones, such as amethysts, instead.
Poor old diamonds. Not only are they cut to pieces, falsely valued, embroiled in wars and besmirched with deeply flawed slogans, in their rough state they are compared to unsavoury characters. What we really need is a sapphire, which in Renaissance times was believed to be an antidote to stupidity.
A lovely word, and one we hardly use anymore, is “lapidary”, from the Latin for stonecutter. A lapidary could be a person who works with precious stones, or the place where the precious stones are worked with, and I really should add something there or my fellow pedants will complain about the appended preposition.
Lapidaries deserve a brilliant comeback, if you ask me. “Jeweller” just doesn’t have the same ring, does it?