ALL THAT LITTERS

The Pedant Class and Your Stars

MANSPREADING is a word that was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in August 2015. That’s just eight months ago, in case you don’t feel like counting backwards on your fingers. How many other words can you think of that have so rudely pushed their way between far more entrenched but clearly less robust words during the past year?

Manspreading is defined by the OED as “the practice whereby a man, especially one travelling on public transport, adopts a sitting position with his legs wide apart, in such a way as to encroach on an adjacent seat or seats”.

The word may be new, but the practice most certainly is not. In an exhibition at New York’s Grand Central Station last week I saw a poster created in 1946 by Amelia Opdyke Jones. It reads “Don’t be a seat-hog” and shows a person doing exactly what we now know as manspreading.

Ms Opdyke Jones, a freelance advertising artist who designed a series of posters for The Subway Sun, provider of public service messages to those who used New York’s underground transport system, might have been too well-mannered to use such a crass word as manspreading (it makes me think of a gooey fleshcoloured paste between two slices of bread at some sort of macabre Halloween picnic) but she is widely credited with coining the term “litterbug”, which appears on some of her other works of art.

“Litterbug” caught on because it rhymed with “jitterbug”, a popular dance movement in the years after World War 2. I did not know until accidentally seeing this exhibition of posters when or by whom the word had been invented, but coincidentally — or serendipitously, depending on your predilections — a few days after returning from the US I happened just as accidentally on a column published in 2010 by the Word Detective, which is a website aimed at those of us who love language.

The Word Detective did not mention Amelia Opdyke Jones, but it did delve into the origins of the word “litter” and how it evolved to mean both rubbish that is thrown away as well as a regal chair or bed on which important personages would recline while being carried aloft on the shoulders of other, less important personages. CS Lewis’s The Horse and his Boy contains reference to this sort of litter. Fortunately the copy I read as a child was illustrated, or I’m sure I would have thought the noble ladies were somehow being carried around on top of a mobile rubbish dump — which, when you look at the state of my car, is not a physical impossibility.

Whoever the word detective might be, in this essay he or she points out that “litter” has a third and a fourth meaning, the third being a batch of baby animals and the fourth that granular substance we pour into plastic trays so that cats can ignore it and complete their evacuative processes on the bathroom floor next to it instead. My cats are particularly fond of ignoring an attractive variety of litter allegedly made of silicone crystals … or perhaps silicon chips, which might account for its price.

Word Detective, while touching on these things, is more interested in the fact that all these litters stem from the same Latin origin, lectus, which was a bed or couch. The litters on which CS Lewis’s fictional aristocrats reclined were beds, of course, but so was the straw scattered on the stable floor or in a box to make a bed for a horse or hedgehog. As happens, nouns morph into verbs and “litter” became the act of chucking stuff about, or away.

The word “litterbug” is no longer as fashionable as it once was, because most people these days pick up their own refuse. Let’s hope the manspreaders catch up. LS

My cats are particularly fond of ignoring an attractive variety of litter