Chums who ensure that, a year on, I’m still not lost for words

Colin Randall

• Last Updated: November 14. 2009 12:36AM UAE / November 13. 2009 8:36PM GMT

How do you keep a column about the English language going for 51 weeks and still have a couple of ideas up your sleeve on approaching completion of a full year, which necessarily coincides with the first anniversary of the appearance of The National’s Saturday edition?

The easy part of the answer is that since we read, hear and use words every day, possible topics are likely to occur at any time.

It is for editors and readers to judge how successfully My Word has identified those topics, which usually need a little thought before they can be turned into a column stretching to 600 words or more. Whatever judgement they may reach, some of those readers and editors have proved saviours on odd occasions when it seems anything I could possibly have to say about words has already been said.

From Dubai comes an interesting point from Tom Bell-Wright, an Englishman with an identity so complicated that he describes himself as “a sort of Anglo-American expat”.

Mr Bell-Wright writes: “Anything you can do to find a substitute for the expression ‘holed-up’ would be greatly appreciated by this reader. It has to be one of the ugliest constructions ever to gain almost general currency.”

I cannot disagree beyond suggesting that even the most passionate admirer of the hyphen should accept that holed up, if it must be used at all, has no need of one. But it is certainly a grating construction.

Some professional users of words may feel it is racier to report that someone has been holed up in a secret location, though it is hard to see why they cannot simply report that he or she hid there. In passing, I would say it is my hunch that most holes are not in any case formed in an upwards direction.

The Merriam-Webster online dictionary offers 1875 as the year of origin of “holed up”, but nothing further. I may have to rely on help from the same American colleagues who responded to my reference on Facebook to last week’s column, where I reported the European etymology of another jarring phrase: “butt out” when leave or leave alone is the intended meaning.

“Butt-out”, wrote one colleague (his hyphen also raising an eyebrow), “was not in colloquial use when a few dozen folks dumped tea into Boston Harbor or when 40 or so more signed a note to King George III in Philadelphia three years later. But the phrase did become a catch-all to describe how Americans proposed the English to be involved in the affairs of those living on a stretch of North America’s eastern seaboard.”

Perhaps he will keep up the service and flesh out the origins of holed up. My reference books are in another country and a reasonably diligent internet search has yielded only definitions.

After his spot of mischief-making about the Boston tea party, and American attitudes to British foreign policy in the 18th century, My colleague indicated that irritation about the way words are used is not felt exclusively on the eastern side of the Atlantic. I had mentioned “Yanks” at Facebook to refer to Americans generally. He pointed out that while writing that “the Yanks were great partners to the British during two world wars” was factually correct, it may also upset those Americans who hail from below the Mason-Dixon line.

I sought to reassure him that my Little Oxford Dictionary supported us both (Yanks and Yankees being colloquial terms for anyone from the US to British English speakers, but only those from New England or the northern states to Americans). In a gesture of gratitude for his assistance with “butt out”, I have suppressed any temptation to ask whether he was referring to the 1917-18 and 1941-45 wars.

But as I celebrate my modest anniversary, it is right to acknowledge the extent to which I owe its occurrence to people who share my fascination with words.

Colin Randall is a contributing editor to The National and may be contacted at crandall@thenational.ae