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CALENDAR


Sunday 17 July: Sixteenth Sunday of the Year (Year A) Monday 18 July: Feria Tuesday 19 July: Feria Wednesday 20 July: St Apollinaris, Bishop and Martyr Thursday 21 July: Feria or St Lawrence of Brindisi, Priest & Doctor Friday 22 July: St Mary Magdalen Saturday 23 July: St Bridget of Sweden, Religious, Patron of Europe Sunday 24 July: Seventeenth Sunday of the Year


■ For the Extraordinary Form calendar go to www.lms.org.uk and look under Find a Mass


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Independently audited certified average circulation per issue of THE TABLET for issues distri buted between 1 July and


31 December 2010 is 21,858. Volume 265 No. 8904 ISSN: 0039 8837


THE LANGUAGE GAME


Scandalmonger’s noble art JOHN MORRISH


THE FIRST major casualty of the phone- hacking scandal was not a person, but an institution, Britain’s oldest surviving “scandal- sheet”. It’s a scandal. I have always had a soft spot for the News of the World, not in the nastily Murdoched form of recent years, but as the inky letterpress broad- sheet that my grandparents used to take, with its wonderful slogan: “All Human Life is There”. It was, too. Of course, it was full of “scandal”, which my Oxford Dictionary of English defines as “an action or event regarded as morally or legally wrong and causing general public outrage”. That applied well to the old paper’s investigations into adulterers, pederasts and satanists, pursued at a time when there was a clear public consensus about right and wrong. It applies, of course, to the phone-hacking


and copper-bribing of which the tabloid News of the World has been embroiled. I’m not sure, though, whether it applied to much of the paper’s content in the Rebekah Wade era: the emotions inspired by its celebrity cover- age were, as the famous legal formula has it, “hatred, ridicule and contempt”. I’m not sure there was public outrage: just Schadenfreude. Interestingly, given the waves of public revul- sion that have battered the Catholic Church over child abuse in recent times, the first “scan- dals” were religious. The word came into English from ecclesiastical Latin, via old French, with its ultimate source in an early Greek word meaning “trap”. Before Tudor times, the English “scandle” is recorded only in our old friend the Ancrene Riwle, a thirteenth-century guide to good conduct for the extremely devout. The Oxford English Dictionary (not to be con- fused with the confusingly named Oxford Dictionary of English, mentioned above) has as its first definition: “Discredit to religion occa- sioned by the conduct of a religious person”.


From the start, hypocrisy has been the essence of a decent “scandal”. The OED’s next notable citations are from


the 1582 Catholic Douay- Rheims Bible. By this time the word has come to mean some- thing more akin to “that which discourages belief”. In Matthew 13:41, where Jesus tells us what will happen at the end of the world, it has “… and they [the angels sent by God] shall gather out of his kingdom all scandals …” where the KJV prefers “they shall gather out of his kingdom all things that offend”. The other appearance is in only the first edition of Rheims, where “scandal of the Cross” at Galatians 5:11 (translating the Latin scandalum crucis) is later replaced by “offence” (1611) and the feeble “stumbling-block” (1880). But what of the secular world? In its early


uses, “scandal” here meant something that damaged one’s reputation, particularly a false accusation. It is used frequently in Shakespeare, who often turns it into a verb. Cassius tells Brutus that he is not the kind of person to fawn on men and hug them today and “after, scandal them”. By the mid-seventeenth century, the mod-


ern uses are well established. A “scandal” is an offence to decency. It also meant defamatory talk about such offences. The OED suggests “scandal” in this sense is etymologically iden- tical to “slander”, except that “scandal” does not imply that the allegations are false. A proper newspaper – which the News of


the World once was – promises its readers that its “scandals” are true: it knows that the most reliable defence against a defamation action is “justification” – proving something to be true. Producing a “scandal-sheet” (early twentieth century, probably American), as opposed to a gossip rag full of innuendo, is not an easy occupation. Indeed, it’s rather a noble one.


Glimpses of Eden


“EXCUSE ME, but I think you’re sitting in my seat.” I looked up blankly. It was the third time that I’d had to get up since boarding the


train. “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry,” the woman shrugged apologetically in return. We shared a weary smile as I struggled out of my seat to be caught up once more in the maelstrom of bodies all feverishly searching for somewhere to sit. I hadn’t realised that if you don’t reserve your place on CrossCountry trains then you’re liable to be the victim of a repeated game of not-so-musical chairs. Easier just to find a quiet corner and stand. The 09:31 Cross- Country Service south to Birmingham was not exactly proving to be an advert for train travel


36 | THE TABLET | 16 July 2011


when somewhere between Sheffield and Derby, something miraculous happened. Inside the carriage it was growing hotter and


hotter, and increasingly packed, while the smell from the adjacent toilet was growing less and less pleasant, but outside, the most wonder- ful pageant was unfurling itself. Rolling hills climbed to cool, wooded summits before tumbling back down again into dappled val- leys. Sudden bridges ushered us over wide, dark rivers whose banks were ranged calmly with willows. Cloud shadows raced one another across waist-deep meadows. A herd of cattle stood half in and half out of a pond where a heron continued its game of patience unim- pressed by our ridiculous speed. Jonathan Tulloch


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