I know I can be horribly judgmental at times, and I don’t mean this to be one of those times, but I could not suppress a shudder while reading a book by a South Africa-born author in which scholars are “pouring” over their books.
This phrase conjured up images of bespectacled students weeping buckets over illuminating texts that moved them to tears, which would be commendable except that the word that should have been used here was “poring”.
The word “pore” — not the noun meaning a hole in the skin but the verb meaning “to gaze intently; to look with close and steady attention or examination” — is of unknown origin, says the Online Etymology Dictionary. It dates back to the early 1200s and is thought to stem from the Nordic-derived Old English word purian, meaning to investigate or examine.
While principle settled down to live a life of righteousness, principal appointed itself head of everything.
Poring was undoubtedly what was meant in the context of the book I was reading. If you must know, it is called Marion Lane and the Midnight Murder and was written by a young South African called TA Willberg.
Ms Willberg’s book transplants JK Rowling’s Hogwarts from a fantasy castle into a grimy warren of tunnels beneath postwar London, where student “inquirers” (a fancy name for detectives) learn the secrets of mechanical gadgets rather than magic.
It is a moderately enjoyable tale but a little more inquiry into the secrets of language would have been nice.
Poring is not pouring. As it stands, we are asked to imagine the students of Miss Brickett’s detective agency leaking eye-water over the scholarly tomes that describe how to make a mechanical hummingbird sing, or something of that ilk.
This is not the only error in the book. It also confuses “principal” with “principle” (when giving a character the designation of principle engineer). As I may have mentioned before, it is easy to confuse these two words.
Principle comes from the Latin principium, which means “beginning” or “origin”. The plural, principia, meant the axioms or foundation of a discipline. Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in Latin in 1687, continued to be known as simply “The Principia” even after it was translated into English (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) in 1728.
Principium took a different road. In the 1650s, the singular word “principle” began to be associated almost exclusively with goodness or morality. A principled person is the sort you want as your bank manager — or school principal, for that matter. A principled beauty queen would mean it when she wished for world peace.
While principle settled down to live a life of righteousness, principal appointed itself head of everything. This is not so surprising when you consider that despite their physical similarities they have different fathers.
Principal is from the Latin principalis — “first in importance”. Trace this backwards and you get to princeps, a chief or leader, whence cometh also princes and princesses.
There are no princes or princesses in the book about Miss Marion Lane. And unfortunately there is yet another mix-up, this time between “personal” and “personnel” — with reference to an army employee.
All these crimes committed against words beginning with “p” are of course forgivable. They might be mere typographical errors that the editors and proofreaders of the book did not pick up.
I cannot damn anyone who mixes up p-words. In its previous print incarnation, this column was called “the pedant class”. Many readers misread this as “the pendant class” and that is certainly not a hanging offence.
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