SUE DE GROOT | I’ll level with you, put ma’am on my radar and I’ll pop you into bed with Abba

Beware of poems that come in the night. 

In my case that means beware the person who is in my company when I’ve crossed the half-a-glass-of-ethanol-too-many line and start hauling dusty old volumes of poetry off the shelf for tearful renderings of my half-remembered favourites.

I won’t regale you with any of these now (suffice it to say Larkin figures large) because I’m writing in the middle of the afternoon and that half-a-league limit is still some way from being breached.

What I will share is the horror of going on a search for poems about recondite subjects in the middle of the night, as one does when challenged by someone equally inebriated who does not believe that there can exist any poem about the sub-Saharan ibis.

There is, of course, a poem about everything, and so I won this bet by finding one about the hadeda, which is the colloquial name by which we in SA know the sub-Saharan ibis — Latin name Bostrychia hagedash — listed in the Roberts bird canon as “hadada” rather than the more common “hadeda”.

The poem I found was a terrible piece of doggerel about palindromes and birds. It might have worked only if one did not dispute the spelling of hadeda as “hadedah” (making a palindrome in that it is spelt the same both backwards and forwards).

This palindromic spelling, as any bird or language lover will tell you, is a complete abomination. It is a hadeda and not a hadedah (or hadada, regardless of what Roberts says). 

The bird itself is an abomination, according to some, but others are fond of the squawking harpies, so let’s not quibble or twitchers might get twitchy.

Twitchers and word nerds are perverse creatures. We rail against Americans who say airplane instead of aeroplane, yet we’re quite content to go to the airport instead of the aerodrome.

'Abba' spelt forwards is the Aramaic word for father, as well as a Swedish band whose anodyne lyrics get stuck in your head for days and drive your colleagues crazy. Play Abba backwards and Napoleon wins the Battle of Waterloo and the Queen of Europe walks French poodles instead of Corgis.

There is still the odd club called a hippodrome, which sounds like a place where semi-amphibious ungulates gather to chomp and chat, but the original was a stadium for racing horses. It comes from the Greek words hippos (horse) and dromos (course). Meanings are mutable, of course: horses for courses.

Then there is the palindrome. This is not where that obsolete US politician Sarah Palin keeps her nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. It is a symmetrical word or phrase that retains the same spelling — though not always the same meaning — when written backwards.

“Abba” spelt forwards is the Aramaic word for father, as well as a Swedish band whose anodyne lyrics get stuck in your head for days and drive your colleagues crazy. Play Abba backwards and Napoleon wins the Battle of Waterloo and the Queen of Europe walks French poodles instead of Corgis.

“Madam”, a word with all sorts of negative connotations, is also a palindrome. From madam we get the unhappy truncation “ma’am”. 

As anyone who has watched The Crown will know, in the UK (the one where the Duke of Wellington beat Napoleon), the queen is first addressed as Your Majesty and thereafter as Ma’am, which some subjects still insist rhymes with “farm”, prompting Buckingham Palace to issue a protocol in 1990 begging for it to rhyme with “jam”. No doubt a Palace hand intervened in the Oscar-winning film The King’s Speech, where the future Queen Mother says: “It’s ‘ma’am’, as in ‘ham’.”

In SA, ma’am always rhymes with lamb and sounds like the nasal bleat of an adolescent sheep. In my high school, women teachers were known only as ma’am, which could cause confusion, given that none of us could remember their actual names. 

Say the PT teacher sent you to tell the English teacher that the maths teacher needed a lift because the science teacher had borrowed her car. You’d say: “Ma’am, ma’am says please can ma’am give ma’am a lift because ma’am has ma’am’s car.”

Perhaps not having to remember teachers’ names left our brains free to absorb the rules of osmosis, but there can be no earthly justification for the strident, unmusical “ma’am”.

It doesn’t sound any better when employed by men trying to sound like JR Ewing in his libidinous youth. “Howdy, ma’am” as a pickup line is no more charming or refined than “Howzit, babe”. In fact, it’s worse.

Ma’am is an atrocious word, whether it is spelt backwards or forwards. I’m not sure if Abba is any more tolerable. I once had a T-shirt made with the slogan “I saw Abba at the Palindrome”, but I’ve never worn it because I’m worried people might read it the wrong way.