A straightforward subset

Like Humpty-Dumpty, I sat on a wall and was amazed to see flowers growing out of the stone. I had seen these flowers before, I knew they were called Giroflée, but I didn’t know what they were called in English. The words “Wall, flower!” came floating into my mind and the feeling was like something dawning on me. I mentally clapped my hands. I told my French friends that in English, the first meaning of “wallflower” that comes to mind is a girl left leaning against the wall at a dance, when the boys or men come to pick their partners. In French the expression is “faire tapisserie” – to act as wallpaper. When I got the chance to look up Giroflée in the dictionary, I was delighted to find that sure enough, they are wallflowers. Intrigued, I googled around a bit and found a pleasing passage to the effect that the figurative usage is the same in German, and the “coincidence is purely coincidental”.

When wall & flower were juxtaposed in my mind, just after the pleasure of the dawning that I was seeing wallflowers for the first time, I felt downhearted, as if the word was reminding me of unpleasant experiences. The ‘poor me’ syndrome. But as I thought about the dancing classes at school, and the Sunday school parties you could be invited to or had to invite a partner to, I remembered some of my “cavaliers” (horseman, flippant, dancing partner…) Alasdair Cairns, Ian Niven (both of whom were butchers’ sons) and Jimmy Logan… I didn't feel particularly beautiful, but I wasn’t downright ugly either. There is no sacrosanct “past” – we re-write it every time we think about it, depending on the frame of mind we are in at the moment. And if My Story is open to interpretation, what about His Story?

Giroflée of course reminded me of girofle and the Body Shop mistranslation of Clover (Trèfle) as clou de girofle (cloves). Which took me to trèfles, one of the four suits in playing cards. Darn me if I could work out how they got “club” from “clover".

I eventually found the answer:
club, n., a suit in a standard deck of cards, from a translation of either the Spanish basto or the Italian baston (both are cognates of baton). Use of the term in English dates to 1563. The origin is not obvious because over the years the symbol on English decks of cards changed. English cards adopted the symbol used in French decks, where it is called a trèfle, or trefoil, but kept the old name club.

Listening to radio 4 I heard the word ‘flaccid’ - I know what it means, but it is not a word I have ever used - it is one of those words I lay no claim to. Not mine.

English is a language I use, but I don’t use all of it. My English is a subset of “English” – as I suppose your English is, too. In fact, nobody actually uses - passively or actively – the whole language. And yet we manage to communicate.

And if My English is a straightforward subset, what could I say about My French? I feel somehow “entitled” to use English as I please, because I was born in the British Isles, but I have no such sense of entitlement in French – I am a humble borrower, a mere uninvited guest… Which reminds me how impressed I was the first time I read Joseph Conrad – The Secret Agent. I found his use of language wonderful and was gobsmacked to read on the cover that English was not his native language.

Food scarcity and Zimbabwe are the main worries in the news at the moment.