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An elegy for the cold collations and border police demanding your papers

I have to confess that when I published the following tweet in early December, I didn't have any higher purpose than amusing myself and (perhaps) amusing others:

Of course, as a language fan, I am fascinated by obsolete words, idioms and phrases. That didn't mean, though, that I was actually considering writing a book(s) entirely devoted to seeking out 'the last people on earth' who used a particular form of words.

Then I received a tweet in reply, that made me think again:

George Miller is an experienced editor who commissioned two of my books (on Denial and on Judaism). He knows my work pretty well, and my interest in 'impossible' books. I'm pretty sure he was joking in his tweet. Yet even if he was, there was a kernel of something there that sparked my imagination.

There's certainly a gap in the market for a book that seeks out the last redoubts against linguistic obsolescence. Of course, there are plenty of books on endangered languages; they are often filled with pathos as they document the last speakers of dying tongues. There are also lots of books about archaic etymologies and extinct words. What I am not aware of, though, is writing about the endangered bits of a non-endangered language like English. Nor do I know of attempts to track down the last speakers of those endangered bits.

One of the reasons why such books (probably) don't exist is that researching them would be incredibly difficult. How, for example, would I go about finding the last people on earth who use a term like 'capital' as a complement (as in, 'what a capital idea!')? I don't think I've ever met anyone who used it, even when I was young and had met people who had been born in the late nineteenth century. You can't search for it's use in books over time through Google Books Ngram Viewer since the word itself is still in rude health; it's one particular use of it that's endangered (or even extinct).

There's another, more personal, reason why I would pause before embarking on a book about endangered terms: I would not want to contribute to the contrived, self-conscious use of archaisms. I have to confess to an occasional penchant for this - I love using the idiom 'a curate's egg' and I have been known to exclaim 'Jesus, Mary and Joseph' in trying times - but it's a pretty tiresome habit if you overdo it. One of the reasons why characters such as David Brent and Alan Partridge are such brilliant satires of a certain kind of middle-aged white man, is that the writers capture a certain kind of arch language, sometimes known as 'jemble'. It makes me wince to see Alan Partridge introducing his fellow DJ as 'Sir David Clifton of Radioshire' or to witness David Brent introducing himself as 'David Brent, my liege'. Because that could have been me.

So I have no plans to actually revive the endangered bits of English. But I do love the idea of tracking down the last regular - non-ironic, non-contrived - speakers of certain words, phrases and idioms as they march towards extinction. That project could raise all sorts of questions about how language changes and what is lost or gained in the process.

Here are some ideas 'chapters' in this 'book' (which may or may not ever happen):

Cold collation

I have never encountered someone using cold collation in the wild. In fact, the first time I remember seeing it in print was in this review from 2005 of the autobiography of the comic actor Eric Sykes, which contained the following paragraph:

Perhaps the prose in the book was dreadful, but was his use of cold collation necessarily evidence for this? According to Wikipedia (don't worry, I will do proper research if I ever write the book), a cold collation isn't necessarily the same as a buffet lunch. Rather it is a kind of improvised meal of cold cuts and other cold dishes. The term 'collation' refers to a light meal eaten on Christian fast days. It might well be then, that Sykes was actually writing accurate prose by distinguishing between a buffet and a cold collation.

It might well be that the extinction of certain terms robs us of a certain precision. Sykes was 82 at the time of his autobiography (he died in 2012), so why should he not use the right terminology for a particular meal? Why should we update our language as we age if doing so robs us of accuracy? Was Sykes raging against the dying of the light?

Your papers please

I have never been asked for my papers, or for my documents for that matter. In fact, despite being well-travelled I'm not sure whether I have ever been asked for my passport. What tends to happen is that I queue up to show my passport at the booth and there's no doubt about what I am expected to do.

To be asked for one's papers has certain implications. One is that proof of identification may take a number of forms, but all of them are fundamentally made of paper. Today, when drivers' licences are generally plastic cards and passports do not have paper covers, calling them papers would be somewhat odd. The other implication is that identification is something that needs to be asked for rather than being implicit in a certain context. That means ad hoc checkpoints and identity checks, perhaps conducted on a train, bus or street.

'Your papers please' is therefore a phrase that connotes both something archaic and something slightly sinister. You expect to hear it, perhaps, from a Gestapo agent or a dour secret policeman in East Berlin. There is, in fact, a game called Papers Please in which you take the role of a border guard in a distopian, dictatorial state.

It occurs to me, though, that there is a possibility that no one has ever demanded 'Your papers please' in the real world. There is a famous scene at the start of Casablanca where the police ask to see 'your papers'. Was this a translation of a commonly used French phrase? Or maybe it was entirely made up? We can't discount the possibility that we have been bequeathed a formula born out of Hollywood fantasy. (For what it's worth, in this famous WW2 checkpoint scene, the Gestapo man asks to see a passport, in German).

So to even begin answering the question of whether there is anyone left who asks for papers, we have to find out if anyone ever did.

That's enough for this edition of A Curious Miscellany. In a future edition I will explore other possible 'chapters' in the 'book'. This will include asking whether there is anyone left who uses the term 'gay' as in lively or happy. If there is, how much has homophobia motivated them to keep the term alive?