How words can be gained or lost in translation: Wyn Drabble

Wyn Drabble is confused over the origins of the phrase "turn to custard". Photo / NZME

Opinion

Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, writer, public speaker and musician. He is based in Hawke’s Bay.

There are a number of words which effectively sum up something which otherwise would take many words to express. There’s probably a word for that. Some are new/made up and others are borrowed from other languages.

German has given a number of words to the English language – kindergarten, kaput, strudel, dachshund, delicatessen, to name a few – but the best have been seamlessly adopted into English because there is no equivalent English word; we don’t even tweak them and we don’t translate them. I suppose you could even say we have stolen them.

Two especially good ones are doppelganger (a ghostly double of a living person) and schadenfreude (pleasure derived from someone else’s misfortune). For the second one it took six unstolen English words to explain the meaning of the one German word. No wonder we stole it. Danke schon.

Zeitgeist is another good example.

But the newish word I’ve just discovered is not German; it is a made-up word but does the job that doppelganger and schadenfreude do. It is the brainchild of author Cory Doctorow, a technology journalist and fiction writer, and it certainly has similarities with the two examples above; it is multisyllabic and it says a lot in a single word.

The word covers the slow decay of things that are good or at least okay. That’s a rather broad definition so a few examples should help: grocery prices and the supermarket duopoly; marketing fluff; New Zealand’s public transport systems; the skyrocketing of airfares during the school holidays; chocolate blocks reducing in size but staying the same price; new packaging of your favourite biscuits which contains fewer than the old pack.

Its creator invented the word initially to explore ethics and society in the digital era and in particular the rise and fall of social media platforms which offer more and more enticing offers but then start cutting corners and boosting advertising so the whole thing starts to turn to custard (more on that phrase soon) and lose customers’ interest.

The word – and don’t read on if you are a tad prim – and these words are providing a buffer zone, is enshittification. It has already become popular; I’m just a little behind.

But let’s head back to the custard phrase. There are plenty of synonymous expressions – go pear-shaped, go down the toilet, go haywire – but I found turn to custard difficult to research. Most sites seemed to agree it’s a Kiwi expression (which I didn’t know) but I could find nothing about its origins.

I accept that I tend to limit research to 10-minute chunks but surely that should have been long enough to find out how that expression came about. If anyone wants to devote more time to the research, I would certainly appreciate your sharing the findings.

Another phrase caught my attention this week. It was on a roadside billboard advertising a local drama production called Beyond Reasonable Doubt. Yes, we all know the phrase from the legal world but seeing it there in such large letters got me wondering how such a lame phrase made its way into the necessarily very exact world of legalese.

What exactly is reasonable and who decides? And, in a similar vein, what exactly are 12 good men and true? I’ll guarantee your picks would differ from mine. Surely the legal profession owes it to the justice system to provide more precise use of language.

So, those are a few language issues you might like to think about and even share your views on.

Alert readers might notice I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Could this be the beginning of the enshittification of my use of language?