Joe Bennett: Flautist, flutist, what's a man to do?

Is a person playing the flute a flautist or a flutist? Photo / Getty Images

It doesn't take much to irk the older man. This morning this older man had been awake only half an hour and, as is my habit, was driving the dog to the wharf for a wander. And on the radio someone from the Insurance Council of New Zealand was talking about I can't remember what and a sudden fear came over me that if I listened to just 10 seconds more I might succumb to catalepsy, crash the car and die, which wouldn't have bothered me too much because at least I would be free of the Insurance Council of New Zealand, but it would have been unfair on the dog.

So I turned to the Concert Programme, that haven of newslessness, where nothing changes, nothing ruffles the waters. And there an announcer was announcing a piece of 300-year-old music in a tone that could have come from any of those 300 years, and I felt a calm stealing over me, similar to what mad old Yeats claimed to feel on Innisfree where peace came dropping slow.

But then the announcer announced the name of the soloist and that soloist played a flute and therefore, by definition, that soloist was, and should have been described as, … altogether now on the count of three (and bellow it to make the heavens shake because we're up against the forces of illiteracy here) one, two three, a FLAUTIST.

(Oh bravo. What an educated readership we have on this page. I take back everything I may have said last week in the column that you didn't read on the subject of literary influence (and don't go looking for it now. It is too late. You used that page to light the log burner on Easter Sunday to fend off the oppressive gloom of godful shoplessness.))

Only, of course, the announcer did not say flautist. Now I am aware that the word flautist is irregular in its formation. One who plays an organ is an organist, a guitar a guitarist, a violin a violinist, and so on. But one who plays a drum is not a drummist and besides, irregularity is good because it reminds us that there is nothing pure or predictable about the English tongue. It's a happy hybrid, the bastard child of bastard children of bastard children. Its origins stretch back to the first grunt in the Rift Valley. There isn't a language English hasn't borrowed from and few it hasn't lent to. It is as rich and bright and various as mongrel blood. You can't dictate to it.

I still remember the first time I heard a flautist called a flute player. Why, I bellowed, why? Who are we pandering to here? Anybody hearing the word flautist in context would have to be a Trumpish cretin not to make the mental leap across the double-vowelled crevasse and land at the conclusion that perhaps, just perhaps, the instrument in a flautist's hand might not be a trombone, nor yet a set of tubular bells, but yes a bloody flute

And flute-player is such a neutered term, so ugly, clumsy, corporate, so bland and bloodless, so clearly chosen not to give offence that it's offensive. It is a crime against simplicity and euphony. Anyone who says flute-player should be seized, flayed and stretched on a frame and placed in the percussion section for the 1812.

But the announcer who did not say flautist did not say flute-player either. She said, at half past seven this morning, and I am not making this up, flutist. I'll say that again while you recover: flutist. What is an older man to do? I all but drove off the road.

The bastards have gone full circle. They ditched the word flautist because it was a little tricky for Trump-supporters, dallied with the hideous flute-player for a while, and have now, it seems, leapt back in with flutist in the hope that we've forgotten what the true word is. The gall of them, the nerve, the sheer unpardonable impudence. Shame on them, I say. Shame on them. I, the older man, senex ipse, am irked.

To lend authority to my irkedness (and you just know that I'm pronouncing irkedness with three distinct emphatic syllables) I have hauled out the granddaddy Oxford English Dictionary, the 22 volume monster with which you argue only if you do not value truth. And I have looked up the words flautist and flutist.

Flautist goes back to 1860. Flutist to 1603.