This week I’ve been somewhat obsessed with draughts – and I don’t mean the board game. Or a quantity of drink. Or the depth of water a boat needs to float. Or preliminary drawings or conscription for that matter (because they’re spelt differently). But wow, what a multifaceted word that is.
No, I’m talking about those evil little jets of freezing air, those feral offspring of the Beast from the East that insinuate themselves through cracks and keyholes and turn houses into igloos, solidify mercury and make my wife cross with me for not being a heating engineer.
So this is an appeal (not quite on the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Ghouta perhaps, but possibly of greater significance to humankind in the long term): will someone please explain, once and for all, how warmth works?
We’re constantly told that warmth escapes a house through the walls and windows, right? So here’s my question: if all the warmth is going out, how can the coldth be coming in? Strikes me they’re making up the rules as they go along. If warm air expands, why isn’t my house a constantly expanding haven of warm air, pushing those freezing zephyrs away all the time, like a big, bloated bouncer keeping those spiteful little oiks out of the club? If it’s like a revolving door, is the coldth coming in to fill the space vacated by the warmth or vice versa? Either way, why don’t they just agree to stay where they are? Why is the coldth so eager to get in? So many questions. Why? What? Whaaagggh?
And while we’re at it, why isn’t coldth a word?
Do you ever stop to wonder why we say warmth instead of warmness, but say coldness instead of coldth? Well, I do. Both -th and -ness, along with a number of other suffixes that turn adjectives into nouns, like -ity, -tude, -hood, -ship and -cy, evolved during the Middle English period, when the rule of linguistic law that the Romans were so good at appears to have gone out the window.
England was a green, stormy melting pot of Henrys and Richards and Edwards and the occasional Matilda, all squabbling over things like legitimacy and the correct name for pig meat, and the language, like the throne, was anyone’s guess. Prefixes and suffixes vied for supremacy like Yorks and Lancasters. Any time they got round the negotiating table, it must have been like a rap battle between Gollum and Daffy Duck, one half with their darkness and boldness and fearsomeness and seriousness, the other all truth and strength and length and breadth. No wonder they preferred to settle their disputes on the battlefield. There was less chance of getting covered in spittle.
These days, it’s not acceptable to hit someone over the head with a spiky club for saying ‘broadness’ instead of ‘breadth’, or ‘accurateness’ instead of ‘accuracy’, or ‘normalcy’ instead of ‘normality’, but it should be. And if anyone asks why, just point them to the War of the Roses.
Like coldth, it doesn’t end well.
