Back in the early 90s, when I was a young magazine journalist, I found myself working under the same roof as Punch magazine – that venerable old organ that had been the flag-bearer for political satire since the mid-1800s but was now slowly dying.
In a room downstairs stood the famous Punch table, centrepiece of many a Punch Lunch, where luminaries of the day would eat, drink, make witty remarks and carve their initials in the wood. I once sneaked in to take a look. The table (now in the British Museum) features initials like JT (James Thurber), WMT (William Makepiece Thackeray) and TGJ (yours truly).
I’m joking. Honest. I never.
Punch folded in 1992 – cause of death: not funny any more – and although Mohamed Al-Fayed attempted to resurrect it four years later, it was like one of those movie scenes where a murderer tries to make a corpse look alive by standing it up and making it wave. It was finally laid to rest in 2002.
But Punch did leave a legacy of terms that are common parlance today. The word ‘cartoon’, meaning a funny sketch – prior to Punch it just meant a preliminary drawing on a piece of cardboard (carton). Crystal Palace – the stadium, the place, the football club. It was in Punch that the giant glass edifice, built for the Great Exhibition in 1851, was first described as such. And best of all, the term ‘curate’s egg’ – meaning something that is fundamentally rotten but ok in parts.
This came from a Punch cartoon published in 1895, in which a bishop apologises to his curate for giving him a bad egg, and the obsequious curate replies, “Oh no, my Lord. I assure you that parts of it are excellent.” I expect BBC2 can pull together a programme in which an assortment of modern comedians explain to us why that’s funny.
Anyway, it came up this week because of the word ‘curate’ – a word that didn’t exist as a verb until the late 1970s but has become ubiquitous in the arts, meaning to put together a programme of live performers or exhibits. The Latin ‘curare’ (to take care of) gave us the noun ‘curate’ (as in the egg man), a carer of souls, and the more succinct verb ‘cure’.
But as early as the 17th century the word ‘curator’ started being used for the manager of a museum or library. And because ‘curator’ sounds like it must mean someone who curates, rather than someone who cures, the verb ‘curate’ was retro-fitted to fill the void where we had no other word for it. Which was timely, because it was soon followed by an explosion of arts and music festivals which all needed curating. And still do.
In fact, is there any better example of a curate’s egg than a festival line-up?
