Here’s a word that has fallen from grace somewhat in recent years. When I was a lad back in the 70s, the idea of personal grooming for blokes was as alien as straight trousers and 24 hour electricity. Beards were straggly monstrosities for collecting beer and peanuts, not carefully crafted facial topiary, preened with exotic oils. Sure, there were ads for Brut 33, which did require Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper to strip down to the waist, but men in pants adorning the pages of glossy magazines? Nah.
Fast-forward half a century and even I’m beginning to feel the need to take some pride in my appearance. Some. I came into town this morning and, too late, realised I was wearing a pair of trainers splattered with concrete. I look like an escapee from a gangland hit. Once upon a time such scruffiness wouldn’t have bothered me. “Let em deal with it,” I would have told myself. But now I feel self-conscious. So what’s happened to me?
Grooming, that’s what. I have watched with a mixture of awe and bewilderment as each new generation of blokes has adopted with increasing vigour the Greco-Roman values of self-beautification: the clothes, the perfumes, the hair, the skin care, the physique. It has become, it seems, every young man’s solemn duty to turn himself into an Adonis.
There’s nothing wrong with making the world a more beautiful place – although the line between an Adonis and a Narcissus is a fine one. It’s something women have been expected to do forever. And so I too have changed my attitude to personal grooming. Society, it’s fair to say, has groomed me to groom myself. “Could have fooled me!” I hear them say – them that know what I look like, with my concrete shoes. But it’s true.
So it’s a bit of a shame that over the same period that I’ve been conditioning myself to shave more often and wear matching socks, the word ‘groom’ has also assumed a much more sinister meaning.
The original word, ‘grome’, had nothing to do with grooming in any sense that we use it today. Back in the 12th century, it simply meant a boy or young man. The French had the wonderful word ‘grommet’, which meant a serving man. And as that serving man was increasingly asked to tend to their master’s horse, so the word evolved to mean someone who looks after horses.
The original bridegroom, however, was not a man who took a curry comb to his betrothed, but simply a ‘bride’s man’, the ‘groom’ in this instance coming from a different Old English word ‘guma’, meaning a man. Somewhere along the line the two words melded into one, creating considerable embarrassment and confusion on many a wedding night, not to mention some surprising runners in the 2.30 at Haydock.
