archaic language

New is old and old is new

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I am looking for poems or other texts to set to music. I was browsing through The Norton Anthology of Poetry and saw a short poem by Geoffrey Chaucer (c 1343-1401) which starts:

Madam, for your newfangelnesse,
Many a servant have ye put out of grace.

So even in the 14th century people could be known for their fondness for novelty. Note that the word first applied to people, then later to things or ideas. I wonder what was considered ‘novel’ in those days.

I would have thought that newfangled was from far later. On the other hand, oldfangled is from far later. Merriam-Webster dates it from 1842. So newfangled is oldfangled and oldfangled is new(er)fangled. Nothing now is ever simply fangled, even Dracula’s dentures.

These days, Chaucer might complain about his madam’s new fangirl-ness. 

Not archaic, just plain wrong

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In 2016 the Australian government, then controlled by the centre-right Liberal Party (~US Republican/UK Conservative) introduced an automated debt assessment and recovery program for welfare recipients. This had a number of official names but was generally referred to as Robodebt. It was a total disaster in multiple ways and was discontinued in 2020. In 2022 the new centre-left Labor government (~US Democratic/UK Labour) announced a royal commission, the highest form of public inquiry in Australia. The commission’s report was released recently.

The government entity I work for is related to this, fortunately contributing to the scheme’s discontinuation. Some of my colleagues were indirectly involved . There is a link to the report on the main page of our intranet, so in an idle moment I clicked on it and browsed through the commissioner’s introduction. The last paragraph is:

Finally on the subject of language, the Commission staff are not to be blamed for the archaic forms of syntax “a number of people was” and use of the subjunctive “if he were” throughout the report. That is my doing; my staff did their best to correct what they were convinced were errors, only to have me stubbornly reinsert them. (I have grudgingly succumbed to the use of “their” in the singular.) (p ix)

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