On the level ... the House of Lords
Photograph: Martin Argles
I was once sat next to a rather intimidating young fellow (in the sense of academic officer) at a Cambridge college dinner. He was tremendously camp, sarcastic, and very hard to impress, so I found myself babbling and floundering. By the time dessert - a white chocolate confection - came round, I was reduced to commenting that white chocolate was interesting for being something that was defined by the absence of what you would think from the concept was the key ingredient. (This because white chocolate is chocolate, only without the cocoa solids).
The fellow looked at me witheringly. "I see," he drawled. "Rather like marriage."
This all came back to me as I followed the loans for peerages scandal this week. Because "peer" has two mutually opposing meanings. From Collins: "2 a person who holds any of the five grades of the British nobility: duke, marquess, earl, viscount and baron. 3 a person who is an equal in social standing, rank age, etc." The idea, clearly, is that the first set are held to be "equal in social standing" with each other, if not with the rest of us (I know it will come as a shock to Blogofile readers to discover that I am not, in fact, a marquis). But even that isn't true - the British nobility is a hierarchical system in which a duke outranks a baron.
We're not alone in this. The French, until those unhappy events of 1789 (which have now cropped up twice in a month), had "pairs de France". Both words are from the Latin "par" meaning equal and the fruits of that word in English show what an inventive language it is. English has several ways of forming nouns from adjectives, usually suffixes. We have -ness, -ity, -age, and, as we discussed a few weeks ago, -th. Starting with par/peer, English tacks on -age to make peerage, "the status belonging to a peer" and -ity to make parity, "the condition of being equal".
There's a great deal of philological treasure hidden in the set of English words relating to nobility, not least the peculiar fact that earl and king survive both from Anglo-Saxon politics and vocabulary, while most of the other terms are Norman or later politically, and derive from Latin etymologically. One gem I discovered only today is that the word nobility itself is from the Latin nobilis, meaning at its simplest "knowable", the idea being that nobles are well-known or notable (another case of language repeatedly ossifying the same metaphor).
Peer, before I finish, does have another meaning, as a friend cryptically reminded me when I said it might be the focus of this week's column. "Very good," she said, "you can talk about the visibility problems of the nobility." It took me, I should admit, a long time to figure out what she meant.
