Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.
But then the ghost went on to say that unfortunately, because of local rules, it wasn’t allowed to go into detail, which, to be frank, was a let-down.
Four hundred years later, however, I too have a soul-harrowing story to unfold and I’m under no such injunction. So I shall tell all. Prepare to have your young blood frozen, with especial emphasis on making ‘each particular hair to stand on end’ (note: the way the separate syllables of that line, so clearly divided, mimic the upstanding individual hairs. Shakespeare could write.)
To the story. Four of us were holding a private squash tournament last Thursday afternoon. All four of us were of pensionable age. That in itself is a harrowing thought, but I digress.
I stretched for a backhand, bending the right knee so as to reach into the corner of the court and I yelped. I yelped at an acute and sudden pain in my right hip. I had no choice but to stop playing and limp to the pub where I applied the universal first-responder medication which did its usual exemplary job.
But that night, in bed, at the hour when ghosts leave graves to go a-haunting, I rolled from my left side onto my right and let out a scream that would have sent those same ghosts gibbering back underground. My hip hurt.
I tell you this not in search of sympathy, but only as preamble to the horrors which are to come. Those porpentine quills are about to stand on end. (How Shakespeare knew about porcupines when he had spent his life in Stratford and London, I can’t tell you. Nor yet can I tell you why he called them porpentines, a word not to be found in the dictionary today. But I can tell you that the wonder of the line lies in the word fretful. Fretful porpentine: once heard, always remembered. That’s genius. )
So anyway, later that morning I hobbled to - well, let me use the jargon of the day - a healthcare provider. I had been there before but since my last visit it had been taken over by a larger healthcare provider. As a result it now had corporate branding, uniforms and, oh joy, oh rapture, new forms to fill in. (Does your heart lurch at the word ‘forms’? Can you sense the climax approaching? Is each particular hair beginning to twitch?)
The Patient Information Form asked for the usual guff, then sought to probe my medical history. ‘Please answer fully,’ it instructed, ‘and tick the boxes that applies to you.’
But even that illiteracy did not prepare me for what came next:
Have you developed, been diagnosed with, or do you take with any of the following:
The mangled grammar, the weird ‘take with’: where was this going?
The options were listed alphabetically. Number two was Anticoagulants. Had I ever developed anticoagulants? I had not. Had I been diagnosed with them? I had not. Did I take with them? Not that I knew of. Ditto drugs. Ditto steroids. Best of the lot was a tickable box beside the word Smoker. Had I developed, or been diagnosed with, or taken with smoker?
Now I realise, of course, that the language is subject to constant butchery. It is butchered by newsreader clichés, political euphemism, academic pomposity and moral propagandists.
And despite all this it survives and even thrives. And it does so, as I shall never tire of saying, because it is governed by simple evolutionary rules: what is good and useful endures, what isn’t, withers, though it can sometimes take a while. So there is no need to bemoan the state of the language.
Nevertheless, does it not defy belief, not only that someone can commit this Patient Information Form to paper, but that it can then pass up the corporate chain, be read, approved for printing and distributed by an outfit that hopes to be entrusted with looking after my wellbeing?
Seated in the waiting room I must have snorted. ‘Can I help you?’ asked the pleasant receptionist. ‘No no,’ I said, ‘just my porpentine fretting.’
‘That’s nice,’ she said.
