By Hook Or By Crook: A Journey in Search of English. David Crystal
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the road. It’sa splendid tourist attraction today.
Cobs turn up in all kinds of places. There’s another one on Anglesey, linking Holy Island to the Anglesey mainland. I suppose the most famous one in Britain is at Lyme Regis in Dorset, because it figured in Jane Austen’s novels and also starred in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman.
Cob – or cobb, as it is sometimes spelled – is a curious word. It has a remarkable range of senses, some dating back to the fifteenth century. At one time or another it has referred to a well-built man, a type of gull, a herring, a male swan, a stout horse, and a spider (think of cobweb). Small haystacks, loaves of bread, certain types of nut, the tops of maize shoots, and even testicles have also been called cobs, as have Spanish dollars (the famous ‘pieces of eight’), lumps of building material for walls, and small rounded stones for roadways, more commonly called cobble stones.
Which is where Lyme Regis comes in, for the cob there was originally made out of cobble stones.
The OED editors must have spent some time puzzling over this set of senses, but without coming to any definite conclusion. Are the meanings all related to each other, or do they have different points of origin? There seem to be three semantic themes involved. The notion of ‘large in size’ is there in such cases as the large men, swans, and horses – and probably also the pieces of eight, which were bigger than the average coin. The notion of ‘head’ or ‘top’ (compare German Kopf) is there in gulls and spiders and maize shoots. The notion of ‘something rounded or forming a roundish lump’ is there in most of the others.
It’s hard to disentangle these notions in many instances. Was it the male swan’s size relative to the female, or the rounded shape of its head, which caused it to be called a cob? And then there are the more abstract or figurative uses of the word, many of which are still found in dialects. To give someone a cob can mean to hit them. To have a cob on is to be in a bad mood. To get a cob on is to become sulky. I remember using those last two in Liverpool, where I lived as a teenager. But are these related to the other senses? Nobody knows.
At the end of the Porthmadog cob, on the left if you’re driving towards Portmeirion, is a small house where until recently you had to pay a 5p toll per car – an unusual practice, to say the least, on a British A-class road. It’s a legacy of William Madocks’ original toll, which helped rescue him from financial difficulty. But it is no more. The road was nationalized by the Welsh Assembly in 2005.
The opening paragraph of the old toll-board is a Roget’s Thesaurus of early-nineteenth-century vehicle names:
TOLLS TO BE TAKEN AT THIS GATE
For every Horse or other Beast of Draught drawing any Coach, Sociable, Berlin, Landau, Chariot, Vis-a-Vis, Chaise, Calash, Chaise-marine, Curricle, Chair, Gig, Whisky, Caravan, Hearse, Litter, Waggon, Wain, Cart, Dray, or other Carriage, any Sum not exceeding One Shilling:
For every Horse, Mare, Gelding, or Ass, laden or unladen, and not drawing, the Sum of Sixpence: but if there shall be more than one such Horse, Mare, Gelding, Mule, or Ass, belonging to the same Person, then the Sum of Sixpence shall be paid for one of them only, and the Sum of Threepence only for every other of them:
For every Drove of Oxen, Cows, or Neat Cattle, any Sum not exceeding Five Shillings per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:
For every Drove of Calves, Pigs, Sheep or Lambs, any Sum not exceeding Three Shillings and Sixpence per Score, and so in proportion for any greater or less Number:
And for every Person crossing or passing on Foot, without any beast or Carriage, any Sum not exceeding Two-pence.
The sign shows the eighteenth-century liking for capital letters on nouns considered to be important – Coach, Mare, Pigs, Horse, Berlin, Person, Chaise…, of course, as these are the critical factors; but also Number, Sum, and Foot, which the sign-writer felt needed extra prominence. The fashion for noun capitalization died out by the end of the century.
After you’ve crossed the cob, quite suddenly you turn right for Portmeirion. You have to be on your toes not to miss the turning. If you encounter a sign saying Penrhyndeudraeth, you’ve gone too far. That name means ‘headland with two beaches’. In 1998 it became the first broadband-networked village in the UK.
Actually, you don’t have to go as far as Penrhyndeudraeth. Another sign just after the turning tells you that you’ve missed it.
The road down to the village winds for a mile through woodland and into the car park by the arched gatehouse which is the entrance to Portmeirion. You pay to get in, unless you’re staying there, or dining in the hotel. But it’s worth every penny. You’d have to travel to Portofino to have a comparable experience.
In his account of the development of Portmeirion, Clough Williams- Ellis describes his creation as full of ‘wilful pleasantries, calculated naivetes, eye-traps, forced and faked perspectives, heretical constructions, unorthodox colour mixtures, [and] general architectural levity’. That’s exactly what it’s like. There is cheeky joy everywhere.
Noël Coward was one of many literary visitors. He stayed for a week in the Watch House, arriving one Saturday and leaving the next. In between he wrote Blithe Spirit.
I called in to the Prisoner shop, and bought yet another book on the subject. As I left, I said ‘Be seeing you,’ to the man behind the counter. He said, ‘And you,’ through a thin smile. The rest of his face held an expression of extreme pity.
A sunny day, and Portmeirion was full of tourists. It’s a small place, really, with one steep windy road leading down to the sea, and innumerable recesses and side turnings beckoning you towards intricately landscaped gardens and visually teasing ornate façades. On a tall pedestal, at the head of the long flight of steps leading to the harbour, is a bronze statue of Hercules, standing in for Atlas, in a heroic kneeling pose, carrying a huge stone globe on his shoulders. Prisoner aficionados would of course see this as an allusion to the huge bouncing balloon-entities, controlled by the Village guardians, that prevented people escaping.
Thomas Telford turns up in Portmeirion. A tall building overlooking the piazza was erected in honour of the bicentenary of his birth, in 1957. They call it Telford’s Tower. Today it is a self-catering cottage for three.
The compact layout of Portmeirion tends to push people towards each other. That day in June it seemed there were more English accents per square metre here than anywhere else in the world. And foreign languages too. I heard five in as many footsteps.
I walked down to the water’s edge, by the hotel. A group in front of me were speaking Welsh. Having been listening to so many English accents, it took me a bit by surprise. And yet this is a corner of the traditional heartland of Welsh. Once upon a time it would have been English that caused the surprise on the banks of Cardigan Bay. And indeed, in some Gwynedd villages English is still the exception rather than the rule.
Welsh has been the success story of the twentieth century when it comes to plotting the future of the world’s endangered languages. And endangered they certainly are. It is thought that half the languages of the planet, some three thousand in all, are unlikely to survive to the end of the present century.
That’s one language dying out somewhere in the world, on average, every two weeks.
About two thousand of those languages have never been written down. That’s the savage part. For when a language dies that has never been written down, it is as if it has never been. And that means the irretrievable loss of another unique vision of what it means to be human.
Many of those endangered languages have only a few dozen or a few hundred speakers. Welsh, by contrast, has over half a million. About a fifth of the people of Wales speak Welsh, and the numbers are steadily increasing. It is the only Celtic language to have done so well. The activism of the 1970s and the subsequent Language Acts, giving measures of protection to the language,