Words: Irregularities

READING about 'financial irregularities' at Tottenham Hotspur Football Club brought a small but agreeable shiver down the spine. For the expression seems to imply more than it says. It has a certain unctuousness about it, a mealiness of mouth, suggestive of who knows what goings-on behind the prissy polysyllables. The proper body language to go with it is a finger laid to the side of the nose.

This must be because irregularity has two meanings. In its medieval youth it meant just what its etymology implied: a regula in Latin was a rule or example, and an irregularity was the neglect of it. But by the 17th century it was being used without any moral content. People began to speak of an irregular pattern, or an irregularity in the ground. Irregular teeth might offend a dentist, but there was no law against them.

Since Spurs did indeed (if I read the story right) break the rules, irregularities is just the word for what happened - in the first sense of it. But because the second, unpejorative, sense is now almost as common as the first, we may think there must be something euphemistic about it even when the first is being used.

Johnson's use of the word in his preface to the dictionary, where he writes about irregularities of spelling, hovers between the two. He meant the first sense (the rules had been broken) but could be taken merely to mean the second (our spelling wasn't uniform). By the 18th century irregularities could actually be a Good Thing, at least among the early romantics, whose Cult of the Picturesque admired whatever was sublimely asymmetrical and rugged. In the middle of the 19th century we find Lord Lytton describing the disarmingly eccentric Lord Derby (then Lord Stanley) as 'irregularly great', a phrase he pinched from Goldsmith. It still had a touch of the oxymoron about it, and in earlier times it would have been called a downright contradiction in terms, but he certainly wasn't accusing the future 14th earl of having taken bribes at the Colonial Office.