Valentine's

Help with the apostrophe, a secret love letter, and back slang

The day of love is nearly here. Are you sending a card? If it’s not pre-printed, you may feel that eek of uncertainty about where to commit the apostrophe in Happy Valentine’s Day (it goes just there).

As I’ve said before, you can be kind to yourself about this one, because:

in English, who hasn’t written a ‘hovering’ apostrophe in a Happy Mother’s Day or Valentine’s Day card because we’re not completely certain which side of the s it should fall?

My other advice for this kind of thing, is to take out the worry of making ‘a mistake’ and simply write the message a different way. How about the classic ‘To My Valentine’ or ‘Will you be my Valentine?’

You could go with what’s thought to be one of the first such messages ever written, a letter dated 1477 from one Margery Brews in which she wrote to her beau as ‘my right well-beloved valentine’ and signed off as ‘your Valentine, Margery Brews’.

Whatever message you choose, I recommend at least penning it yourself, unlike this ‘gentleman’, who presumably got his secretary to write it:

The message reads: Best love and kisses [from signature]. | I am writing for [name] because he has no time.

Even worse, this card wasn’t sent for Valentine’s but for St Catherine’s Day (the front side says ‘Vive Ste Catherine’), the 25th November, when young single women in France used to pray to Saint Catherine for a husband. Let’s hope the Miss on this card didn’t land up with this guy. (Actually, it’s not clear to me who sends St Catherine’s cards … maybe this one was actually from a family member or friend? Whoever you are, make time to write the message yourself!).

More romantically, on a recent postcard forage I found a secret love message written backwards! When I got home, I tried for a while to decipher the cryptic card by squinting at it but couldn’t solve the puzzle so I went and got a mirror and revealed it that way. Breathtakingly exciting! What’s even more lovely is that the message was written to a postcard collector (I know this because I own a small stack of their postcards and some of them say simply, ‘Here’s a P.C. for your collection’). This one must have been particularly special.

The message, sent to Thomas in 1905, reads:

evod eltrut ouy read tseraed yM
evol I uoy tub esle eno on serehT
uoy evol I sa em evol uoy fI
owt su trap llahs htaed tub gnihtoN
eulb steloiv eht der sesoR
uoy era os dna teews snoitanraC
siht uoy sdnes ohw ehs si os dnA
ssik a evah lliw ew teem ew nehW

reve srouY

My dearest dear you turtle dove
Theres no one else but you I love
If you love me as I love you
Nothing but death shall part us two
Roses red the violets blue
Carnations sweet and so are you
And so is she who sends you this
When we meet we will have a kiss.

Yours ever

Last night I watched the first episode of the new series of Channel 4’s First Dates and one of the guests, Justine, asked her date if he could say words backwards, because she could. Just last week I’d been asking my partner Lee if he remembered back slang from school days. I could never do it, but for some of my friends it seemed to be the easiest thing in the world and they could hold whole conversations like that, fluently. Perhaps I’ll try to learn. Is there a Duolingo for that?

From Wikipedia:

Back slang is an English coded language in which the written word is spoken phonetically backwards.

Back slang is thought to have originated in Victorian England. It was used mainly by market sellers, such as butchers and greengrocers, for private conversations behind their customers’ backs and to pass off lower-quality goods to less-observant customers. […] Some back slang has entered Standard English. For example, the term yob was originally back slang for “boy”.

Back slang is not restricted to words spoken phonemically backwards. English frequently makes use of diphthongs, which is an issue for back slang since diphthongs cannot be reversed. The resulting fix slightly alters the traditional back slang. An example is trousers and its diphthong, ou, which is replaced with wo in the back slang version reswort.

In 2010, back slang was reported to have been adopted for the sake of privacy on foreign tennis courts by the young English players Laura Robson and Heather Watson.

A true love language.

Pip x

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