words

CleaveVerb

Here's another of those single-syllable words our crazy language uses to mean quite different things - an extreme example this one, since cleave can mean one of two total opposites. A "from" or a "to" might be the only guide. We don't have the excuse that our bastard tongue takes one meaning from romance languages, the other from Old English, since both are from the latter. We have dis- entangled the past participles (cleft and cleaved). But misunderstandings still arise. A Guardian critic said he thought the poet Geoffrey Hill was being purposely ambiguous when he said Henry VIII was "the arch cleaver of women". I should have thought he meant Henry beheaded them rather than that he loved them.

Nicholas Bagnall

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