Words: Perversion

THE RESPECTABLE broadsheets, notably The Independent and the Guardian, were quick to condemn the tabloid papers for hounding Mary Bell, and so they should have been. Roy Greenslade, in the Guardian, wrote of "the Sun's squalid stalking", which he called "a perversion of press freedom" - a good thing to say of a paper that spends much of its space revealing perversions of one sort or another. The word has a seedy flavour: if someone said they were writing a book on the subject, you would probably assume without asking that the perversions in question were sexual, though that was not Mr Greenslade's sense of the word.

Pervertere in Latin meant to cause a complete U-turn, implicitly the wrong one. In English, perversion was mostly to do with religion at first, or with the laws of nature. A pervert was the opposite of a convert. "Perverse and foolish oft I strayed," said the hymn-writer, Sir Henry Baker, in 1861. Then along came the sexologists and used it as a metaphor for those who had strayed in a different sense. And now, when we hear of people "perverting the course of justice", it sounds faintly like a borrowing from sexology. Perversion has become a sort of mirror-metaphor, throwing back a reverse image of itself.

Morals had nothing to do with it as far as the sexologists were concerned, though it may or may not be significant that the opposite of "gay", as used by gays themselves, is still "straight". One of the first definitions of perversion in the OED is "turning aside from truth or right" - which, at least till the Renaissance, almost certainly meant "the way, the truth and the life" of the New Testament. People who write about someone "leaving the straight and narrow", as one sometimes sees it spelt in the newspapers, are confusing Christ's "way" with his other remark about the gate into Heaven being strait and the road narrow.

Nicholas Bagnall