The Archbishop has a stuff

Life in Malta is becoming increasingly stressful for the linguistically pernickety. As I recover from Queens Mary, Green Mary’s, Bart University and the bullet-ridden corpse of a drug-dealer, I learn through Times of Malta that the new Archbishop will use “his stuff when faced by the wolf”.

In his homily, Archbishop Scicluna said that to tend the flock of the Lord was now his call and duty and he would seek to achieve it with word and deed as well as love for everyone, while using his stuff when faced by the wolf.

What stuff, I thought, wondering whether he would be chucking boxes of clothes and DVDs and magazines at “the wolf”.

When in doubt, go to Maltese, because this kind of rubbish is always the result of listening to a speech in Maltese and then translating it literally.

Stuff = staffa (because of the pronunciation)

The wolf – let’s not even bother going there. The metaphor doesn’t work in English, but idiomatic translation appears to be an alien concept.

But back to that stuff – which is, of course, staff. This is quite clearly the result of a pronunciation problem, because most Maltese people pronounce ‘staff’ like ‘stuff’ and not as it should be pronounced, which is stah-f. So then they get all confused when writing on the hoof: staffa/staff/stuff.

Nobody who pronounces stah-f the way it should be pronounced would ever put it down as ‘stuff’, even when translating from the Maltese stuff-ah.