Latest despatches from the Dictionary Wars bring news of Oxford’s words of the year, a counterblast to last week’s words from Collins dictionaries. Collins’s winning word was single-use — feeble, I thought. Its runner-up, gammon, is on Oxford’s list too. But the Oxford champion word is toxic. This, with its connotations, is interesting, but not so interesting to me as a runner-up: cakeism.
In November 2016, an aide to Mark Field MP was photographed in Downing Street with a handwritten note about Brexit reading: ‘What’s the model? Have cake and eat it.’ I thought this a splendid aim by the British negotiators. The Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Xavier Bettel, did not. ‘They want to have their cake, eat it, and get a smile from the baker,’ he told reporters. Mr Bettel’s alternative motto was ‘No cherry-picking’ (a metaphor that in English dates only from the 1960s).
This was not the first formulation of British aims in terms of cake.
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