Foreign friends

From Bonbon to Cha-cha, edited by Andrew Delahunty

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Druin Burch

Lucy Letby and the killer nurse I worked with

On the spine of From Bonbon to Cha-cha shines the silhouette, in gold leaf, of a dancing couple, which makes the volume look a little vulgar on the shelf. This is no mistake. The Strictly Come Dancing triumph of celebrity over expertise is to be applied to marketing dictionaries. The first edition of this item was published in 1997 as The Oxford Dictionary of Foreign Words and Phrases. That’s too dull a menu to entice today’s drinkers of machiatto and chompers of ciabatta.

Books on words are big business and there is a dictionary war between rivals. Oxford, with a history of subsidising lexicography, more or less willingly, now seeks to monetarise its computerised verbal capital. It draws on a database that includes a two-billion-word corpus of English usage (of which 100 million are the word ‘the’).