Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 20 October 2007

When the postal strike was in full spate we heard quite a bit about ‘Spanish practices’, or at least we did sometimes.

issue 20 October 2007

When the postal strike was in full spate we heard quite a bit about ‘Spanish practices’, or at least we did sometimes.

On one morning the BBC referred to ‘Spanish practices’ in the nine o’clock news and merely to ‘practices’ in its later bulletins, presumably for fear of offending any Spaniards who were listening in.

‘It used to be old Spanish customs in my day,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair like a badger on a sunny winter’s day. But he was right about the grey years when unions would come out over the slightest disagreement over demarcation. They stayed true to old Spanish customs.

To be sure, practices is well enough established in a pejorative sense, having been in use for the past 500 years. In parallel it applied to a professional avocation. John Aubrey says in his Brief Lives that the notable lawyer John Selden (1584–1654) ‘had got more by his prick than he had done by his practice’, for, according to his version of events, the Countess of Kent ‘would let him lie with her, and her husband knew it’.

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