‘Lord Rutherford,’ said my husband, looking up from the Telegraph and taking a glug of whisky.
He might as well communicate by flags, because ‘Lord Rutherford’ means a letter to the editor from a reader who knows no more about a subject than he does about atomic physics. This time it was marmalade. ‘I was told by the French owner of a well-known brand of jam,’ wrote the reader, ‘that the origin of the word marmalade is in fact the English mispronunciation of the French phrase ‘‘maladie de Marie’’. Mary, Queen of Scots, would visit her close ally the French king by sea from Scotland rather than risk the wrath of Elizabeth I by travelling through England. Mary suffered awful sea-sickness during the often choppy crossing. Eating portions of bitter Seville oranges was found to be an effective remedy for this illness.
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