The Twelve Hates of Christmas

I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day.

12. Outside Starbucks a sign declared: ‘The holiday icons you’ve been waiting for are back!’ The icons were things like gingerbread latte, indicating that holiday meant ‘Christmas’, an unpleasant usage from America, where holidays are rare and they have invented one called Kwanzaa in case anyone feels left out. It just happens to be at Christmas. Besides being a religious image, icon now means a symbol on a computer screen. I dislike the attempt to make it mean ‘star’, as in a ‘gay icon’.

11. ‘The protestors sat or laid down,’ said a newspaper report when it meant ‘lay’. We have lost this battle. English speakers are incapable of distinguishing the forms of lie and lay.

10. I read that the King and Queen of Spain were ‘pelted with mud and rocks’. The author meant ‘stones’, not ‘rocks’, which are bigger and more deadly in Britain than they are in America.

9. In Donald Trump’s previous administration, ‘some of his nominees took multiple years to be confirmed’, a report said. Multiple can mean ‘many’, but there are only four years in a US administration. The writer could have left out multiple – ‘took years’ – and have made the same point. Multiple is ousting several and is useful to a speaker who wants to imply a large number but has only two.