‘You rocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things,’ exclaimed my husband, misquoting Shakespeare as though it were an improvement. In English a rock is different from a stone and it can be annoying when news reports, especially on radio and television, speak of crowds throwing rocks.
This Americanism has not yet ousted stones in British English. ‘It is one of the peculiarities of the dialect of the people in the westernmost states, to call small stones rocks,’ wrote the Revd Samuel Parker in his Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1838).
My husband had been set off by a report from France. During the disorder there, the offices in Nice of the leader of the Républicains, Eric Ciotti, were attacked. In a rather mangled sentence, the BBC news website reported: ‘Mr Ciotti said people threw rocks at his office overnight on Twitter.’
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