Will MI6 finally come in from the cold?

Sir John Sawers is not the Downing Street stooge some of the old guard say he is, writes Tim Shipman. And the new head of MI6 may focus the spooks’ gaze on the real enemy

The man who brought us The Meaning of Tingo is at it again, closer to home. Adam Jacot de Boinod’s previous excursion among unlikely foreign words turned at times into a wild Boojum chase because the meanings claimed for some words softly and silently vanished away once confronted. That was the case with tingo itself, the supposed definition of which was more like a short essay on circumstances in which it might be used.

His latest amuse-bouche, The Wonder of Whiffling (Particular Books, £12.99), is a sort of reverse Call My Bluff, which groups the true meaning of English words according to themes. Imaginative appeal still sometimes trumps sense. A section on words about ears begins: ‘Even the highest in the land have to learn to live with the particular shape of their auditory nerves.’ Well, it’s not the shape of the nerves but the cartilage and flesh they must live with, or pin back, but never mind. What is odd is to find in this section latch-lug’t, a Cumberland word for ‘having ears which hang down instead of standing erect’ — as with a spaniel’s ears not a terrier’s. I don’t know about Mr Jacot de Boinot, but I’d be unhappy with either. The Cumberland word refers to animals.

More usefully, when we move on to the eyes, is canthus — the angle between the eyelids at the corners of the eye, to my husband an obvious word, but not to me. Near the nose sits the inner, medial or domestic canthus. Here lies the lacus lacrimalis, the lake of tears. I wonder if Lewis Carroll had read Gray’s Anatomy before landing Alice in the Pool of Tears.