‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary has just published a new entry for witch. It is less dismissive of old women. The former version spoke of a ‘repulsive-looking old woman’. Now it is ‘a term of abuse or contempt for a
The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one
There’s a rude gesture in Pickwick that I don’t quite understand. Mr Jackson, a young lawyer’s clerk in conversation with Mr Pickwick, ‘applying his left thumb to the tip of his nose, worked a visionary coffee-mill with his right hand, thereby performing a very graceful piece of pantomime (then much in vogue, but now, unhappily,
‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be blith; oh how this festive joy / Stirs up my fury to revenge and death.”’ ‘Very Christmassy,’ he agreed. The lines came from a series of five plays by Shakespeare’s contemporary Thomas Heywood, in which
When my husband’s whisky glass fell off the little table next to his chair on to next door’s cat, which was on an unauthorised visit, provoking it to make a speedy exit, en route scratching the postman, who had for a change that afternoon rung the bell to deliver a parcel instead of putting a
In its coverage of the shuffled cabinet, the BBC added a note: ‘BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) is a term widely used in the UK to describe people of non-white descent, as defined by the Institute of Race Relations.’ The Institute of Race Relations was founded in 1958, but in 1972, by its own
I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the wireless began discussing whether Priti Patel would roll out ‘controversial new tactics to turn migrants back mid-Channel’. I felt that our rolling roles belonged to different realms. For pastry, I have a rolling pin. How
When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he joined Sacheverell Sitwell on honeymoon in Amalfi. I don’t know what Mrs Sitwell thought of it. I learnt this odd fact because I was seeing what connection his name had with quenelles, the fashionable dish
‘This crossword is problematic!’ exclaimed my husband, tossing aside the folded newspaper marked with a ring where his whisky glass had rested. He was being facetious, a common register of speech with him when vacancy does not take over. Problematic has acquired new life as a label for something disapproved of and therefore ripe for
Language is used in a weird way in the victimhood war, where those who see themselves without agency bravely speak their truth to power. Their truth cannot be negated merely by examining the evidence, for it derives from lived experience. The powerful are axiomatically guilty, and must be called out for their behaviour or behaviours,
‘What do they mean, “Guess”?’ asked my husband, staring suspiciously at a page of the Daily Mail that had been used as wrapping for a secondhand book he had bought through the post. He finds old newspapers more interesting than the morning’s fresh issue. ‘Guess the definition: Aleatory (c.1690),’ it said. ‘A) A concealed repository.
‘That chap in Line of Duty. That’s what I’d call a bad actor,’ said my husband with vague certainty. He was responding to a remark on the wireless about Iran being a bad actor. Language, as usual, is in a state of transition. Actor is now employed to mean some person, or moral entity, acting
‘They asked me if I wanted to wash up before we even went in to dinner,’ my husband recalled with mock horror of a visit to America some years ago. He doesn’t get out much. It is true that Americans use wash up differently from us, to mean washing your hands (and perhaps face while
The title of the keenly awaited volume of memoirs by John Martin Robinson sounds like a crossword clue: Holland Blind Twilight. Would that be a Dutch kind of unseeing twilight or a drinking-session blind at twilight when Hollands gin is consumed? Of course not! It’s plain enough. Blinds are often made of Holland, a linen
‘Oh, yes,’ said my husband, enthusiastically, ‘a loathsome disease. The tongue goes black and dry.’ He was referring to an historical grouping of symptoms given the name prunella. If you are thinking it is therefore an unkind name to give a girl, that is because the name also applies to a pretty wild flower related
‘Ping, ping, ping went the bell,’ sang my husband, making his eyes wide and jigging in his best imitation of Judy Garland, ‘Zing, zing, zing went my heart strings.’ The effect was horrific. And ‘The Trolley Song’ doesn’t go ‘Ping, ping, ping’ but ‘Ding, ding, ding’. Everything else has been pinging, though. ‘Missing a holiday
I have never been a soccer mom, described in the Washington Post as ‘the overburdened, middle-income working mother who ferries her kids from soccer practice to scouts to school’. That was in 1996, during the American election campaign when Bill Clinton wished to appeal to this stereotype. I admit there have been days devoted to
In 1923 in Whose Body? we were introduced to Lord Peter Wimsey on his way to an auction where he hoped to buy a Caxton folio from 1489 of The Four Sons of Aymon. But he had forgotten his catalogue, so said to the cab driver: ‘D’you mind puttin’ back to where we came from?’
Six years ago I wrote here about critique, as a noun or verb, and things have gone from bad to worse, as expected. I didn’t like it then, and even my husband was repelled. I had thought that people were trying to avoid the negative connotation of criticise. But both words are now used in
Seeing my husband in his armchair snoozing, as his unacknowledged habit is, head back, mouth open, stertorous and blotchy, it is sometimes hard to believe in the patriarchy. Along with the doctrine that we women are oppressed, a wave of terminology washes over us from the radio. Its originators believe that by gaining our acquiescence
