Some birds seem inherently comical. I can’t help being amused by the duck taking its name from its habit of ducking. In English it has enjoyed this name for some time — a thousand years or so. Before that it was called ened, a word related to the Latin anas, anatem. Similarly, the swift is
Someone on The Kitchen Cabinet remarked that sambusa, as samosa is known in Somalia, came from Arabic. Perhaps it does, for the Hindi samosa, which we have borrowed for the fried triangles, comes from Persian sambose. Loan words weave in and out of the routes of trade and cultural conquest between the Near East and
Spoiler alert: in Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb, the hero is swallowed by a cow ‘of larger than the usual size’. Before this tragic end comes a scene between Princess Huncamunca and Lord Grizzle, who declares: ‘Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh! / Thy pouting Breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass, / Beat everlasting loud Alarms of Joy.’
Was the cascade of water that made the Commons suspend its sitting an omen or augury? When I asked that in conversation last week, a friend of my husband said that ‘strictly speaking’, augury is to do with divination from the behaviour of birds. I’ve since discovered that even more strictly speaking, it isn’t. Dear old
In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were covered with Dutch tiles, like his own fireplaces, he was worrying about Navy pay. People who were owed money by the Navy had to apply for it at a goldsmith’s shop, where they would have to
My husband has been doing something useful but criminal for the past two years. He reads the sports pages, mostly of the Telegraph, or of other papers if another member of his club has nabbed the Telegraph. When he comes across something promising, he tears out a snippet, none too neatly often, and stuffs it
‘Does a dark lantern give out black light?’ asked my husband as if in delirium. He was reading a book I would have been enjoying if he hadn’t grabbed it. It is called 1776, being about London in that year, when Britain was losing its Empire of America. It’s by Justin Lovill, who ten years
‘The term coloured, is an outdated, offensive and revealing choice of words,’ tweeted Diane Abbott last week in response to Amber Rudd having remarked on the radio with regard to verbal abuse: ‘And it’s worst of all if you’re a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse, and I think
The Sun, reviewing a new laptop from Huawei, mentioned a combined fingerprint sensor and on-switch that lets users ‘power up and log in in one fell swoop’. Logging-in is not usually a fell act, but one fell swoop has long been a cliché, rather than a quotation from Macbeth, where Macduff, on hearing of their murder,
‘What is a kibosh?’ asked a German medical friend of my husband’s, when the word cropped up. No one knew, though we were certain it was the kibosh and it was put on things. All our lives, the earliest citation for the word had been from Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836): ‘ “Hoo-roar,” ejaculates a
My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In 20 years’ time that sentence may seem normal. To me it seems at best whimsical, perhaps arch. There’s a lot of interrogating at the moment, quite apart from the traditional kind by unpleasant policemen. Jay
Ordinarily my husband is punctilious in keeping the pages of the Telegraph straight, especially when it is read by other people (me). ‘It’s all scrunched up,’ he exclaims if even the notoriously loose slip-page in the paper is misaligned. But he shook the sports pages into a toy-boat shape and slapped them against his leg
Jan Morris in her book Oxford enjoyed the Greek lettering on the floor of the rotunda entrance to Rhodes House, Oxford. It seems to complement the Greek inscription on the roof and pious memorials on the walls. But literally translated, it means: ‘Let no smoke-bearing person enter.’ In other words: ‘No smoking.’ Could it have
‘Sounds like fun,’ said my husband, wearing a hat with the sign ‘Irony’ in its band. He had read a review of ‘a gritty reworking of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set on the River Humber’. The name of the drama was Jack Lear. A true drama that gripped the popular tabloids is that of Jack Shepherd, convicted
The government (if it hasn’t fallen yet) has found difficulty moving people onto Universal Credit from the benefits that they were receiving before. The process is called managed migration and the government refers to acts of migrating claimants. This jargon sounds the more grotesque for the associations it provokes in the imagination: of migrants or
The parliamentary press gallery has in the past given a pair of silver shoe buckles to the Speaker as a token of respect, since his shoes were all they could see of him from their perch above his chair. They won’t be giving buckles to John Bercow, for he has done away with most of
Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as ‘the Sajid’ or ‘the Saj’. This habit has a long history. Xenophon entered his own Anabasis 2,400 years ago with the words: ‘There was in that host a certain man, an Athenian, Xenophon.’ Caesar played
‘Heads. Heads. Heads. Heads,’ said my husband, tossing an imaginary coin. The same improbability was amusing when Rosencrantz won the toss 92 times in a row in Tom Stoppard’s play (1966). We know the odds for the next toss are 50-50, but we can’t help thinking it morally impossible for the lucky streak to go
‘Remind me what incel means again,’ said my husband. There was no point, since he’d forgotten twice already. I suspected a psychological barrier to learning. Incel (a label for people unhappy at being involuntarily celibate) was a runner-up for Oxford dictionaries’ word of the year, won by toxic. But to me the word that captures
Martin Allen has written with a very interesting question. It follows on from his initial query, which is why people use text as the form of the verb in the past tense: ‘I text him yesterday.’ He adds: ‘It sound moronic to me, but is this how irregular verbs originate?’ The funny thing is that