Mind your language

I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks to Brexit’ to the European parliament. But ballocks are to balls what hillocks are to hills. An old word, it appears in a manuscript glossary from the early 10th century. To spell it bollocks is

Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for the origins of words, it is universally known that the origin of posh is from ships’ tickets to and from India stamped ‘Port Out, Starboard Home’. None of this triad of certainties is true. Let

In Casablanca, Mr and Mrs Leuchtag resolve to speak English to each other in preparation for emigration to America. Mr Leuchtag asks: ‘Liebchen — sweetness heart, what watch?’ Mrs Leuchtag: ‘Ten watch.’ Mr Leuchtag: ‘Such much?’ The head waiter, Carl (played by S.Z. Sakall) comments: ‘Hmm. You will get along beautiful in America.’ A development in

Doggy sounds childish. ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ asks the popular song. (The song title used the spelling doggie, being American, though Britain enjoyed a cover version by Lita Roza in 1953, the same year as Patti Page’s original.). Doggo sounds cooler (like daddy-o in hep talk), but in the strange world

‘How many words will you use today, first used by Thomas Browne in the 17th century?’ asked a trailer on Twitter for Radio 4’s In Our Time. A tweeter called Adam B replied that, of the examples given, ambidextrous, carnivorous and medical could all be found before Browne. He added: ‘I love Browne, will be

My husband has been growling: ‘You cross-legged hartichoak.’ He tries it on obstructive pedestrians hypnotised by their mobile phones. He thus hopes, optimistically, to utter insults while avoiding any ism that could get him into trouble. This imprecation hartichoak he took from the mouth of Young Tom Strowd, a Norfolk man, in The Blind-Beggar of

After he invented the term young fogey (in The Spectator in 1984), the much lamented journalist Alan Watkins coined the term men in suits. Of course other people before him had used the phrases young fogey and men in suits as nonce formations. Watkins identified both as what has since been denominated ‘a thing’. By

‘Is it like a packet of fags?’ asked my husband, less annoyingly than usual, but still in some confusion. I had been telling him why a book was like a sarcophagus, which I admit has the ring of a Victorian riddle. It has long been accepted that book shares the same derivation as beech. I

A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful and aesthetic purposes): gadroon, astragal, larmier and rabbet, but none is chunkier or more mysterious than bolection. Bolection mouldings cover joints, especially between surfaces of different levels, such as round the panels of a door.

‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do with mushrooms.’ My husband had responded to my exclaiming ‘What does she think that means?’ on hearing Theresa May use the word fungible. This rare word now crops up in discussion of Brexit, perhaps caught from lawyers and business types. They seem to think it means ‘porous, malleable,

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

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

‘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