Mind your language

I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. Some things about it are awkward. Two Australians, Richard Thomas and Joy Bear, had been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to ‘follow the signage’. When do signs, he wondered, become signage? At the same level, I suspect, that rooms become roomage. Hardy wrote in his beguiling way: ‘When moiling seems at cease/ In the vague void

We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in rural Britain. There is, I think, a confusion built into the term, though language is capable of accommodating such inconsistencies. Most of the stuff in the papers and on television on the subject derives from

I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease, HIV or psoriasis. Perhaps I should describe myself as a person living with my husband. The formula is recommended by many Aids organisations that follow the ‘terminology guidelines’ of the UN Programme on HIV/Aids. Instead

‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked him what ideation suggested to him. Unknown to him, ideation has, since my husband’s day, made an unlikely leap from psychiatry to management theory. ‘Management gurus,’ wrote Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian, ‘seem inordinately obsessed

A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She said it reminded her of delft ware. That word has its own historical peculiarity. We used to call it delf, as you can find in Dickens and his contemporaries. That is because the town of

‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and the promise of ‘a new iteration of softer suiting’. Suiting in itself is a comical word when found outside the technical pages of Tailor and Cutter. In that respect it belongs to the same family

Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that I remember Macmillan using in the 1970s. But it was in 1908, a year after Kipling, that Eucken won the Nobel prize for literature. (Anyone read a book by him?) His belief was that truth

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only

To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked. Poor Jones had been so upset

I’m often annoyed by like being misused in different ways. (In place of as, for example: ‘Like I expected, he was late.’) But I’m now surprised by baffling uses of similar to. The Sun provided three examples in discussing the little internet craze for listening to an audio clip that either says ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’. (If

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was asked if the Marine Corps forces he led might be defeated by the strong Iraqi army defending Baghdad. ‘Hell these are Marines,’ he said. ‘Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima.

I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when a character wondered aloud if he was paranoid. Paranoid? How could he be? The novel was finished by 1860 and paranoid was not invented till 1902 (in a translation of a book by the psychiatrist

Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited her. She was passionate and outspoken. My husband was of course terrified of her. She did not mind mentioning that she was a hermaphrodite. ‘If God made me hermaphrodite, that is how I stay,’ she

In the warm weather, I had an al fresco hit with my mad-apple bruschette. Mad-apple shows the tangle to which ‘a foreign and unintelligible word is liable under the influence of popular etymology’. It is a name for the aubergine, or egg-plant as it was earlier known in England, as it still is in America.

Scarcely a sober breath has been drawn in my house all week for celebrating the 90th anniversary of the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary. This stupendous achievement, in 15,490 pages by 1928, drew on more than five million quotations from old books sent in by volunteers. In 1879, when the heroic James Murray became

Crooning is I think the word to describe what my husband was doing to the lyrics of a Beach Boys number. ‘Round, round, get around, I get around,’ he crooned ludicrously, for no one less like a Beach Boy than he, with his frayed tweed jacket cuffs, could be imagined. He was, however, right if

Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today and was pleasantly surprised by its poetic quality. My husband was harrumphing a bit because the poet began by saying, ‘Soo… basically,’ and in his opinion went downhill from there, by talking about the poem