Mind your language

My husband, not surprisingly, finds it extremely annoying. It, in this instance, is the use by women of creaky voice. If you don’t recognise the trend immediately imagine a youngish woman (not me) finishing a sentence with the phrase ‘really shiny leather’ and creaking, like a door, as she says the vowels. The trait is

My husband pointed with his stick, which he carries not to steady himself but to cudgel pedestrians out of his way, and said: ‘What am I supposed to do about that?’ His question was in response to a notice posted up on the wall by a platform at Vauxhall Underground station: ‘Due to our works.

Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble Mont Blanc. After a few floors, it was finished, and the top of the façade projected like the peak of a baseball cap. I felt cheated. Peak is a vogue word that itself has gone

There is no chance whatsoever of box set being replaced by the more correct form boxed set. So stop seething about it and causing yourself distress. The form, boxed set has been in use for 125 years or so, but the Oxford English Dictionary has dug up a reference from Wisconsin in 1969 to a

‘Did you say “fabric”?’ asked my husband when I was telling him about words that have just been added to the Oxford English Dictionary. No, phablet, but I can see why he misheard. It’s a dull portmanteau word meaning ‘half phone, half tablet,’ just as the first citation, from an Australian periodical, explained in 2010.

When the much missed Frank Johnson (1943–2006), once editor of The Spectator, wrote in 1980 that ‘the peculiar need for something to be frightened about only seems to affect those of us who are part of the chattering classes’, I think that ‘those of us’ meant himself, and me and you, dear reader. It is

I couldn’t help laughing when I found that an Australian senator, Cory Bernardi, had deleted all his tweets from Twitter, apart from a single sad survivor: ‘Parliament finishing up for the year.’ Mr Bernardi had earlier in 2015 tweeted a striking quotation: ‘To know who rules over you, simply find out who you are not

‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly a penitential time of preparation), nor to accepting a glass of champagne after having earlier accepted a glass of whisky at another house. No, what made him feel sick was the seasonal greeting: ‘God bless,

My husband struck out with his stick at an advertisement in the street that said: ‘Commit to winter.’ He doesn’t need a stick to walk with, but he likes threatening to cudgel Christmas shoppers out of his way in this joyful season. I agree with his disapproval of commit used intransitively, not committing oneself or

The word of the year, according to Collins, the dictionary people, is binge-watch. It means to watch DVDs consecutively or, more voguishly expressed, a box-set back-to-back. But I was taken by the runner-up, clean eating. This is a trend. There is a magazine called Clean Eating and the definition is not simple. ‘The soul of clean

‘More deadly than the male,’ said my husband archly. He was knowingly quoting Kipling, though I don’t know why he should, since Kipling was not fashionable when he was young. His cue was a remark he overheard from an academic former colleague puzzled by the frequency of female in student essays, where woman might have

‘That’s not how you spell “system”,’ said my husband triumphantly, pointing with his whisky glass at a placard inveighing against the ‘Cistem’, held up by a transgender protester on television. ‘No, darling,’ I said, not even assuming a patient tone. ‘It’s a play on words.’ Among people who like using the word gender outside its

It’s funny that two much misused words end in —some: fulsome and noisome. Noisome is the less often used at all, and then usually as though it meant noisy. There is a word noisesome that does mean noisy, coined 80 years ago, but noisome has meant ‘unpleasant’ or ‘offensive’, especially ‘smelly’, for 400 years or

A friend of my husband’s asked me to explain why the usually impeccable critic Francine Stock had recently used the term whipsmart. That I cannot tell, but I do know that he has identified a cliché in the casting. Everyone is suddenly using it. Joaquin Phoenix gave a ‘whipsmart performance as a genius philosophy professor’.

One thing grabbed my attention from David Cameron’s speech, long ago in the middle of last week. ‘We need a national crusade to get homes built.’ I’m as interested in housing as the next mother with a practically homeless grown-up daughter, but it was the word crusade that astonished me. I did not think a

‘Is Nicky Morgan too “normal” to be the next prime minister?’ asked someone in the Daily Telegraph. That would make her abnormally normal, I suppose, at least for a PM. ‘Who and what dictates what is normal?’ asked Justine Greening, the International Development Secretary, earlier this year, but, like jesting Pilate, did not stay for

I lost my husband on the way from Malabar. He is easily lost. We had been talking about the verb critique, which we neither much care for. But, in gathering ammunition, I’d come across this charming sentence from a book of voyages translated in 1598 by William Phillip. He referred to a ‘fruite which the

A great discovery has been made by Dr Paul Booth, a fellow of Keele University. It is a 14th-century example of fuck. We might think the word Anglo-Saxon, but it’s hard to find written examples before the 16th century. Chaucer never uses it. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is in a poem