Mind your language

‘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

‘Tweeting’s like text messaging, isn’t it?’ said my husband confidently, though not, as usual, from any knowledge of the matter. I find the register of language in tweets interesting. The tweeter in his own right must assume an easy tone, quite different from that of the niggling troll. As far as style goes, I was

In a wonderfully dry manual of theology on my husband’s bookshelves, written in Latin and printed in Naples in the 1830s, there is a discussion of whether ‘rustics and idiots’ are supported in their belief by ‘motives of credibility’, such as miracles. The same question has been asked about belief in Jeremy Corbyn, except that

Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, is going to use refugee instead of migrant in its English output. ‘The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean,’ one of its editors explained. ‘It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises

We reached peak Charlie in 2012, when 5,571 baby boys were given the name. There were only 4,642 last year. Perhaps the Paris massacre early this year will leave more infants than ever lisping ‘Je suis Charlie’ when they learn to talk. Names go in waves. In the Office for National Statistics list of last year’s

There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on the screen with the greeting ‘Hello, sailor.’ Last week, though, the man who was Sir Edward’s principal private secretary during his time as prime minister, Robert Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong, commented on the posthumous accusations

I had never heard the Country (Red Dirt) singer Wade Bowen before, although his latest album Hold my Beer (Vol 1) has already sold 14,000 copies. On an earlier album, he provided textbook examples of two constructions that I find increasingly annoying, and one that seems fine. ‘I love it that you’re my girl,’ sang Wade.

‘What about the moon Tracey?’ asked my husband facetiously when an astronomer on the wireless, talking of Pluto’s moon Charon, pronounced it ‘Sharon’. As usual, things turn out not to be so simple as my husband’s understanding of them. Everyone knows that Pluto was named in 1930 by an 11-year-old girl, Venetia Burney. Her mother,

If my husband were an insect it might well be a bug — a squat creature imbibing nutriment in liquid form. I had not taken much notice of bugs in an otherwise full life, and am surprised to learn there are nearly 2,000 species of British bugs. The point I should like to make is that