What tense shall we use? That’s the first question autobiographers must settle. The historic present might convey a sense of immediacy. ‘I’m just one race away from becoming an Olympic champion,’ Victoria Pendleton writes, describing events four years ago in Beijing. ‘My legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, and I
‘Have you read it then?’ asked my husband on the afternoon Lord Justice Leveson’s report was published. Of course I had not, and he only asked to annoy. But, then, nor could that strange Mr Miliband have read all 2,000 pages when he urged the world: ‘We should put our trust in Lord Justice Leveson’s
‘I wandered home ’tween twelve and one,’ sang my husband, waving his head from side to side in the fond belief that it made him look more like Olivia Newton-John, ‘I cried, “My God, what have I done?” ’ I was feeling a little queasy to start with, and this did not help. The occasion,
Pippa Middleton, I learnt from the Daily Telegraph, has a ‘passion’ for writing. Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC said, has a ‘passion for resolving conflict’. The Times, in a piece about entrepreneurs, quoted a lawyer as saying: ‘Passion is very, very important.’ Can any of this be true? Certainly not if
On an article in the Times about eating oak moss I saw the headline: ‘I’m lichen it!’ Since I pronounce lichen to rhyme with kitchen, this meant little to me. You may think that I have no business pronouncing lichen in this way. That is the strong opinion of my husband. But to him lichen
Disease, we hear, will decimate ash trees, as the elms were obliterated, and we will see the spoliation of the landscape. I don’t want to be a schoolma’am about decimate. It has, as R.W. Burchfield pointed out in his edition of Fowler, been used for ‘destroy a large proportion’ for as long as it has meant
When I heard on the BBC that an organisation in St Petersburg named after St Basil the Great taught teenagers on probation the art of parkour I didn’t understand what was meant. Parkour is, I learn, a variant of free-running — moving rapidly and freely over or around the obstacles presented by an urban environment
‘Look at all this bumf,’ said my husband, shaking some ‘guidance’ on how to fill in his tax return and sounding like someone out of Much Binding in the Marsh. I mentioned last week the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves,
The kick-start and the first world war arrived in the same year. Despite talk of a ‘big bazooka’, the former is still currently favoured as the model for stimulating the economy. (A bazooka, by the way, was a second world war anti-tank rocket launcher, the name deriving from a sort of homemade trombone of the
‘Old people’, as anyone under 30 calls anyone over 40, apparently suffer from textlexia. The word may be more painful than the condition. The wrong element in dyslexia has been taken to mean something like ‘inability’, and this, Greek in form, has been jammed on to text, which derives from Latin. Let us not be too
My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister. The dilemma matches the
So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a
I feel flattered to think that Ed Miliband was inspired by my column of 31 March to invent a word for his speech at the Stock Exchange earlier this month. I had written, after Theresa May denounced preloading, that it was ‘easy to tack pre- on to words’. I forgot to advise that some meaning
‘It’s just a fudge-a-rama,’ exclaimed Boris Johnson of the government stance on Heathrow. ‘And it’s just an excuse for a delay,’ he added by way of gloss. I was surprised to find that a fudge-a-rama, or Fudgeorama, already existed: Salerno Fudgeorama Fudge Covered Graham Cookies. They are American, or were till production stopped in 2008
In 1911, bakers and dustmen were more likely than most to be called Bill, or at least William, according to one of those family genealogy companies, Ancestry.co.uk, which has been rummaging in the census for that year. My impression 101 years later is that Bills are rarer than Williams, Wills or even Willses. Prince William
‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New
That was all right,’ said my husband after listening to Paul Scofield read the whole of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ on Poetry Please. I hope they are not going to axe Poetry Please as part of Radio 4’s improvements. It’s the sort of thing that happens after 33 years of success. We have grown
The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic
Collins dictionaries have invited people to send in a word for inclusion in its English dictionary. ‘If it’s accepted,’ the publishers say, ‘your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded forever.’ Forever (usually written as two words in
On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to