My husband gave me a copy of Plutarch’s Moralia for our wedding anniversary, the romantic old thing. It is in the translation of Philemon Holland, made in 1603 and republished in 1657. At the back is ‘An Explanation of certain obscure words… in favour of the unlearned Reader’. That’s me. Some entries in the glossary
I could scarcely believe the feebleness of my husband’s little joke in declaring he would take less water with his whisky ‘to help with the drought’. I think he must have been watching repeats of Mock the Week while I am out. But the new cliché is that we are in drought. Sometimes this is
Francis Maude was judged to have let the side down by uttering the words ‘kitchen supper’. It was almost as bad, apparently, as having said ‘nursery tea’ — not the language of the people. Yet people do eat supper, and may eat it in the kitchen, not always on their laps in front of the
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, wants to stop us preloading — filling up on cheap booze before going to a nightclub. The first time I heard her use the word, I thought she was saying freeloading. But that is a different problem. Perhaps soon we will hear Mrs May talking of getting bladdered or rat-arsed, or
On 22 August 1662, the day before the new queen arrived at Whitehall in a barge so surrounded by craft that ‘we could see no water’, Samuel Pepys walked over to Mr Creede’s lodging and had ‘a little banquet’ (meaning fruit and sweets and wine) ‘and I had liked to have begged a parrett for
The back-page notebook in the Times Literary Supplement the other week was pondering whether the word obnixely had ever really been used. It means ‘earnestly, strenuously’, but I can see that there is not much point using it if no one knows what it means. The prefix ob- generates a goodly store of seldom used
Who is to say what marriage should mean? Not dictionaries, for they record what words do mean, not what they should. Lexicographers are like lepidopterists, catching and describing species, not pig-farmers, breeding and improving them. Last week Lynne Featherstone, the equalities minister asked: ‘Who owns marriage?’ She answered: ‘It is owned by the people,’ and
Since my husband had retuned the television, importing channels that no person free from troubling neurosis could possibly want to watch, such as one devoted to the sale of steam-cleaning machines, I stumbled over Emeli Sandé singing her song ‘Next to Me’, which was No. 2 in the BBC singles charts last week, and may
English teachers are often remembered for two reasons. I don’t know which is more damaging. The first is for having made a pupil think she was writing well. The second is for having inculcated a few arbitrary rules, such as not to split an infinitive or to end a sentence with a preposition, thus enabling
Dickens’s coinages ‘Dickens. Makes a change,’ said my husband, flopping a TLS on to the chair next to his whisky-drinking chair and turning to the free Telegraph television guide. The sarcasm was stingless, as we’re only in the second month of Dickens year, with plenty to enjoy. I saw Dickens credited the other day with
The fatuousness of remarks on Radio 3, about which Charles Moore complains, is an established aim on Radio 4. Last Sunday, before The Archers, I was invited to ‘Have another cuppa’. The implicit intention was to sound like someone who had just dropped in to the kitchen. But a stranger dropping in to the kitchen
On Start the Week, Shami Chakrabarti of Liberty spoke of an arms race in Home Office policy. She wasn’t talking about tasers or automatic weapons for policemen. Her phrase was metaphorical. Now I find that this metaphor is habitual to her. She used it when giving evidence in 2008 to the committee considering the Counter-Terrorism
You (my husband) say farther and I say further. Not only that but we are both sure we’re right. How can this be? To the benighted farther brigade it is obvious. Farther is the comparative of far, so, at least in the literal sense of distance, it is the logical form. Such instincts to tidy
The other day I walked past Patisserie Valerie on the corner of Broadwick Street and Marshall Street, in a shop that used to be a potter’s. ‘This isn’t really Patisserie Valerie,’ I thought to myself. What I had always taken to be a proper name (of a place in Old Compton Street, after its move
Hurrying for the Underground, I thought I saw a poster for a film by Madonna called Wee. It seemed a strange title even for her, and indeed the film turns out to be called W./E., the initials of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. Nevertheless, wee has suddenly become a frequent word in public utterances. On
Many middle-class parents would (it is said) prefer to hear their little children say fuck than toilet. A similar system of class shibboleths governs the choice of children’s name. The most popular in 2011, it turns out, was Harry. It is unexceptionable, being of ancient royal lineage (‘Cry God for Harry…’), and, like Jack, uniting
The word of the year is across. Earlier this month someone on the radio spoke of hospital experiences ‘across the patient journey’. The meaning was ‘throughout’. It is universality that across is now felt to express. A widely favoured, seldom understood figure of speech is across the piece. Proof of the obscurity of its application,
A national hobby during the screening of Downton Abbey was to spot supposed anachronisms in behaviour and language. It drove poor Lord Fellowes into a frenzy. When last week I read Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’s whodunnit set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, I soon found myself tempted to play the Downton
‘Because I said so’ is the most common phrase mothers find themselves using to their children that their own mothers used to them, according to a deeply unscientific survey undertaken by a baby-outfitters. Other such phrases included: ‘Take your coat off or you won’t feel the benefit’; ‘Wait and see’; and ‘Were you born in
I feel a jarring sensation to hear business as usual employed in a strange sense. It is frequently used at the moment to suggest that bankers and other wicked people have gone back to their greedy ways. The dog has returned to his vomit. Although I am not old enough to remember the war, I