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
Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it
Of course I live in the past — where better? But I found out this week exactly how many years in the past. The answer is six, which seems to me indecently like futurism. The occasion for my discovery was hearing in a politics programme that there were a harmful number of spads in government.
A baffling news report appeared last week in the newspaper that I read while I was waiting for my husband to have his hair cut — long enough considering how little he still has. ‘Traditional British words are dying out, because text speak has become so popular, research has found,’ said the report. Right, texters
To be told that onycha is made of opercula is not always helpful. ‘Take unto thee sweete spices, Stacte, and Onicha, and Galbanum,’ says the Bible (Exodus, xxx 34). The words are poetic, as referring to something oriental that we don’t know from everyday life. Perhaps that is why Edith Sitwell used onycha towards the
‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education. I did know where to find out, though,
Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are. Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean
When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek
Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the
Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still
‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them. In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to
Libyan rebels called Colonel Gaddafi a ‘rat’ before he lost power — not because he was in a hole, but just as an all-purpose insult. And he had called them rats too in a similar spirit. Yet the only Arabist I have been able to catch told me that rat is not a usual animal
I don’t think I pick up tricks of speech from Veronica, but I noticed last week Madonna, who is 53 going on 23, echoing her daughter Lourdes, aged 14. Lourdes was complaining of her mother’s dress sense, as daughters do: ‘Every day, I’ll be like, “Mom, you can’t wear that”.’ Her mother spoke in the
‘He is the organiser of half that is evil and of nearly all that is undetected in this great city,’ Sherlock Holmes said of Moriarty. ‘He is the Napoleon of crime, Watson.’ Holmes did not say: ‘He is the Napoleon of criminality.’ Nor did T.S. Eliot of Macavity, who was accorded the same sobriquet as
‘Who,’ I wondered to myself as I folded away my husband’s pyjamas, which he’d left on the hall floor (why the hall floor?), ‘is this woman sprinkling glottal stops like currants into a Welsh pancake mix and between each one inserting a cliché?’ It was Sally Bercow, the cheery wife of the Speaker of the
Most of us have discovered since Anders Behring Breivik killed 78 people on 22 July how well Norwegians speak English. We heard many use the phrase in shock. Two days after the shooting, the Catholic bishop of Olso said: ‘Norway is still in shock.’ The killer’s father some days later said: ‘I am in a
‘Ha, ha! Caught you out,’ shouted my husband, holding a copy of The Spectator above his head and twirling beneath the hall light as I came in. He showed me a letter from a man (it is always a man) who suggested I thought noctae was the genitive of nox. In one sense, I was
Sorry ‘She was sorry Doctor Cameron objected to her maternal arrangements,’ wrote Anna Maria Bennett in her seven-volume novel The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797). It is funny how fame and scandal are soon forgotten, for Mrs Bennett was a smash-hit novelist of her age. The scandal was her living for 17 years with