Mind your language

Last week’s industrial action did not quite convey the certainty with which in 1905 the Industrial Workers of the World (nicknamed the Wobblies) opened the preamble to their constitution: ‘The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.’ That was an era when anarcho-syndicalists excitedly spoke of industrial unionism. ‘Capable and courageous industrial

An American soldier just back from Afghanistan said on television that he thought his fellow combatants should not be withdrawn ‘until the country is stable enough that it can stand on its own feet’. What struck me was not the opinion on strategy but the grammar. Instead of saying ‘stable enough that it can’, I’d

Until the rain blew over, I sought refuge in a Pret A Manger and drank some ginger beer. For entertainment I read the label. ‘We do not add any weird chemicals,’ it said. No doubt Pret knows better than to say ‘any chemicals’. Water is a chemical, we are told by the know-alls (of the kind

Mr Brown’s writing In those secret documents in the Daily Telegraph, Tony Blair wrote ‘Do not copy’ on one page, to limit dangers of a leak. Gordon Brown needed no such precaution, because of his secret weapon: illegibility. I am not making fun of Mr Brown, who has only one eye that works, and that

A labour of love of the strangest kind, published posthumously, came to me this week. It is The English Wordsmith, by David Andrews (£12.99), which is nothing but 8,000 ‘important, relevant, obscure, difficult, unusual words and phrases’. He doesn’t list Shakespeare’s honorificabilitudinitatibus, but he does include floccinaucinihilipilification, presumably because of its unusual length, defining it

So … When I asked him the name of the person who had rung while I was out, my husband enunciated the sound aaaaaaaaaahhh at such length that I wondered whether he wanted his tonsils inspected. In reality he was trying to remember, and so used this non-lexical filler. It can be very annoying when

At dinner parties in Camden, Haringey, Hackney, or Southwark, according to Christina Patterson, the writer for the Independent, you hear people saying things about politics like ‘what we need is a clearer narrative’. I was delighted that she added: ‘I’m still not sure what narrative means.’ I do not go to parties in Haringey or

‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies are not cloudy all day,’ sang my husband in the manner, he thought, of Cary Grant in Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House, with variations. His excuse was my mentioning the word home. ‘Where seldom is heardsworth a discouraging Wordsworth, / And the skies

A rumour ran round Cern the other day, almost as fast as its accelerated particles, that the Higgs boson had been detected. This little creature, named after Peter Higgs (born, 1929) and the Indian physicist S. N. Bose (1894–1974), is tailor-made for a cosmic theory that calls for its interaction with quarks. For my part,

Someone, so the Times reported, was asked about young people being unemployed. ‘The problem is not the lack of jobs,’ came the reply, ‘but a lack of determination on behalf of young jobseekers.’ What he meant was ‘on the part of young jobseekers’. It was they who lacked determination, not anyone else on their behalf.

In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register of speech, ‘What time’s kick-off?’ His image came from Association Football. In reply to a telephoned invitation to dinner, I heard my husband ask, in an attempt at a relaxed and modern register

Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to  President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not

I asked Veronica how to pronounce LOL. She is of an age to know, for this abbreviation is ubiquitous in emails and texts. ‘El-o-el,’ she said. So, orally it isn’t much of an abbreviation, though it performs better than www, which replaces three syllables, world wide web, with nine syllables. Next week LOL joins other

‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I replied. ‘What,’ asked my husband, with a peculiarly annoying tone of archness in his voice, ‘is the highest kite that can fly?’ ‘I don’t know what you

While thinking of socks for my husband, I sat up when I read a sentence in the Autobiography of the extraordinary Anne Murray. She, having helped disguise James Duke of York in a woman’s dress (‘very pretty in itt’), for him to escape the Roundheads in 1648, found that she herself had to escape the

Iain Duncan Smith said last week that he was going to ‘lift a million out of poverty’. Lifting is something of which people in poverty run a perennial risk, especially if they are children. It is as though they were a field of root crops. ‘Some potatoes in Lincolnshire are lifting well, others are below

How is it that, having said become instinct all their lives, people suddenly start to say go extinct? I use this as an example. I can understand the acquisition or disposal of a piece of slang, such as cool. It might have been possible for a young thing in the 1950s who looked on the

Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the proverb: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ I suppose the antique syntax baffled them. Charles Moore told of a headmaster (The Spectator’s Notes, 29 January) who found that no one knew the meaning of the

The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian of language examining the speeches of politicians to gauge the linguistic habits of the ruling class. Nothing could be more misleading. The Egyptian people, David Cameron said last week, have ‘legitimate grievances’. I can imagine a future historian