I was baffled when I heard last month that British troops in Iraq would be ‘drawn down’. Byron’s Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, but he didn’t need to be drawn down. To me, as to George Herbert, being drawn down is the sort of thing we worry we might do to
If 2006 was the year of issues, when the word problem gave way to ‘issues around’ things, then 2007 looks as if it will be the year of challenge. Dreary management-speak types have long invited workers to see negative problems as positive challenges. All that this has meant is that the new word challenge has
A reader wrote in to share his triumph at thwarting an attempt by an organisation to which he belongs to change the title ‘chairman’ to ‘chair’. The current chairman happens to be a woman. ‘It is ridiculous,’ our reader writes, ‘what person has four legs and is made of wood? The syllable man does not
Every now and then, I come across a way of using language that is so divergent from the norm that I wonder how anyone can have adopted it. This seems to have happened to spectrum. Ofcom declared in 2005, ‘One of Ofcom’s primary statutory duties is to ensure the optimal use of the radio spectrum
Casket looks as if it will be an early victor in 2007 as a triumphant Americanism. In 2006 it was train station. A letter to the Daily Telegraph noted that even English Heritage had entitled a snowy scene of a Victorian railway station on its website as ‘Train Station’. Even before the New Year, casket
With the intention of making us healthy they sell us meat now with no fat. What is the point? If you cook it, it shrivels into dry toughness. During the period we have just survived, when cooking large birds is customary, I was amused to come across this sentence from Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘When I
Conversation is an art in which we all prefer to think we excel, and Stephen Miller has written a whole book on the subject (Conversation, Yale, £15), which turns out to be mostly about Samuel Johnson and David Hume, who never did meet and talk. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comes into it too, and Mr
A word hound from Leeds has sent me a basketful of unconsidered truffles. ‘Are you aware of the increasing use of the word über,’ asks Mr Donald Adams, ‘with or without the umlaut which it should have in German?’ Well, I had come across it, but I had not quite realised what an infestation it
A lovely framed photograph of some rhubarb, which Veronica took, hangs on the kitchen wall as I write — white where it has been pulled from the root, and then juicy red in the stalk against the fresh green leaves. So it was quite interesting to discover that when Thackeray wrote of a ‘rhubarb-coloured coat’
My husband has been trying to interest me in the architecture of the stations on the Jubilee line on the London Underground. Some of them — Westminster and Canary Wharf — are indeed impressive in an overpowering way. The line, before its extension eastward from Green Park, was named after the celebration of the Queen’s
The words in which Sir Richard Dannatt, the Chief of the General Staff, expressed his historic opinion about withdrawing British forces from Iraq were of some interest. ‘We should get ourselves out some time soon because our presence exacerbates the security problem.’ Or was it, as many papers reported ‘sometime soon’? Aurally there is no
Mr George Osborne was criticised for calling Mr Gordon Brown autistic. Osborne had mentioned in a public meeting that his brothers nicknamed him Knowledge as a boy. Miss Mary Ann Sieghart, of the Times, suggested he might have been ‘faintly autistic’. Mr Osborne remarked, ‘We’re not getting on to Gordon Brown yet.’ A psychiatrist friend
A reader (whose name I would be able to tell you if my husband had not put her letter in the recycling skip, along with the television licence demand and that leaflet from the Post Office about the confusing new postal rates) asks if people are not over-pronouncing words such as little. It is not
Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not
The sort of people who humorously say ‘Eat your heart out’ are also likely to say ‘To die for!’ as if they had just coined either phrase. ‘Eat your heart out’ has adjusted its meaning since the Oxford English Dictionary was redacted — 1893 for the letter E, edited by Henry Bradley. Then the definition
There will be no deigning, I’m glad to discover, in the new translation of the Mass into English. A contrary rumour was, I think, put about by enemies of the conservative approach taken, after Vatican intervention, by the International Committee on English in the Liturgy. Its chairman is an Englishman, the Bishop of Leeds, Arthur
Reporting a case of corruption recently, the Yorkshire Post quoted an observation about a culprit: ‘Any work he was doing was off his own back and he should not have been paid.’ Meanwhile the Cambridge Evening News reported the deliverance from a custodial sentence of a ‘nuisance drunk’ in Newmarket who had waved a samurai
The play Abraham Lincoln was watching when he was shot was Our American Cousin. Its English author, Tom Taylor (1817–80), reached the height of his great popularity with The Ticket-of-Leave Man, staged two years earlier, in 1863. I noticed a belittling reference to it in Stevenson the other day, so I decided to read it.
My husband suddenly found it necessary to discuss some hair-raising medical developments with other doctors in the sunshine of an out-of-season ski resort in the Pyrenees, and for once he let me come too, and enjoy some healthy walks while the menfolk were playing at Frankenstein. Perhaps he had heard they have reintroduced wild bears
Are we now more ignorant than Bertie Wooster? Orwell, in his essay defending P.G. Wodehouse, noted that when ‘he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology’. Orwell characterised such