‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number. ‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What
‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played
New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us
The term ‘Middle England’ has been drifting a bit in the last few years, but never so far, so fast as under the impulsion of Mr David Miliband, a young minister in the Department for Education. He said last week that educational ‘improvements have released the potential of Middle England’. This sudden reference to ‘Middle
I’m sure I can’t remember hearing it used wrongly before, and now I’ve heard it twice in a fortnight from politicians. Perhaps they catch it from each other. The phrase in question is in extremis and it has been used as if it meant ‘extremely’ or ‘in extreme circumstances’. In truth it means ‘on the
Shakespeare invented the words anchovy, well-ordered, worm-hole and zany. Or did he? I’ve been nagged at the back of my mind (a tender spot) by doubts about Shakespeare ever since I wrote (5 June) about Dr David Crystal’s remarks in his excellent book The Stories of English. Dr Crystal notes that of the 2,035 words
M. Jacques Myard, the bouncy French deputy, was talking on the wireless the other day about ‘unsecurity’. I am not mocking his English; there was a word unsecure in the 17th century, and we still talk of unsecured loans. But the meaning of security is like a pea in the butter-dish — hard to get
The film Around the World in Eighty Days, though identified as a turkey by the taxonomists of the critics’ circle, took more money in Britain last week than any film but one, with incalculable effects on the English language. But before I drone on about that, let me mention a satisfying sighting of well reported
The summer flowers are blowing, and I was reminded yesterday of a slightly outlandish-sounding line in the summery poem Pearl which speaks of the plants ‘gilofre, gyngure & gromylyoun’. I am still not sure what gromylyoun is. I know it’s gromwell, but I haven’t got any in the garden, and my husband has never had
I had just looked up a phenomenon that a sharp-eared reader had heard on the wireless — the remarkable ‘double is’ — in Robert Burchfield’s New Fowler’s, when the telephone rang and I heard that he was dead. Dr Burchfield was a New Zealander, born in 1923, who developed a fascination for language in Trieste
As a reader of this column you probably dislike people on the wireless saying ‘well’, especially Mr Robin Cook. But according to a learned paper by Jan Svartvik, it occurs every 150 words or so in an average conversation. With conversation as its habitat, it naturally occurs frequently on programmes such as Today on Radio
‘What, what, what,’ said my husband, as if he had bought up a job lot of whats and wanted to use them up before the hot weather spoilt them. He was provoked by my having read out a sentence by W.W. Skeat: ‘Argosy is not really of Slavonic origin.’ Skeat (1835–1912) had meant to go
I heard the other day that the late Lord Hartwell, the proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, had once exclaimed that when he was at Eton he had been taught never to begin a sentence with the word but. He then found to his slight mortification that his chance remark had been set as an iron
On The South Bank Show in January 2000 a contributor said excitedly, ‘Shakespeare invented a quarter of our language.’ Rubbish. I found that reference, and its refutation, in a new book by the indefatigable Professor David Crystal, The Stories of English (Allen Lane, £25). First, he asks, how big is an Englishman’s vocabulary? Dr Crystal
‘High street stalwart Marks & Spencer is preparing to go head-to-head with the likes of Topshop,’ said a news report the other day. Never mind ‘going head-to-head’, a metaphor presumably taken from the life of the caribou or elk, and enthusiastically seized upon by people who like to speak of going ‘belly up’ or ‘pear-shaped’,
To pronounce when reading aloud an entirely different word from the one written on the page might seem a more than Mandarin complication, or perhaps be reminiscent of the Hebrews’ reverence for the Name that prompted them to substitute ‘Adonai’ orally for the word represented by the tetragrammaton. Yet we do just such a thing
‘Yes, the post never comes till two now,’ said my husband, thereby demonstrating that he hadn’t been listening to what I’d been saying, and by implication that what I had been saying was boring. So then I read out something to make him laugh, which I’ll come to later. But the occasion for my original
Well, the Poles are in the European Union, and very welcome they are too as far as I’m concerned. Already Tesco and Carrefour are flogging the poor things centrally distributed comestibles with sell-by dates on them. From my archives (a bundle of post extracted from a pile of unread medical magazines to which my husband
‘A light, pleasant, and digestible food,’ says the Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition: the best). ‘Come off it,’ said my husband, and for once I agreed with him. The food in question was tapioca, which is a starchy derivative from the cassava plant. The word is Brazilian, the thing is disgusting. The frogspawn particles are agglomerations
Here’s a modish metaphor that is dead but hasn’t stopped breeding: ‘If I had taken cannabis, I would be transparent about it,’ said Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. ‘I want a transparent, non-variable law on drugs.’ And here’s another specimen caught in the verbal butterfly net of Mr Francis Radcliffe of York, who sent