The Metropolitan Police have put up big posters on the Underground telling people what to do if they see a bag without an owner. ‘Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999,’ it says. You might think that I am being captious in thinking this reads badly. If the word don’t
I was listening to Radio Four’s serialisation of the Palliser novels while doing the washing-up after Sunday lunch, and I heard Mr Wharton saying that he preferred Arthur Fletcher to Ferdinand Lopez because he had a ‘proper job’. (We’re in The Prime Minister; it does rattle along, somewhat to the detriment of the characterisation.) That’s
Before I forget, here is a slight development on chav, this year’s youth pejorative term of choice. It is, as Sampson’s Dictionary of the Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales makes clear, a Romany word, though it need not signify a Gypsy. Anyway, that popular jazz man Ron Rubin writes to suggest that the Spanish
According to that very annoying programme Woman’s Hour (one minute being militantly gynaecological, the next giving recipes for butternut-squash soup), a mother complained to a school that allowed her son to say toilet instead of lavatory. A vox pop discovered more people in the street were at home with toilet than with lavatory, which one
I blushed to learn I had been wrong all my life. ‘Though Sir William Golding consistently pronounced the word as contsh in a lecture that he gave on The Lord of the Flies at the University of Oxford in 1990,’ says Professor Robert Burchfield in his New Fowler’s, ‘the more usual standard pronunciation is conk.’
‘We need closure,’ said Mr Greg Dyke after resigning as director-general of the BBC. ‘Not for you or me but for the benefit of everyone out there.’ Over the past couple of months the newspapers have reported the closure of more than one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants, of mother-and-baby units, of factories, railway stations and
I asked Veronica what the difference was between a pikey and a chav. ‘A pikey is like a pram-face, really rubbish, eats economy burgers and oven chips and watches telly all day. A chav dresses in sportswear, with white trainers and wears a fake Burberry baseball hat and hangs around the bus station starting fights.’
Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle was practising her vowels for Rex Harrison as Professor Pickering in a bit of My Fair Lady that I came across on the television the other day. If Eliza was to pass for a duchess, it was a very sensible thing to do. But the film represented her pronouncing the
So many much-loved books have been badly done on television — The Irish RM, and just now The Young Visiters, which anyone could have seen would be difficult to do well on telly — that I wonder how much longer they can resist dear old Parson Woodforde. I’ve been reading bits of his diary again
I’ve just looked up foxglove in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, not because I expected it to tell me the word’s origin, but because I hoped it would give a false origin. I love Brewer, but it tells the reader not the facts of history and etymology but what the widely educated High Victorian
This year we have seen a word born like one of those volcanoes off the coast of Iceland. The word is issue, in a new and puzzling meaning. It had been looming through the seawater for many months before, but now it has come hissing and steaming above the surface. I had become used to
‘What? What! What?!’ said my husband with a provoking profligacy of punctuation. ‘What?’ I said before I could stop myself. ‘Buttonhole,’ he said. ‘You say here it’s nothing to do with a hole. But it is. Look. I put my poppy in it.’ ‘No dear, the verb.’ Buttonhole, as a verb meaning ‘detain in conversation’,
In connection with J.R.R. Tolkien — who with the much feebler J.K. Rowling is soon to be dominating school-holiday cinema once again — there was an interesting piece in the TLS this month by that clever old philologist Tom Shippey. It was about Joseph Grimm’s ironly scientific success in analysing and predicting historical sound changes
A query comes from Argyllshire: ‘What is the infinitive of can?’ The reference is not to canning peas. But before I forget, Harry Henry of Esher, who sounds a sport, reminds me, if I ever knew, that (as Max Beerbohm tells us in A Variety of Things) the original pattern for all publishing titles containing
A Kentish man, Mr Spencer Jones, sends me a photograph of a street named ‘The Forstal’. It is a cul-de-sac, or dead end, as we say in Oxfordshire. Why, asks Mr Jones, is this perfectly ordinary word not in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? The answer would be that it is dialect. There are lots
‘This is a good one,’ said my husband, bubbling into his Famous Grouse. ‘Abbreviator: An officer of the court of Rome appointed to draw up the Pope’s briefs.’ ‘But that can’t possibly be a joke intended by James Murray or his collaborators working on the volume for “A” in the Oxford English Dictionary in the
My husband’s favourite programme on television, to judge by what he shouts at the screen, is Grumpy Old Men. You should hear him when they sound off about automated telephone answering (‘Press 2…’, etc). I think I have caught something from him, because when I was listening to Poetry Please on the wireless, I too
I am looking forward to reading The Floating Prison, the memoirs of a French prisoner, Louis Garneray, who became an artist while captive in the hulks in Portsmouth harbour between 1806 and 1814. It is edited by the learned Richard Rose, who has just written to me about rafalés — insane and insatiable gamblers in
There are some things I shall never say. I don’t just mean toilet or cool. I mean things like train station and lifestyle. They are not part of my parole or idiolect. On lifestyle I have just discovered an historical oddity, but in passing I should like to remark that the previous default meaning (I
My husband, when asked to buy some French beans once, came home with a tin of broad beans produced in France. So I was delighted when he got me a reprint from the Ohio State Law Journal 1964, vol. 25 no. 1, as requested, from the medical school library. The question was the spelling of