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
Many people think a runcible spoon is a sort of pickle-fork with a serrated edge. If that is what they call it, then that is the word for it, but it is not the same word that Edward Lear used when he wrote of a runcible spoon in 1871. He also wrote of a runcible
I can’t say that I care for the outbreak of ‘Mumbai’ that has been pouring from the telly since those terrible bombs in Bombay. Why should we suddenly call it Mumbai any more than we should now call Burma Myanmar? Twenty years ago there was a passing vogue for calling Cambodia Kampuchea. The dictionary that
Some people who didn’t exist have entries in the Dictionary of National Biography and some words that don’t exist have entries in the Oxford English Dictionary. One such is primet, which was ‘erroneously stated by Prior to occur in the Grete Herball as the name of the primrose, and used by him to suggest an
‘Phwuh, this is a bit scatological,’ said my husband, looking up from last week’s column, his brow glistening with recycled Black Bush. From a man who is seldom ten yards from a sigmoidoscope, that was pretty rich. But in an interesting development on the great lasagne chase, Dr Peter Emery writes from hot Oman to
It is by no means clear to me which words are acceptable in what social circumstances. I mean words from bloody southward. It was, 20 years ago, the case that in the grown-up surroundings of The Spectator it was all right to use for good reason strong language that the BBC could not abide. Now,
I was looking for an obscure work by Richarde Weste (fl. 1609
Those trained train staff have come up with a new one. Until now it has been ‘Peterborough is the next station stop with this train.’ That is a Babylonish dialect, to be sure. But today it was: ‘We shall shortly be arriving into Peterborough.’ Arriving into? As it happens, Bishop Cuthbert Tunstall in a sermon
Britain invented lasagne, according to a front-page report in the Daily Telegraph. The claim came from organisers of a mediaeval banquet at Berkeley Castle. They appealed to ‘the world’s oldest recipe book’, The Forme of Cury, compiled under Richard II in 1390. It seems the Berkeley banqueteers meant that not just the food but the
On one of those discussion programmes, not about books but about buying books, Mariella Frostrup has just said, ‘We shall be discussing that momentarily.’ If only that had been true. Now what I really want to write about is a grammatical solecism I have been convicted of. In the politest possible way, Andrew Wilton, a