Etymology

‘“I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’ By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in a book you might not wish your wife or your servants to read. It is The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905) about boys at Harrow, more particularly the love between them. Surprisingly it caused no outrage at the time. The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor

‘Oh, no!’ cried my husband from the other room in the tones of one who has upset the goldfish bowl on to a rare book. I rushed in, despite previous experience, and found the problem was that the BBC had just referred to ‘Princess Catherine’. To take his mind off it, I told him about Bedfordshire putting its foot down on the spelling of one of its villages. In future, when a road sign needs replacing, it will refer to Yelden – not Yielden or even Yieldon. There had been an attempt to resolve the uncertainty in 1998 when villagers were asked what they thought the village was called. Thirty

‘It’s got to be greenlighted,’ said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when ‘he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb’. The Observer looked back on the recent history of the National Gallery, when ‘the Sainsbury Wing revamp was greenlit’. My husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated,

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or so the BBC reported. The Guardian reported that he called on them to ‘reduce and defuse tensions’. What you do with a bomb in a Hollywood movie is to defuse it. Its fuse might be ticking away and you remove it. Tensions can be reduced by figuratively defusing them. But very often tensions and situations

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until that happy day, the RYA has issued a slim volume,  Inclusive Language Guidance, with a sort of phrasebook thrown in. A sample is: ‘Ze went sailing yesterday. Zir boat is green. That boat belongs to zem.’ This indicates not that the speaker is German, or perhaps from Somerset, but that the person being spoken about

Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvellous bob hairdo, this month became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people the King likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here about content. ‘That is probably not a sign of dementia,’ said my husband encouragingly. Why is content such an unpleasant label for articles in a magazine? After all, the title page of the Great Bible, ordered to be published by Henry VIII in 1539, read: ‘The Byble in Englyshe, that is to saye the content

Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before. Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian; working-class too Your Party. Anyway, the humble background had to be thrown off. Hers was not the professed outlook of the writhing Uriah Heep (seen as a ‘red-headed animal’ by David Copperfield). ‘“Be umble, Uriah,” says father to me, “and you’ll get on. It was what was always being dinned into you and me at

‘Do you know how many people Hallmark cards employs?’ asked my husband. I didn’t, and nor would he, had he not just looked it up on Wikipedia. ‘Seven?’ I replied. ‘No.’ ‘A million?’ ‘Now you’re just being silly.’ The reason that the birthday card people had come up was because James Heale began his column in last week’s Spectator: ‘If there is a hallmark of Keir Starmer’s leadership, it is a willingness to bash the left.’ I had wondered aloud whether a figurative hallmark implied something of value, like the marks on gold and silver. I thought the name of the Hallmark brand suggested as much. ‘When you care enough

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce introduces the question of whether ballocks is the only example of the dual number in English. In Irish English it is certainly used in the plural form with singular concord. Ballocks was in standard use up to the 17th century, after which it was

When this century began we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely. But now I reach for my throwing-slippers when someone on the radio says: ‘One hundred per cent.’ It can be a hundred per cent, hundred per cent or (in the mouth of Gen Z) hundo P. Even odder is the development of an emoji with its own meanings. I had supposed that 💯 meant 100 per cent, implying agreement.

I spent some time looking for the connection between the ancient city of Canopus and the English canopy. Nelson won the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay. The bay was named after the city of Abu Qir, which was named after a Christian martyr, St Cyrus. Abu Qir stands on the site of the city of Canopus, to which ran the Canopic Way, from Alexandria. Canopus was said to have been founded by Menelaus, the King of Sparta who figures in the Iliad. Canopus, the pilot of his ship, was fatally bitten by a snake, and around the monument built by Menelaus grew the city. At Canopus, the Egyptian

‘Spook or spoof?’ asked my husband, throwing a copy of the paper over to me, and only missing by a foot. When I’d picked it up, I read the headline: ‘Fully Chinese-made drone spooking Ukraine air defence.’ Then I read the introduction of the report: ‘A new Russian decoy drone used to spoof Ukrainian air-defences is made up entirely of Chinese parts.’ Well, to spook a person or an animal is to frighten them. It has been in use in America since between the wars and comes from the Dutch for a ghost. Spoof is a more mysterious word. Since the 1970s, to spoof has acquired the meaning ‘To render

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often it turns up in sporting contexts, considering it is a mangling of a metaphor from cricket, ‘off his own bat’. In Trollope’s novel from 1869, He Knew He Was Right, in which a brittle-sounding character is called Glascock (which I suspect is pronounced Glasgow), a lesser hero, Hugh Stanbury, asks an old servant of his

The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on which its proposed measures are drawn up for the OBR to score. The analogy is with the cricket field rather than the ballroom. The OBR score indicates its forecast for spending, receipts and public debt. It also takes into account knock-on effects of a policy change. This is called dynamic scoring. I had to ask

‘Am I housebound?’ asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role in life. ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.’ Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank in worth with the years, following the same path as boor, churl and peasant. Whereas I as a housewife enjoy a comparatively transparent label, any husband’s title is obscure. It is simply a house-bond, but the first element of husband, hus-, no longer seems like house, and the -bond element is often mistaken for a

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically. But I was wondering whether the Prime Minister was aware of the connotations of his claim about being in lockstep. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the meaning ‘in perfect or rigid, often mindless, conformity’. An image might be the scene in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), where the overalled workers change shift, their heads bowed, their

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would be amusing. But it is true that the political wrangle over personal independence payments would have been harder to popularise without the cheery abbreviation. Some of us remember Denis Healey’s promise to ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’. He might also have made similar promises about the rich in general. His inspiration was Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1917. ‘We will get everything out of her that you can squeeze out of a lemon,’ he said of Germany in December 1918. ‘I will squeeze

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a Hugo le Cuint in 1208 and a Richard le Queynte in Hampshire in 1263. The name would relate to quant or quaint, meaning ‘clever’ or ‘cunning’, and derived from Latin cognitus. The varied spelling overlapped with the word Chaucer used for a woman’s private parts, which comes from a completely different Latin word. Such is

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up. Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in

Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon ‘has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews’. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: ‘give permission’ and ‘enact a penalty to enforce obedience to a law’. The latter sense was extended after the first world war to cover economic or military action against a state as a coercive measure. That is the use we daily find applied to action, or the lack of it, against Russia. The diverging meanings both