Etymology

‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’. ‘No, if it was cysticercosis,’ my husband insisted, ‘it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain.

To ‘kickstart economic growth’ is the first (‘number one’) of Labour’s five ‘missions’ to rebuild Britain. That is what the manifesto announced last year. The mission is not just economic growth, but kickstarting it. On 29 January, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that she was ‘going further and faster to kickstart economic growth’. I can see that she might be going further, but it is not easy to see what ‘faster’ means here, although it is true that, since economic growth has slowed down since the election in July, there is more opportunity for going faster. I suppose the word kickstart was chosen because

‘My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’ Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved. The Oxford

My husband was so delighted with the new-found term perigee-syzygy that he kept repeating it, until the syllables merged into his regular breathing and he fell asleep in his chair. The compound word means what the vulgar press call a supermoon. A syzygy is the lining-up of the moon, Earth and sun, producing a full moon (or a new moon, which is invisible because only the far side is illuminated). The perigee is when the moon is nearest the Earth (its furthest being the apogee). The distance varies because the moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse. The funny-looking word syzygy, used in English since the 17th century, merely comes

‘Why can’t you have legacy tomatoes?’ asked my husband. ‘There are plenty of heritage tomatoes.’ He might well ask. Heritage tomatoes, usually called heirloom tomatoes in America, are cultivars valued for flavour lost in many modern hybrids. They include the Black Krim from the Crimea and the delicious Raf, grown in Almeria, its name an unromantic acronym from Resistente al Fusarium, since it is resistant to a fungus. Only since the 1970s has heritage been used as a label for things of historical, cultural or scenic interest. The fashionable term was applied in 1983 to the new quango English Heritage. Like heritage, a legacy was something we were glad to

The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole. When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the NHS waiting-list is ‘a drag anchor on our economy and our country’, his metaphor was obscure to his listeners and unhelpful to his argument. A drag anchor is a useful thing: a device towed underwater by a sailing ship in order to keep it pointing into the waves and to lessen leeway. In other words,

The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The title has no legal force. As far as etymology goes, minster comes from the Latin monasterium, which had already in the 8th century acquired the meaning ‘cathedral church’ in addition to ‘monastery’. Before the Norman Conquest, minster in English had come to mean a large, important church. Before the recent efflorescence, we had a hotchpotch

My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings. My mnemonic for the meanings are Balfour, Bolingbroke, Zola and Caravaggio. When ‘The Hay Wain’ went on show in 1824, the Telegraph explained, ‘its naturalism and heroic scale were hailed as a revelation’. That naturalism may be labelled Caravaggio after an observation in 1950 by E.H. Gombrich in The Story of Art about ‘Caravaggio’s “naturalism”, that is,

‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One can’t exactly say that to do so is incorrect. Daniel Jones’s English Pronouncing Dictionary (1974) gives it with the t silent; but then The Place-Names of Hertfordshire (1938) gives it with the t pronounced. In My Fair Lady, Rex Harrison, singing after a fashion The Rain in Spain, sounds the t. But what did he

I’ve heard people using back-to-back housing to mean terraces separated by back yards. But strictly, back-to-back houses are built against a party wall and face opposite ways. Byelaws after the passing of the Public Health Act 1875 prevented their continued construction. In Birmingham, four of the city’s former thousands of back-to-backs are preserved by the National Trust off Hurst Street, which runs through the middle of what this year was officially designated Chinatown. I was surprised by the renaming because parallel designations are regarded as offensive. ‘Formerly often with negative connotations of criminality,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary of Chinatown, ‘but now typically used with more positive connotations.’ So that’s

An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery. Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to strip off the hide’. Generally, present-day meanings need not be those of the etymological originals, but in these two cases many writers are aware of the ancestry and think of sparkling behind coruscating and flaying behind excoriating. Yet a large proportion of uses of coruscate are clearly meant to mean ‘upbraid scathingly, decry, revile’ –

‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass. I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive voice (“nestled in the rolling Cotswold landscape” etc), perhaps I could persuade you to inveigh against this widespread abuse.’ I began by asking my husband why he found the usage so shocking. He said something about it resembling sat as in ‘sat in the corner, the child surveyed the room’. But nestled has long been

‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team sometimes gives him a ‘bit of tummy ache’. There is even an outfit called the Happy Tummy Co, which bakes bread that is said to be easily digestible. It is not as though stomach was particularly indelicate. Queen Elizabeth I at Tilbury was happy to claim ‘the heart and stomach of a king’, though she

‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner turned into a little police station. I felt one ahead on this, as I had since been up the arch, for the sake of the view, mostly. I remembered from an exhibition there that the name of the police station cat had been Snooks. With Snooks in mind, I

Virginia Woolf submitted an article to Tit-Bits at the age of eight. It was rejected. The experience might have hurt her. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she had built an imaginary world in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, modelled upon Tit-Bits. Writing as an adult about George Eliot she said: ‘She is as easy to read as Tit-Bits.’ In Flush, her imaginative biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog, she used the common noun: ‘They tempted him with caresses; they offered him titbits; but it was useless.’ There was nothing rude about Tit-Bits (beginning in 1881 as Tit-Bits from all the interesting Books and Newspapers of the

‘Did she mean youth clubs?’ asked my husband when I said how annoying I found the promise made by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to provide ‘new youth hubs to steer young people away from violence’. No, she definitely said ‘hubs’. Everyone has to have a hub now. Sophy Ridge has one on television at seven o’clock every evening. A hub was an almost magical thing when Gordon Brown as prime minister introduced one to Downing Street. It was credited with being inspired by one at the Daily Telegraph. ‘Mr Brown has decided to spend some of his time working in Downing Street surrounded by his closest aides,’ reported Rosa Prince

Becky Sharp, you’ll remember, near the beginning of Vanity Fair, throws the school gift of a Johnson’s Dictionary out of the window of the coach. She responds to Amelia Sedley’s horror by saying with a laugh: ‘Do you think Miss Pinkerton will come out and order me back to the black-hole?’ This is not the £22 billion black hole that Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, teases us with. I’m surprised she has persevered with it, especially as it employed black pejoratively. As I mentioned last year, UK Finance, a banking trade body, declared that black market should be replaced with illegal market lest it suggest racial bias. Black hole, in Becky