Etymology

Spoiler alert: in Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb, the hero is swallowed by a cow ‘of larger than the usual size’. Before this tragic end comes a scene between Princess Huncamunca and Lord Grizzle, who declares: ‘Oh, Huncamunca, Huncamunca, oh! / Thy pouting Breasts, like Kettle-Drums of Brass, / Beat everlasting loud Alarms of Joy.’ At this the Haymarket Theatre roared, for Fielding was parodying a line widely mocked two months earlier, in February 1730, during the ten-day run of the tragedy Sophonisba by James Thomson, where Masinissa (King of Numidia) exclaims: ‘Oh! Sophonisba, Sophonisba, oh!’ It might not sound worth mocking now, but in 1730 theatre-goers, had to bear

‘Just two sugars,’ said my husband as I passed him his tea. He is cutting down. I doubt he would have a better understanding of the effects of sugar on him, or the effects of his character on his sugar intake, if he took a granular view of the granulated sugar he shovels into his cup. I can see why granular has become such a successful vogue term, since it opposes the unspecific or even creatively ambiguous language that plagues us, from Human Resources departments and, ahem, Brexit, that cursed sinkhole of sense. The hope is to tether inflated dirigibles of verbiage to fixed points. Normally now, granular simply means

In the annual dictionary wars to nominate words of the year, in the hope of attracting publicity, Collins has made single-use its first choice for 2018. But of more interest is its second choice: gammon. It is used by Twitter trolls and other supporters of Momentum to signify ‘a male, middle-aged and white, with reactionary views, especially one who supports Brexit’. His face resembles ham. Collins said that in Nicholas Nickleby (1838), ‘Dickens used the word gammon to describe a large, self-satisfied, middle-aged man who professes an extreme patriotism in large part to disguise his essential selfishness and corruption’. I’m afraid the people at the dictionary have completely misunderstood what

Someone on the wireless was talking about marrying in the Liberty of Newgate before the Marriage Act of 1753, and she said it would cost ‘Seven shillings, sixpence’. It made me realise that knowing of pounds, shillings and pence is not to recapture the language of the world in which the units were used. I would have said (not in 1753, granted): ‘Seven shillings and sixpence’, or simply ‘Seven and six’. If there were pounds before the shillings, I’d have said: ‘Nineteen pounds, seven and six’. I’ve just looked up Mr Micawber’s famous dictum in David Copperfield, and this is how he put it: ‘Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure

Radio 3 tries to distract listeners from music by posing little quizzes and hearing quirky details of history from a ‘time traveller’. Last Wednesday we were assured that on the wagon, meaning ‘abstaining from alcohol’, derived somehow from condemned prisoners being taken from Newgate to Tyburn and having a last drink at St Giles’s. This is definitely not the origin of the phrase. That reliable philologist Michael Quinion gave the true version in his blog World Wide Words in 1998. The journey to Tyburn was a staple of popular miscellanies such as Hone’s Year Book and Chambers Book of Days, and earlier of fictionalised histories like Jonathan Wild (1725) and

My husband, who fancies himself as something of a classicist, was delighted to see the Turkish investigators of the Khashoggi horror in Istanbul with ‘Polis’ on their T-shirts. Against the odds of Ottoman rule and the Turkish cultural initiatives of Ataturk, this Greek word for a city society, polis, still designates the guardians of civic peace. The borrowed word was all the more striking as the police were acting in Istanbul, the name of which derived from the Greek phrase eis ten polin, to the city. Where are you going? Eis ten polin, which by the 16th century had become Istanbul. A Turkish folk etymology derives the name from Islam bol,

When I say that it has given comfort to my husband, you can judge how foolish the Wellcome Institute was in using the word womxn and then apologising for it. It had wanted to be more inclusive with a workshop on ‘how womxn can challenge existing archives’. There, womxn serves as a plural, but it can be a singular too. Wellcome did not invent the word. The BBC quoted Dr Clara Bradbury-Rance, of King’s College London, saying that it ‘stems from a longstanding objection to the word woman as it comes from man’. Dr Bradbury-Rance is not a philologist, preferring the ‘intersectional study of sexuality and gender in film and

My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert Island Discs last week. Having confronted the terrible consequences of human error in this alarming speciality, the author mentions the bathetic absurdity of an NHS training presentation by ‘a young man with a background in catering telling me I should develop empathy, keep focused and stay calm’. Empathy is the great thing, it seems. Without it you’re a psychopath; with it you’re the carer we all want. Yet the word has only been in use in English since 1909. Was everybody a pitiless solipsist before that? Empathy translates the German

If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, published in 1704, there’s one on AbeBooks for £131,245.03, plus £12 P&P. Do people just click on such items, I wonder, and wait for the book to plop through the letterbox a few days later? Anyway, there is a meaning of optics now being heavily used that Newton wouldn’t have understood. It is not the first time this has happened, because, for pub-going folk, optics are the measures attached to upside-down bottle of spirits to dispense reliably mean doses. Optic in this sense began as a trade name

I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. Some things about it are awkward. Two Australians, Richard Thomas and Joy Bear, had been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation on the chemistry behind the smell. They found it comes from the ‘blue haze’ of hot summer days, part of the 450 million tons of volatile compounds released by plants into the atmosphere each year. But in the air the compounds do not smell attractive, as they do after being catalysed on the surfaces of

We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in rural Britain. There is, I think, a confusion built into the term, though language is capable of accommodating such inconsistencies. Most of the stuff in the papers and on television on the subject derives from County Lines, Violence, Exploitation & Drug Supply, a report published last year by the National Crime Agency. It says that the phrase county lines refers to the supply of Class A drugs ‘from an urban hub into rural towns or county locations’. It adds: ‘A key feature of county lines drug supply is the use

I’m often annoyed by like being misused in different ways. (In place of as, for example: ‘Like I expected, he was late.’) But I’m now surprised by baffling uses of similar to. The Sun provided three examples in discussing the little internet craze for listening to an audio clip that either says ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny’. (If this has passed you by, don’t trouble.) ‘The Yanny v Laurel debate,’ said the Sun, ‘has taken the internet by storm — similar to The Dress in 2015.’ There I’d probably say like, or more formally as did. In a different edition, the Sun hazarded: ‘Similar to the dress colour debate way back in 2014,