Etymology

Ralph Bathurst was accused shortly after his death in 1704 of being ‘suspected of Hypocrisy and of mean Complyance’. I am not quite sure what particular hypocrisy was meant, but the accuser was Thomas Hearne, a cranky but principled antiquary in the mould of Anthony Wood. Hearne resented not being able to accept appointments such as librarian of the Bodleian because he would not take the oath to King William after he took the throne in 1689. Bathurst had felt able to accept the Deanery of Wells while retaining the presidency of Trinity College, Oxford, so he was obviously a little flexible, even if he was a great man, a

The number of things I don’t know is infinite — or infinite minus one, if such as number exists, since I discovered something the other day: the most unlikely origin for a common phrase. I could hardly believe it at first. A perfectly current idiom in English is to talk of people currying favour, in the sense of ‘ingratiating themselves’. I knew that currying here had nothing to do with the kind of curry we eat with rice, the name of which we borrowed from Tamil in the 17th century. I supposed, right enough, that the currying of favour was the sort done with a curry-comb when rubbing down a horse.

‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much like rocket salad and wishes all supplies had perished along with the lettuces of Spain. So as a distraction I tried telling him that rocket leaves were connected with street urchins, caterpillars, caprices and hedgehogs. The herb rocket is older in English than the sky-rocket, which appeared no earlier than 1566. The firework rocket took its name from rocchetta in Italian, meaning ‘little bobbin’, from the similarity in shape. There is a related old word in English, rock, which once meant ‘distaff’ and is used by historians now to mean

Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where the hearth is. The Spaniards have a proverb (of course) on the matter: El sol es hogar de los pobres, ‘The sun is hearth and home for the poor’, since they can afford no other fire than the winter sun. My columnar neighbour, Peter Jones, touches on this hearth in his wonderfully entertaining new book, Quid Pro Quo, What the Romans Really Gave the English Language. I found it fun to turn from one entry to a connecting entry and read it like a game of hare and hounds. For

Old Quentin Letts was on the wireless the other day asking ‘What’s the point of the London black cab?’ Between much shouting from my husband (a sign he is paying attention) I heard an old cabby explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. Really! There is no defeating this blunder, which is all over the internet. In reality taxi came into English from the French taximètre (1905), where the first element represents taxe, ‘tariff’. Taxis are hackney carriages. Autodidact cab-drivers cite an origin from Middle Dutch, in which an ambling horse was called hackeneie. But why did the Dutch call it

Bustle, an online newspaper ‘for and by women’, has published ‘six common phrases you didn’t know were sexist (that you’ll now want to ban from your vocabulary)’. One of them is ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’. By chance this phrase was used by Sir Ernest Gowers, the enemy of officialese and cliché, in his book H.W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching. ‘We can,’ Sir Ernest wrote, ‘rid ourselves of those grammarians’ fetishes which make it more difficult to be intelligible without throwing the baby away with the bath-water’. That would annoy someone called Julie Sprankles, a writer for Bustle. ‘The most popular theory is that in medieval

‘Makes me feel sick,’ said my husband, referring not to the third mince pie of the morning (in Advent, supposedly a penitential time of preparation), nor to accepting a glass of champagne after having earlier accepted a glass of whisky at another house. No, what made him feel sick was the seasonal greeting: ‘God bless, and be safe.’ For once, I agreed with him. It was bad enough to be exhorted to drive safely or even stay safe during periods when terrorists had eased off a bit (after peak IRA, but before 2001). But now, with a fashion for shooting civilians in unexpected places, to be told to be safe

A notion is going about that, just as readers of film reviews receive spoiler alerts, so readers of anything should get a trigger warning. Otherwise something nasty in the woodshed might trigger post-traumatic stress disorder or worse. ‘I use the phrase trigger warning myself,’ wrote Kate Maltby in a Spectator blog the other day, ‘to warn Facebook friends that they may not wish to click on a link because it is likely to automatically “trigger” flashbacks for survivors of trauma.’ That’s kind, and luckily I am not triggered by split infinitives. But she and fellow admirers of the classics are shocked by a demand from four students at Columbia University

A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen? Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS of a biography of Jack London, commenting on an example of detail in The People of the Abyss (1903): ‘a deceptively lumpen old man who gently tucks a rogue strand of hair behind his wife’s ear’. The English word lumpen derives from Karl Marx’s use of Lumpenproletariat. He first used it in 1850 of the