Etymology

It’s the bane of many an author these days: those newspaper-filler Q&As. One I recently filled out included the question: ‘What’s the book you’re never without?’ Of course, there’s no book I lug about with me everywhere, but inanity comes with this territory. I responded: ‘A tattered, duct-taped blue hardcover of my Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary (based on Webster’s Third) published in 1969.’ Lame? Actually, no. Access to older analogue dictionaries has become politically invaluable. Pre-internet, august dictionaries such as Webster’s and the OED functioned as linguistic anchors. Beneficially slow to adapt and resistant to vernacular fashion, print editions that were expensive to reissue acted as drags on popular

‘I’ll stick to being Brazilian,’ said my husband. It was a family joke. Every time a politician on the radio says resilient, the first to shout out Brazilian wins. I haven’t yet discovered what the prize is, though we have been playing the game since 2014, when I wrote about resilience here. My husband may be resilient, even robust (another political watchword), but the newest favourite is nimble, and I don’t think he’s up to that. Ursula von der Leyen called Britain ‘a nimble speedboat’ in its vaccine provision. Actually, though she did say speedboat, I think nimble was supplied by the Sun. Kate Bingham, heroine of the vaccine campaign

I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator, 6 February) that it is a shame the Times is dropping its use of titles of courtesy — Mrs, Mr, Lord — at the second mention of anyone in a report. Now it’s Charles Moore first mention, and Moore after that. Even when I see Jane Austen referred to as ‘Austen’ I feel it a little rude. It makes her sound like a convict, or at best the cook below stairs in some historical drama. ‘Austen, there will be 14 to dinner and please ensure the duck is thoroughly done.’ This is partly a question of sex. I wouldn’t like to be called

‘Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley,’ said my husband, multitasking by kicking the stone and slightly misquoting Samuel Johnson at the same time. It was his (my husband’s) notion of a little joke. Dr Johnson had demonstrated with his own kick the falsehood of thinking that all things are merely ideal, not material. The stone my husband kicked was a milestone outside the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington Gore. It said ‘To Hounslow 9 miles’ and ‘To London (Hyde Park Corner) 1 mile’. Helpfully, a manicule pointed out which way was which. I’m still unsure where Bishop Berkeley comes into this, but milestones have been everywhere recently, all of them grim.

Suzanne Moore, the Telegraph columnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at the ends of emails. Her real gripe was with false claims to kindness. So what should you put at the end of an email? Yours sincerely is conventional in letters to people whom one knows. Sincerely in this context is first recorded by the beloved Oxford English Dictionary from the year 1702, in a letter to Samuel Pepys, in the last year of his life, from Arthur Charlett, the gossipy self-promoting Master of University College, Oxford, who had designed a bookplate for the diarist. He signed himself as ‘your

In discussing the German low-life cant called Rotwelsch, Mark Glanville (Books, 9 January) referred in passing to Polari, ‘the language of gay English subculture’, being used ‘by members of a marginalised group to converse without being understood by outsiders’. I’ve never been convinced by this description of Polari. Undercover policemen in Soho before 1967 may not have been the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they did share the speech of those among whom they moved. Polari, or Parlyare, was a loosely coherent slang drawing on Italian, Yiddish, back slang, rhyming slang and perhaps Romany. This slang vocabulary was familiar to fairground people, publicans, criminals, theatre folk and the homosexuals

Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles. The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers used it in a sense that I thought wrong. Of the 100 newspaper articles mentioning it, not one used performative correctly (to my mind). I must be the only person marching in step. Performative was invented by an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, who used it in lectures in 1952, then in the William James

In the aisle of Tesco I stood like one thunderstruck. It was not the print of a man’s naked foot that took me aback, as it did Crusoe, but a tin of ‘Mandarin segments in juice’. These days we get our entertainment where we can, and I had toyed with buying tinned goods against the next disruption of trade, as Margaret Thatcher had stocked up with 20 tins of fruit in 1974 against inflation. But I had wondered that very morning what to call the shape made by cutting the top off a boiled egg. That is a spherical cap, I learnt. One thing led to another, and the next

In 2015 smombie became the Youth Word of the Year in Germany. In January 2016 a survey found that 92 per cent of the young people asked did not know the meaning of smombie. Smombie is a portmanteau word composed from smartphone and zombie, used for those people who stumble about the street looking at their phones. Like many nonce formations it did not catch on. What, you may ask, was a putatively English word doing as the German youth choice? Certainly there is quite a bit of English vocabulary thrown lightly about by young people in Germany. The word of the year for 2020 is lost, but it was

‘Try the sports pages,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair. I was looking for examples of fortuitous used as though it meant ‘fortunate’. You and I know that it means ‘produced by chance’, and it seems a pity to lose the distinction. The sports pages were indeed thronged with fortuitous. Football, it seems, is a game of chance. It didn’t take long to get a writer in the Daily Mail bang to rights. ‘Only occasionally will you get lucky. Arsenal did ride their luck to down Klopp’s team in London towards the end of last season but may have to wait a while to be so fortuitous again.’ There

‘Forget coronavirus,’ said my husband, ‘the word of the year is strange.’ The strange thing is he’s right. This wasn’t determined by online polls or fixed by dictionaries. It emerged spontaneously and distinctly when the lockdowns got going. About lockdown I am still not quite happy. The word seems a little extreme for the episodes so far. But friends kept mentioning these strange times. The word fitted in more than one sense. When politicians’ repetition of unprecedented had become tiresome, strange still applied in the sense of ‘unfamiliar; not known or experienced before’. It also described the feeling of life as ‘abnormal’. Both meanings have been present in English since

‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of Radio 4 and whisky. ‘No, darling,’ I tried to explain, ‘not Brazilians. Resilience.’ They had been talking about civil servants sworn at by politicians, or at least being in the same room as swearing. Resilience seems the counterpart to robustness. Sir Alex Allan (who resigned after his report into the conduct of Priti Patel was not taken up wholeheartedly by Boris Johnson) had said that ‘senior civil servants should be expected to handle robust criticism but should not have to face behaviour that goes beyond that’. My mind went to

At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been in the Strada Nuova that morning. ‘What else have we to do with our mornings, we women?’ replied Madame de Ventadour. ‘Our life is a lounge from the cradle to the grave.’ How true. The observation comes in Bulwer Lytton’s novel Ernest Maltravers (1837). I was put in mind of lounging by remarks that Anne McElvoy made on the wireless about the use of video-conferencing and broadcasting allowing people to attend to their visible top half while wearing lounge pants below. I wasn’t too sure what lounge pants were. I

Boris Johnson, the Telegraph suggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers to release on his own Exmoor estate’. I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a carrier bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it? My first thought was that there was a perfectly good word, giving. My second was that gifting is an obtrusive case of verbing a noun. Thirdly, it seemed like an Americanism. Fourthly, it belongs to a kind of speech adopted by copywriters for luxury cruises and retirement homes. In 1996, Robert Burchfield in The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage

Boris Johnson looked unhappy, as well he might, standing at his indoor lectern last Saturday to announce the new lockdown: ‘In this country, alas, as across much of Europe, the virus is spreading.’ He said alas a couple more times during the conference. Normally such a word belongs to the sprinkling of slightly absurd phrases that garnish his speech like particularly curly parsley. But, Ichabod, the fun has departed. Alas, there is less and less irony in saying alas. The Prime Minister is doubtless aware of the classical origin of alas in lassitudo, Latin for weariness. Lassitude came into English in the 16th century. Francis Bacon, the Jacobean Lord Chancellor,

An advertisement from GCHQ provoked angry comment because it seemed to suggest that some ballet dancers would be better working with computers, or as it put it: ‘Fatima’s next job could be in cyber.’ The angry brigade said that ballet dancers should not have to give up their art. I suspect too an element of hatred of the state’s security apparatus. No doubt the advert gave the dancer the name ‘Fatima’ hoping to attract people of a Muslim background (Fatima being Mohammed’s daughter). The man who took the original photograph expressed outrage. The woman depicted, from Atlanta, Georgia, is called Desire’e Kelley, who apparently uses an apostrophe in her first

QAnon, the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theory, teaches that President Donald Trump is in secret warfare with a worldwide network of paedophiles. As an explanatory model it reminds me of the voices that Gilbert Pinfold hears in Evelyn Waugh’s novel bravely describing his own delusions brought on by too much chloral and crème de menthe. In the QAnon dark world, kidnapped children are, I think, made use of to produce a psychotropic drug and elixir of immortality called adrenochrome. They are no doubt tortured and killed in the process. QAnon did not invent adrenochrome. Aldous Huxley mentions it in The Doors of Perception (1954), which largely explores his experience of mescaline.

‘Everyone’s been very kind to my husband and I,’ said someone behind me in a (spaced) queue. That is the classic genteelism. We are taught when young not to say ‘Me and my friend went swimming’ and end up talking nonsense. We’d never say ‘very kind to I’, but the genteel yoking cannot be shaken off. I’ve been entertained by looking up ‘Genteelism’ in the first edition of Henry Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926). He characterised it as ‘the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the

I take it personally that a word I practically saw being born is now unrecognised by people almost old enough to be the Chancellor. I am in any case suspicious of the recent survey that found a good proportion of people aged 18 to 30 do not know the meaning of sozzled, cad, henceforth, swot or disco. Do these people live in silos? Some research company surveyed 2,000 young adults and fed the results to newspapers, which reported them last week, giving it publicity. Sozzled was unknown to 40 per cent of respondents and even disco to 17 per cent. But the one that shocked me was bonk. As I