Language

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

On a Saturday morning, no life stirs. The village café is closed and the ancient church of St Beuno’s is locked and deserted. Beside the stone porch stands a dusty glass case that advertises church services and parish gatherings. Not a single event is scheduled. This is the peaceful village of Botwnnog (pronounced Bot-oon-awg) in the Llyn peninsula, north Wales, whose council recently rejected a plan to build 18 houses for rent. Few Welsh words have found their way into English, even though we inhabit the same island The language chosen by the council made headline news. ‘The Welsh village where English speakers aren’t welcome,’ said the Daily Telegraph, referring

There were many tributes paid to the Jersey aid worker Simon Boas when he died of throat cancer in July, aged 47. In writing and speaking about his terminal diagnosis with courage and humour, he was admired on the island and beyond. My mother-in-law, having spent years working with aid charities, lives on Jersey and knew Simon well. So I listened with interest earlier this month to an item about him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The host, Emma Barnett, had spoken to Simon days before he died. Now she was about to interview his widow. Or, as she referred to Aurelie Boas, ‘his wife’. As editorial mistakes go,

In Florence there was a stone on which Dante sat in the evenings, pondering and talking to acquaintances. One asked him: ‘Dante, what is your favourite food?’ He replied: ‘Eggs.’ The following year, the same celebrity-hunter found him in the same place and asked: ‘With what?’ Dante replied: ‘With salt.’ In the Piazza delle Pallottole in Florence skulks a lump of stone bearing a label declaring it the genuine Stone of Dante. It doesn’t look very comfortable but at least it explains the line in Browning’s ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ where he says: ‘This time we’ll shoot better game and bag ’em hot – / No mere display at the

‘Very tasty,’ said my husband. ‘Very sweet.’ In a catchphrase from 1940 that must surely predate even his long tale of years, he had found an echo for one that has in recent days attracted millions on TikTok. The difference is that today it is called a meme. ‘You see how I do my make-up for work?’ says Jools Lebron in a video. ‘Very demure. Very mindful.’ It is funny, if it is funny, because the deadpan cosmetics tutorial is delivered by Jools Lebron, a great fat trans woman. The audience is addressed as ‘divas’. They are told: ‘I don’t come to work with a green-cut crease. I don’t look

Freddie Flintoff recently called the Maidan ‘the home of cricket’. For supporters of Ukraine’s independence, the Maidan saw continual demonstrations a decade ago. The outline of the Hippodrome of Constantinople is marked out on the Maidan. Quite a place, then. Or rather, places. Our tacking ‘the’ on to Maidan, indicates its use as ‘a square’. Indeed, foreign places that we call ‘Square’ are often called Maidan in their own country. (Cairo’s Tahrir Square is Maydan at-Tahrir.) The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded at its own Maidan. The Young Zoroastrians still play at the Maidan in Mumbai, where Parsis founded the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848. Like Parsis, the word maidan

Writing about monkeypox in The Spectator in May 2022, Douglas Murray repeated a formula he had put forward in 2020, explaining ‘the problem with us humans as a species’: ‘Someone always shags a monkey.’ Now an outbreak of new, improved monkeypox is upon us, and the first thought has been to avoid stigmatising monkeys. It has been renamed mpox. The Oxford English Dictionary, a vasty hoard where words can lie undisturbed for more than a century, was quick to comment: ‘Mpox was originally named monkeypox because it was first seen in laboratory monkeys. It was later identified in rodents and other small mammals, various wild primates, and humans. After a

My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it. I wonder if the book explains the title: A Voyage Around the Queen. I see the idea, glimpses of the late Queen from many points of view, a speciality in which the author excels. The title reminded me of John Mortimer’s play A Voyage Round My Father, on which Rupert Everett toured last autumn. An East Midlands theatre site announced it as A Voyage

In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket when he found him in the cloakroom at Victoria station – the Brighton line. When told, Lady Bracknell exclaimed: ‘The line is immaterial!’ This turns out not to be true, since it emerges that Miss Prism left a baby at the cloakroom of the Brighton line. Was it immaterial that Mr Cardew (whose Christian name – ‘James, or Thomas’ – Lady Bracknell also assumes is immaterial) had a first-class ticket? Not at all, for his wealth made his granddaughter an eligible bride for

The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than he perhaps knew. ‘I won’t shy away from calling it what it is – far-right thuggery.’ Thuggery throve in India, was suppressed by imperial authorities and has been revived in a different form in the gangsta culture of black America. A thug was, the OED tells us, ‘a member of a society or cult of robbers and murderers in India known for strangling their victims’. The word was first noted in English usage in 1810. Between 1826 and 1840 more than 14,000 thugs were hanged, transported, or imprisoned for life

My husband has taken to crying out or braying ‘Haar, ha!’ at the wireless whenever he hears something particularly foolish, which is quite often. His bray was even louder than usual when one of those endless trailers invited us all to ‘dive deeper’. Like a tornado, this figure of speech has thickened into reality within the lifetime of most of us. No example earlier than 1986 has been found by the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes a New York Times review of a television programme of that year, ‘a deep dive into nostalgia’ with the help of ‘old newsreel and movie clips’. The metaphor is intended to convey the sense

Logan Paul, a wrestler with 23 million YouTube subscribers, called Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to his shooting ‘the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life’. It helped that it was photographed with Old Glory flying against a blue sky and Trump, fist in the air, mouthing ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ with blood trickling down his cheek. Earlier the wrestler had also called it approvingly ‘the most gangster image of all time’. There is an overlap between gangster and badass. In his novel Londonstani (2006), Gautam Malkani has a character say: ‘Don’t get me wrong, we in’t wannabe badass gangstas or someshit.’ That was six years after Kid Rock peaked

Lord Peter Wimsey said to the nurse: ‘Now about the old lady herself. I gather she was a little queer towards the end – a bit mental, I think you people call it?’ This is in Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, from 1927. The 1920s were the heyday of mental, which occurred then about 87 times in each million words. Now it has fallen back to about 66 in a million. We no longer speak of things such as mental homes, and mental patient, mental retardation, even mental illness, are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘avoided as being potentially offensive’. The curious consequence is that a positive phrase, mental