Language

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

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

Graham Norton’s latest novel ‘blends dark humour and emotional weight with ease’, says the Radio Times. That may well be, but it was the title that struck me: Forever Home. It seems to me a childish phrase, heard in the imagination in a high-pitched American accent, as perhaps in Boys Town (1938), which was Ronnie Kray’s favourite film. Forever home is all over the place. Ant Anstead, a television presenter, has, according to the Sun, ‘bought a 500-year-old farmhouse in Bedford for his parents and will transform it into their forever home’. Nothing lasts forever, and if my husband pegs out (which could happen any time, the way he goes

‘That’ll be the old pivot again,’ said Amol Rajan on Today last week. He was interviewing Pat McFadden, who is the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, since the Duchy needs its chancellor shadowed. Amol, as I think of him since he sounds so young (though he is 41 on election day), suggested that it was hard to trust Sir Keir Starmer as he had campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn. Pat (as I don’t think of him at 59) said that, unlike Corbyn, Liz Truss was on the loose in Norfolk as a Tory candidate despite the mess she’d made. I took the subsequent pivot remark to be a metaphor taken

‘Evelyn Waugh,’ said my husband when I asked who came up with the analogy of carrying a Ming vase. He was, in a way, right, but wrong too. Every political commentator, it seems, has been talking of Sir Keir Starmer’s Ming vase strategy in approaching the election. In April 2021 Decca Aitkenhead was reminded of Roy Jenkins’s observation that before the 1997 election: ‘Tony Blair took such care not to make any mistakes, he resembled “a man carrying a priceless Ming vase across a highly polished floor”.’ Indeed, Ben Macintyre had cited Jenkins on 4 July 1996 – 28 years exactly before Keir Day. Every month we’ve heard the same

The National Galleries of Scotland is singular. In its public pronouncements its pronouns are it and its. Fair enough. Though it appears plural, I shall not misuse its chosen pronouns. Visitors must also learn a new language to visit its three galleries, for they are not now called galleries. They are called National, Portrait and Modern (comprising Modern One and Modern Two). The new names, adopted last year, are ‘snappier and more memorable for visitors than the previous longer names’ such as the Scottish National Gallery. So you should say: ‘I’m just off to see Women in Revolt! at Modern Two.’ The National Galleries of Scotland has been looking for a Director

‘Bear with me,’ said my husband on the phone and then let out a loud roar. It was intended to be the sound of the bear with him. There are no circumstances in which that would be amusing. It is bad enough when people say ‘Bear with me’ and then spend unfathomable minutes trying to find your ‘details’. I can’t bear being asked to be borne with. It is even worse when the bearing falls into the growing category of difficulty with verbs: sitting and sat; brought and bought; lie and lay. The Sun carried a news story recently about a television presenter called Carol Kirkwood, who took her colleagues’

‘It sounds like Polari to me,’ said my husband, who can remember Julian and Sandy (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) on Round the Horne, 1965 to 1968. They used Polari, an assorted camp slang popular in the years when homosexual acts were still illegal. It was the phrase Genny Lex that my husband had heard, popping up as a jocular name for the general election. This annoys people. On that old-fashioned social medium, X, someone with the handle bewilderedyorks posted: ‘*Opens Twitter* *Reads post about “the genny lex”* *Burns iPhone*.’ ‘Right, if you’re gonna call it the gennylex, I’m calling the protagonists Richie Soons and The Starmeister General,’ wrote GlennyRodge,

‘You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,’ sang my husband with execrable delivery. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of Bame, not Mame.’ The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology for what we were encouraged to call Black and Minority Ethnic people until that term was expelled from polite conversation. Now the trendy label is global majority. ‘The term Global Majority was coined as a result of my work in London on leadership preparation within the school sector between 2003 and 2011,’ says someone called

‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t. We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese migrants drowned in Morecambe Bay while picking cockles for a gangmaster, later sent to prison. The Gangmasters (Licensing) Act 2004 then made it a crime to be in charge of people harvesting shellfish or agricultural produce without a licence. Twenty years earlier, the name of the film Ghostbusters was added to the world’s vocabulary. An

‘Sparks,’ said my husband, after a short pause. I had asked him what one could spark. His answer was true but not all that helpful. I had come across a headline on the BBC News website that said: ‘Record hot March sparks “unchartered territory” fears.’ The inverted commas around unchartered territory were not meant as so-called sneer-quotes, but to indicate quotation. Later the same day the headline was amended to uncharted and sparks was jettisoned. There is such a word as unchartered. My distant relation by marriage, William Wordsworth, used it in his ‘Ode to Duty’, the one that begins: ‘Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!’ It is not