Language

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up. Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in

Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon ‘has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews’. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: ‘give permission’ and ‘enact a penalty to enforce obedience to a law’. The latter sense was extended after the first world war to cover economic or military action against a state as a coercive measure. That is the use we daily find applied to action, or the lack of it, against Russia. The diverging meanings both

On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: ‘babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped’. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together with the help of an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback. The site has no connection with Penguin. But ‘Wake up, babe, new [something] just dropped’ is a catchphrase or meme that has been around

With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his expulsion from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. An American professor of philosophy, Yitzhak Melamed, asked the Portuguese Jewish synagogue there for permission to film some footage. The rabbi pointed out that Spinoza had been excommunicated ‘with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time’. So, no he could not visit

‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not sure Nigel Farage is a Flashman. What kind of viper did Mr Lowe mean? Presumably one in the bosom – not like Cleopatra’s asp, but one thawed out by a man who pitied it, only to be bitten when the creature warms up. It’s a fable of Aesop with which Cicero was familiar. Hence, in

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a permanent or habitual quality. I suppose the people who wrote the news bulletins wanted to make it clear that the existence of the conclave was not a secret. But that is not how secret would be used. After all, we benefit from the secret ballot in Britain, but it is not the holding of the

‘Six!’ cried my husband, waving his notebook as he monitored the by-elections. He wasn’t counting Reform wins but the ways of pronouncing mayoralty. The most inventive seemed to be Jonny Dymond on Radio 4, who called them mayoralities, introducing an i, as in words such as realities or moralities. Although mayoralities wasn’t exactly the required word, it sounded much better than the popular but hideous method of basing its pronunciation on mayor as if it consisted in two syllables, may and or, with the second stressed. It is not as though mayoralty was invented in the 21st century along with the vogue for elected mayors, beginning with poor old Ken

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

‘Is it connected to plant-based?’ asked my husband, as though we were playing Twenty Questions. ‘Anything to do with Homebase, drum and bass, Prisoners’ Base?’ I was trying to interest him in the 21st-century meaning of based, of which he had never heard. The New York Times never stops trying to give a new etymology for based, according to Jeff Bercovici, who is co-head of the newsroom of the San Francisco Standard. His actual words were ‘trying to retcon the etymology’, but I didn’t know that retcon means to give ‘retroactive continuity’ to a thing, as Dallas did by saying that Bobby Ewing’s death was just a dream. On Twitter

‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’. I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B

‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria – about the same amount as those little bottles of milk we had at school.’ I had been talking about billions, trillions and quadrillions and had suggested that our bodies’ cells were outnumbered ten to one by bacteria. But since 2016, apparently, the reliable estimate is of 30 trillion human cells with 38 trillion bacteria wandering about inside us. The language of those large numbers remains ambiguous. In 1974 Harold Wilson, the prime minister, refused a request by a Tory MP for ministers to use billion only in its British

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’ Well, yes and no. Her children were registered as Mountbatten-Windsor at birth. That was a name invented by a declaration in the Privy Council in 1960. But Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess now and need not have a surname. The trouble is that other descendants of the late Queen made up surnames for their

My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules. And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is

‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp. Damp in English originally meant ‘a noxious exhalation’. Caxton used it in the 15th century when writing of a prophecy of Merlin about a goat breathing from its nostrils a ‘damp’ that would betoken hunger. By the 17th century various kinds of damp were feared in mines, fulminating damp or firedamp, which caught fire from the miners’ candles, and

‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been trying to work out what intentional living meant, with regard to the Duchess of Sussex’s new brand of flower sprinkles and raspberry jam. ‘The collection is infused with joy, love, and a touch of whimsy,’ says the publicity. ‘Thoughtfully curated, As Ever celebrates intentional living.’ Intentional living could be the opposite of assisted dying, I suppose. It is quite a puzzle.      ‘The debut As Ever collection showcases eight intentionally designed products, personally developed by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,’ says another bit of PR. In the OED, the meaning ‘on purpose’

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know. Not to be outdone, Cardiff University has told its students to avoid using ‘British-English’ phrases such as ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece

In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published. Published 34 years posthumously, however, in 1981, were Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, a commonplace book edited by J.A. Gere and John Sparrow, with a foreword by his friend Harold Macmillan. One entry lists 17 lives in the Dictionary of National Biography ‘of interest and not usually read’, such as John Selby Watson (1804-84), ‘author and murderer’;

‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’. ‘No, if it was cysticercosis,’ my husband insisted, ‘it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain.