Dot Wordsworth

Marks & Spencer’s (as we still call it) has designated 27 June National Picky Bits Day. It entails eating things like olives and dips straight from their packaging. An evening meal of this kind is called a picky tea. It is, of course, a class minefield. ‘So what’s going on here, are we having a

‘Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,’ said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – ‘his only real passion and his

When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking up courage, while I’m busy in the kitchen. Normally he sits idly by. It’s the loitering that is unsettling. He might get a job, if he could fly, as a loitering munition. These drones hover

The public disturbances in Clapham, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. ‘You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, ‘The surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.’  Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military

‘The creep of “AI slop” in writing on the arts is everywhere,’ complained the Telegraph’s music writer Ivan Hewett the other week, and it’s up to us readers, he says, to stop it. For others, it means weirdly disjointed videos of anthropomorphic cats. But where did the forceful term AI slop come from? For prisoners,

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall

When I hear surveil on the wireless I often imagine it is spelt surveille, since it is a back-formation from surveillance. But the spelling has settled down as surveil. The Telegraph had a report the other day about someone who found his iPhone had been infected with spyware ‘in order to surveil him’. The word

‘That’s really meta,’ said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a

To me, grandee goes together with Tory. So it was a surprise to find Lord Mandelson called a Labour grandee in recent reports. The Sun even called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ‘Grandee Andy’, though that spoils the original joke of calling party bigwigs grandees as though they were the truly grand grandees of Spain. At the last

‘It’s lunchtime and it’s raining. Both things can be true at the same time,’ said my husband, putting on the face that makes him look like John Betjeman on a windy day. The use of this gnomic formula has grown so popular that not many minutes go by without encountering it. Danny Fortson, in the

‘Can you tell us what a stela [pronounced stealer] is and describe it for us?’ Misha Glenny asked the learned guest Fran Reynolds on In Our Time, blessedly continuing after Lord Bragg’s long innings as presenter. The episode was on Hammurabi, King of Babylon. Professor Reynolds managed to get quite far before saying: ‘There’s the

Misuse of myself ‘should be a capital offence’, suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. ‘As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),’ he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and

‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b—h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at

In October, Nicolas Sarkozy took with him to prison a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Its hero, Edmond Dantès, was imprisoned in the Château d’If for 14 years. Mr Sarkozy was in for 20 days. In his instant memoir, Journal d’un prisonnier, he says the food was horrible. Yet, ‘neither wishing nor knowing

My husband made a noise which he thinks is like a klaxon but sounds as if he is choking on his whisky. Even though I was in the middle of making a roux, I had to hurry from the kitchen to make sure he wasn’t. The klaxon was to signal that he had found in

‘They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,’ said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. The Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer. ‘Language has moved on and changed,’ the government

‘Why doesn’t anyone do what you ask them to?’ enquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the subject, I should have thought. He was referring to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: ‘I am reaching out to you.’ But it

Everyone has been declaring which words are too rude to utter in public. Shortly after breakfast, Radio 4 happily discussed by name the book by Cory Doctorow called Enshittification. But on Radio 4’s Feedback it proved impossible to say the word that shocked some listeners when they heard it on a dramatisation of a work

‘After having thrown a sheep six times from the top of a tower,’ reported the Gloucester Journal in 1784, ‘Montgolfier prevailed upon a man to try the experiment, which was performed with the utmost safety.’ The trick was done thanks to ‘a machine called a parachute’. Within weeks, a kind of hat called the Parachute