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
In the First Act of Othello, just as things are getting interesting, the audience hears someone calling from offstage: ‘What ho, what ho, what ho!’ It is not Bertie Wooster but a sailor with news about the Turks (or Ottomites, as they are sometimes referred to). Yet Bertie made ‘what ho’ his own. In Jeeves
‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the sky, burnt during the foot-and-mouth outbreak of 2001. It was eradicated by culling six million beasts, not by vaccination producing herd immunity. In Shropshire, stone memorials survive to the outbreak of rinderpest (like Covid-19 a
My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe at his resignation in 1990: ‘Rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone seems to be talking about upticks. Usually it is to do with local increases in coronavirus cases. But my husband, not above reading the sports pages, found that Juventus was wondering whether Cristiano Ronaldo had
A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the 60,000 entries in the Scots Wikipedia. This online resource is like Wikipedia in English, except that it is in the Scottish tongue — not Gaelic, but the Lowland Scots dialect of English, a Germanic language.
Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William Douglas-Home. She took the part to Broadway, but then in the film it was taken by poor Sandra Dee, who, if she was born in 1942, was still only 16 when it was released in
I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy, referred to the Queen as ‘The Queen’. It made her look like a work of fiction. The Royal Household is at it still, referring to ‘The Princess Royal’, ‘The Royal Navy’ and even ‘The Royal
Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just thinking.’ If so, he seems recently to have been overthinking. Overthinking is a pretty annoying word, often used by people not noted as great thinkers. Taylor Swift, the belle of West Reading, contrasts it with
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what it would be like to live with the bust of a poet. A bust of Byron on one’s desk would be impossible, with ‘that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth,
‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was published posthumously in 1997. The joke in the title depended on knowing two things: that there was an earlier book on English usage of that name (by the brothers H.W. and F.G. Fowler, 1906) and
The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there are such things as women) or even pronounce a taboo word. Taboo words have long been with us. The taboo word fuck was not even included in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with the magic money that Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor, was throwing out from his tree. Then my eye was caught by my husband dozing over his newspaper where a little patch of whiskyish dribble had spread
It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of us could only object by asserting that one simply could not say: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ It should be: ‘I love it.’ Yet I doubt we’d be more convincing by saying (truly enough) that love is
At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the Guardian last week. Swathes tend to be whole. Either that or vast, huge, great. Soldiers on first world war battlefields were mown down in them. If a swathe retains a literal meaning, on which its
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed (nor had since 2000). I don’t know why anyone should have told him, but I too regret its demise. Its title was high-sounding but meant no more than ‘a weekly meeting’. Indeed until an Act
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives
That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici (from the 1630s), ‘I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.’ His hat he took
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls and many other things for dinner, with which I was highly pleased,’ wrote Samuel Pepys on 13 January 1667. They were eight. ‘I had for them, after oysters, at first course, a hash of rabbits,
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie fantastique. He was expecting a political decapitation. Political metaphors tend to the violent: toast, under a bus, the high jump. Berlioz didn’t use échafaud, ‘scaffold’, in the title of his movement, but supplice, ‘torment’.
