Dot Wordsworth

Here are the first 50 words in the order that they were learnt by a child called Will: 1 uh-oh; 2 alldone; 3 light; 4 down; 5 shoes; 6 baby; 7 don’t-throw; 8 moo; 9 bite; 10 three; 11 hi; 12 cheese; 13 up; 14 quack-quack; 15 oink-oink; 16 coat; 17 beep-beep; 18 keys; 19 cycle; 20 mama; 21 daddy; 22 siren

My husband has an irritating habit of holding his hymn book open at the right page but obviously not referring to the text as he belts out carols. He is perfectly happy growling, in what he thinks a light baritone, the Latin version of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, even the fourth verse, beginning: ‘Ergo

‘When I asked the bank,’ said my husband, ‘they were no help at all.’ My attention was distracted from his Kafkaesque predicament, which is both typical and too complicated to explain. Instead I was pondering the reference to the bank as they. This is well established in British English. The bank, Sainsbury’s or England (the

There’s something suspicious about the name for a fear of clowns which was on the shortlist of words of the year compiled by Oxford Dictionaries. This phobia, coulrophobia, oddly enough illustrates the meaning of Oxford’s eventual chosen winner: post-truth. Post-truth applies to a circumstance ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion

At the Queen’s Coronation, the Duke of Northumberland carried the Sword of Mercy called Cortana. I mention this for three reasons: by way of a holiday, since it is as far from the American elections as we can get; because I am worried that the sword might not be carried at the next Coronation; and

Staring at a brown envelope, my husband said: ‘I’ll deal with that post-breakfast,’ and then laughed as though he had made a joke. In his mind it was a play on words, the unspoken words being post-Brexit. It is true that no one is safe from that phrase these days. As a compound adjective, it’s

I’m very glad I followed a friend’s recommendation to read The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield, an author neglected to the point of disparagement. The vehicle of the book is a tale of seafaring in the 1860s, and one of Masefield’s great strengths is vividness. He deals with material objects in motion. But description

‘How can Bovril be suitable for vegetarians?’ asked my husband. ‘Bo- comes from bos, Latin for an ox.’ He was staring at a label that said: ‘Beef Bovril. Beef flavoured drink.’ This is a preparation of dried granules, containing yeast extract but no beef, which therefore not only suits vegetarians but also counts as halal.

Of the contribution to English that Polari is claimed to have brought, perhaps naff is the most current-sounding. An older suggestion for its origin, recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary, is from northern English naffu, ‘simpleton’. But, in a refreshing wander through the forest of Jonathon Green’s Dictionary of Slang, which this week went online,

‘Americans,’ said my husband in much the same tone that Betsey Trotwood said ‘Donkeys’. It was his way of explaining my dislike of the verb critique. I had bridled most recently in reading a rather good review by Professor Sir Paul Collier in the TLS, where he said that ‘leading economists have critiqued the euro’.

Home is where the heart is, but some poor languages have no word for ‘home’. For them, home is where the hearth is. The Spaniards have a proverb (of course) on the matter: El sol es hogar de los pobres, ‘The sun is hearth and home for the poor’, since they can afford no other

Jonathan Swift, in his satirical poem ‘An Epistle to a Lady’, says modestly: ‘If I can but fill my Nitch,/ I attempt no higher Pitch.’ This notion of a social alcove was identical 300 years later when a character in Bill the Conqueror by P.G. Wodehouse finds she has grown used to ‘his undynamic acceptance

What do you say to someone who is killing you? It is seldom possible to decide in advance. We are told that Fr Jacques Hamel, aged 85, murdered while saying Mass at Saint-Étienne-du-Rouvray on 26 July, said, as his killers brought him to his knees to cut his throat: ‘Va-t’en, Satan.’ It is a reasonable

I’d seen The Gruffalo in Latin, so I was delighted when Veronica showed me a version her daughter had been given, in Doric. It begins: ‘A moose tuik a dander ben the wid./ A tod saw the moose, an the moose luiked guid.’ (I take it that every mother knows The Gruffalo by heart. The

Old Quentin Letts was on the wireless the other day asking ‘What’s the point of the London black cab?’ Between much shouting from my husband (a sign he is paying attention) I heard an old cabby explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. Really! There is

Revisers of OED have made a pig’s ear of pelican pie, I fear. I’ve been reading for pleasure Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (reviewed last week). I’m up to 1904, when James Murray complains he ‘could have written two books with less labour’ than it took to compile the entries for

When I ran out of space last week, I was about to mention the way in which some people relish long names. It may be childish but they enjoy it. In Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective world, characters unashamedly cap obscure quotations and references. There is an exchange in Murder Must Advertise between an ad man