The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole. When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the
The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The
My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings. My mnemonic
I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside
‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One
John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one
I’ve heard people using back-to-back housing to mean terraces separated by back yards. But strictly, back-to-back houses are built against a party wall and face opposite ways. Byelaws after the passing of the Public Health Act 1875 prevented their continued construction. In Birmingham, four of the city’s former thousands of back-to-backs are preserved by the
An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery. Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to
‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass. I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive
‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team
‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of
Virginia Woolf submitted an article to Tit-Bits at the age of eight. It was rejected. The experience might have hurt her. With her sister Vanessa and brother Thoby she had built an imaginary world in their family newspaper, the Hyde Park Gate News, modelled upon Tit-Bits. Writing as an adult about George Eliot she said: ‘She
Towards the end of the 1980s, Jeffrey Bernard, late of this magazine, sometimes used to wear grey shoes with jeans and a blazer. Those grey shoes, if ever fashionable, were out of fashion by then, like referring to young women as birds. But his writerly disposition once encouraged him to call an intimate acquaintance who
‘Did she mean youth clubs?’ asked my husband when I said how annoying I found the promise made by Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, to provide ‘new youth hubs to steer young people away from violence’. No, she definitely said ‘hubs’. Everyone has to have a hub now. Sophy Ridge has one on television at
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
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
‘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
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’.
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
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:
