Dot Wordsworth

In the series of radio programmes on culture, a guest of Melvyn Bragg’s declared that the distinction between high and low culture was never strict, as a Wagner opera was first performed in a music hall. This is to suggest that music halls always offered acrobats and performing dogs. But the Liverpool Music Hall, for

Like many, I have just read The Hobbit again, which I hadn’t done since reading it to Veronica as a girl. Even when solemn, Tolkien knows what he is doing with language. It was at his most relaxed that he could be careless, as in the early pages where he too often repeats dreadful (in

‘Serious fellows, these Americans,’ said my husband, applying stereotypes with a broad, patronising brush. He had a point, though, for Merriam-Webster’s, the dictionary people, announced that their word of the year, 2012, was a dead heat between socialism and capitalism. ‘We saw a huge spike for socialism on election day,’ said one of its editors.

What tense shall we use? That’s the first question autobiographers must settle. The historic present might convey a sense of immediacy. ‘I’m just one race away from becoming an Olympic champion,’ Victoria Pendleton writes, describing events four years ago in Beijing. ‘My legs have been unbelievably quiet. They lead down to my feet, and I

‘Have you read it then?’ asked my husband on the afternoon Lord Justice Leveson’s report was published. Of course I had not, and he only asked to annoy. But, then, nor could that strange Mr Miliband have read all 2,000 pages when he urged the world: ‘We should put our trust in Lord Justice Leveson’s

‘I wandered home ’tween twelve and one,’ sang my husband, waving his head from side to side in the fond belief that it made him look more like Olivia Newton-John, ‘I cried, “My God, what have I done?” ’ I was feeling a little queasy to start with, and this did not help. The occasion,

Pippa Middleton, I learnt from the Daily Telegraph, has a ‘passion’ for writing. Justin Welby, the next Archbishop of Canterbury, the BBC said, has a ‘passion for resolving conflict’. The Times, in a piece about entrepreneurs, quoted a lawyer as saying: ‘Passion is very, very important.’ Can any of this be true? Certainly not if

On an article in the Times about eating oak moss I saw the headline: ‘I’m lichen it!’ Since I pronounce lichen to rhyme with kitchen, this meant little to me. You may think that I have no business pronouncing lichen in this way. That is the strong opinion of my husband. But to him lichen

Disease, we hear, will decimate ash trees, as the elms were obliterated, and we will see the spoliation of the landscape. I don’t want to be a schoolma’am about decimate. It has, as R.W. Burchfield pointed out in his edition of Fowler, been used for ‘destroy a large proportion’ for as long as it has meant

When I heard on the BBC that an organisation in St Petersburg named after St Basil the Great taught teenagers on probation the art of parkour I didn’t understand what was meant. Parkour is, I learn, a variant of free-running — moving rapidly and freely over or around the obstacles presented by an urban environment

‘Look at all this bumf,’ said my husband, shaking some ‘guidance’ on how to fill in his tax return and sounding like someone out of Much Binding in the Marsh. I mentioned last week the New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew, in its several Tribes, of Gypsies, Beggers, Thieves,

The kick-start and the first world war arrived in the same year. Despite talk of a ‘big bazooka’, the former is still currently favoured as the model for stimulating the economy. (A bazooka, by the way, was a second world war anti-tank rocket launcher, the name deriving from a sort of homemade trombone of the

‘Old people’, as anyone under 30 calls anyone over 40, apparently suffer from textlexia. The word may be more painful than the condition. The wrong element in dyslexia has been taken to mean something like ‘inability’, and this, Greek in form, has been jammed on to text, which derives from Latin. Let us not be too

My husband had for some reason got stuck into a television politics discussion of whether Boris Johnson should be serious or joky at the Conservative party conference. The latter demeanour may have served him as Mayor of London, the argument went, but the former would be needed to become Prime Minister. The dilemma matches the

So far this year everyone has been too busy sitting in front of the television to go rioting, in England at least. But the Independent Riots Communities and Victims Panel has published its final report on why last August’s riots took place. Clearing the ground, it said: ‘We know that the rioters were not a

Q. I understand that the man who organised the Debs’ List is no longer with us, so I wonder if you can advise me how I could round up some of the right sort of young for a drinks party? My niece, who has been at school in Los Angeles, is about to fly into

‘It’s just a fudge-a-rama,’ exclaimed Boris Johnson of the government stance on Heathrow. ‘And it’s just an excuse for a delay,’ he added by way of gloss. I was surprised to find that a fudge-a-rama, or Fudgeorama, already existed: Salerno Fudgeorama Fudge Covered Graham Cookies. They are American, or were till production stopped in 2008

In 1911, bakers and dustmen were more likely than most to be called Bill, or at least William, according to one of those family genealogy companies, Ancestry.co.uk, which has been rummaging in the census for that year. My impression 101 years later is that Bills are rarer than Williams, Wills or even Willses. Prince William

‘Lady Day,’ it said in the New Oxford Style Manual (one of ‘the world’s most trusted reference books’, as it said on the jacket), ‘25 May, the feast of the Annunciation.’ Well, it is the Annunciation, but it isn’t in May but March. Of course, one does not look up ‘Lady Day’ in the New