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
That was all right,’ said my husband after listening to Paul Scofield read the whole of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ on Poetry Please. I hope they are not going to axe Poetry Please as part of Radio 4’s improvements. It’s the sort of thing that happens after 33 years of success. We have grown
The people who occasionally drive in the empty Olympic lanes and are entitled to sit in the seats left empty at Olympic events are called the Olympic family. It seems to me unwise to have attached such a name to this already creepy notion. Even the UK Border Agency has special procedures for an ‘Olympic
Collins dictionaries have invited people to send in a word for inclusion in its English dictionary. ‘If it’s accepted,’ the publishers say, ‘your word will be published on collinsdictionary.com within a few weeks, and your name will appear on the definition page where you will be recorded forever.’ Forever (usually written as two words in
On the matter of a referendum (not, of course for British people), the Prime Minister said recently that he hoped the Falkland islanders ‘will speak loudly and clearly and that Argentina will listen’. This seems to me an example of hypercorrect speech, parallel to the tendency of people whose social insecurity overwhelms their grammar to
‘I hope you’re not having a go at P.D. James,’ said my husband, looking up from Devices and Desires (1989), which I had just finished. I am certainly not, for I admire and enjoy the author. My article last year about mistakes in Death Comes to Pemberley was intended to raise the question of the
For a moment I thought it odd that Sam Leith should use the word ballsy of Lillian Hellman in reviewing her biography here a couple of weeks ago. Then I thought, hang on, one never hears the word used of men. Sarah Crompton, writing in the Telegraph recently, noticed something similar, listing other words used
My husband woke himself up with a snort that sounded like a crocodile seizing the hind limb of a warthog, reached for his whisky glass and said, as if I had accused him of anything: ‘Just chillaxing.’ If this useless portmanteau word struggles through a few more months of life, it will be thanks to
The other morning on the wireless (Home Service), Stephen Evans, the BBC’s man in Berlin, mentioned Angela Merkel’s favourite Anglicism: Shitstorm. So I suppose it is quite all right to discuss it here, between adults. The word has been voted Anglicism of the year by a jury headed by Professor Dr Anatol Stefanowitsch. It beat
Yell, which publishes Yellow Pages, is changing its name to Hibu, after seeking ‘an identity to tell our story’. It prefers to spell hibu with a small h. It admits that hibu means nothing (though to me it looks like a mis-spelled French owl), but it knows how it is pronounced: high-boo. If it were
I heard a man say mayor on the radio recently as though it were mayo (of the kind that one goes easy on) followed by ‘r’. I suspect that this weird pronunciation (which could only be adopted by someone who had never heard Larry the Lamb bleat at ‘Mr Mayor’) was influenced by mayoral. Mayoral
‘How do you stand on the the?’ asked my husband. ‘The the?’ ‘Yes, the the.’ We could have gone on all morning, but the phone went, a so-called opinion survey. By the time I had sent them (or him) away with a flea in his ear, my husband had drifted off. The the in question
Pop Larkin from The Darling Buds of May won himself a place in the Oxford English Dictionary by saying things like: ‘Perfick wevver! You kids all right at the back there?’ So it was some surprise to find a couple of television advertisements mispronouncing perfect in quite a different way. They say the second syllable
A London gallery had a spot of trouble with the police when someone complained about a picture of Leda and the swan. ‘As the exhibition was already over,’ said a report in the Daily Telegraph, ‘they took down the artwork, which shows the animal ravaging the naked woman.’ Ravaging? ‘Thou still unravaged bride of quietness,’
‘Roaster — A green linnet, as this bird was most frequently roasted by the boys at the playroom fire.’ That item comes in a glossary at the back of The History of Sedgley Park School by F.C. Husenbeth, published in 1856. I stumbled across it when looking to see if the book had an index. (It
I want to add a footnote to the obstetric history of last week’s newborn word omnishambles. But before I forget, I noticed an advertisement on the side of a bus recently which asked: ‘Fed up with buffering?’ I did, by chance, know what the bus meant: buffering is the juddering standstill that internet video can
My husband gave me a copy of Plutarch’s Moralia for our wedding anniversary, the romantic old thing. It is in the translation of Philemon Holland, made in 1603 and republished in 1657. At the back is ‘An Explanation of certain obscure words… in favour of the unlearned Reader’. That’s me. Some entries in the glossary
I could scarcely believe the feebleness of my husband’s little joke in declaring he would take less water with his whisky ‘to help with the drought’. I think he must have been watching repeats of Mock the Week while I am out. But the new cliché is that we are in drought. Sometimes this is
Francis Maude was judged to have let the side down by uttering the words ‘kitchen supper’. It was almost as bad, apparently, as having said ‘nursery tea’ — not the language of the people. Yet people do eat supper, and may eat it in the kitchen, not always on their laps in front of the