Jack pipped Mohammed as the most popular boy’s name for babies born last year. There were 8,007 Jacks and 7,576 Mohammeds, or similar spellings. To me Jack is a pet-name for John — a hypocorism, as the grammarians rejoice to call babyish versions of names. You wouldn’t baptise anyone Jack. There is no St Jack.
Much to my annoyance, and yours, I know, language changes. Thus Samuel Johnson, whose Dictionary we celebrate with its author’s 300th birthday this week, defined urinator as ‘a diver; one who searches under water’. Charles II had a urinator of his own, as a letter by Robert Boyle indicates: ‘His majesty’s urinator, Mr Curtis, published
Taxi-drivers tell you all sorts of myths about history. (‘Yes, Blackheath got its name from the plague pits they dug there in the Black Death). The internet, it strikes me, is like a taxi-drivers’ convention. I’ve just come across this: ‘The phrase “the die is cast” has nothing to do with gambling or dice; instead,
Errors stick like burrs. Forty years ago, Jimi Hendrix played ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Woodstock with a good deal of distortion on his guitar, mostly engendered by feedback. Some people, I learn, refer to this inaccurately as phase distortion. Phase distortion cannot of itself be heard, the physicists tell me. Phase, again, is identified in
My husband wanted to use the lavatory in London recently, as husbands begin to, and, since all the public conveniences have inconveniently been closed, he popped into the Strutton Arms. I was delighted to find that it had changed its name from Finnegan’s Wake. My objection was not the apostrophe, which, though absent in the
Forming part of my husband’s baggage-train en route for another medical ‘conference’, I read a novel by an American. It contained this sentence: ‘It requires that a very real dynamic and active union exists.’ It could have been worse: it might have employed the subjunctive. I have nothing but affection for the subjunctive. I sing
Mr Alan Moore asked my opinion from the Letters column last week on the mother who insisted that swearing meant ‘taking the Name of the Lord in vain’, but using the word f*** was just coarse language. I’m not sure this isn’t a question better directed to Dear Mary, since swearing is as much defined
David Cameron innocently said twat on the wireless last week. He pronounced it to rhyme with hat, when it should rhyme with what. He hadn’t realised it was rude. It’s funny which words one can say and which one can’t. Mr Cameron seems to have thought twat was like prat, which seems to be acceptable.
Outside a theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue that offers a dubiously amusing entertainment a poster proclaims: ‘Pant-wettingly funny.’ This is interesting, because what one might have the misfortune to wet is not a pant but pants. The grammar, though, is undoubtedly correct. Nouns used as adjectives generally remain in the singular. This rule makes honest nouns
The eccentric Sir George Sitwell, the father of Edith, Osbert and Sacheverell, had a valet called Henry Moat, who would also have been called eccentric had he not been a plain-speaking Yorkshireman. One evening after lugging a heavy trunk up the stairs of an Italian hotel he opened the door with his elbow and threw
‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. ‘It’s a good year for daisies,’ said my husband, looking up from the Daily Telegraph and casting an eye over the grass outside the window. He’d learnt the fact from
Like the flying ants that swarm at this time of year, certain tricks of speech seethe in sudden outbursts. I heard the word testament used by mistake for testimony twice during From Our Own Correspondent last week, from different contributors. I was too kind about this usage four years ago when I mentioned it here.
Someone at dinner the other day tried to convince us that the origin of the phrase sent to Coventry had something to do with a London livery company expelling members for some misdemeanour, forcing them to practise in Coventry, beyond the territorial limit of livery authority or (according to another version) a free-trade town that
The Queen has had a vegetable garden laid out behind Buckingham Palace. ‘No chemicals are used and the plot is irrigated from the palace borehole,’ reported the Sunday Times. This use of chemicals annoys some people, mostly chemists. By chemists, of course, I do not mean pharmacists, whom I normally do call chemists, to their
‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. ‘What do they mean by the millionth word?’ asked my husband as he turned away from Jeremy Paxman’s houndlike physiognomy and towards his whisky glass. What indeed? It seems that
What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are no longer representing their constituents.’ What is wrong with the following sentence, taken from a newspaper? ‘Any MP announcing they will step down should face a by-election because they are
Simon Heffer, the Telegraph columnist, has offered to stand for parliament against Sir Alan Haselhurst, the MP for Saffron Walden, who claimed £12,000 expenses for gardening. Mr Heffer commented on Sir Alan’s grammar, declaring that ‘the solecism “hopefully this website will also shed light on the parliamentary system” should have been beaten out of him
I was struck by Neil Tennant’s story (Diary, 23 May) about a message in a séance spelling out to a group of teenagers ‘My dear children, you are so young. Do not make my mistake. — Oscar Wilde.’ It reminded me of that passage in G.K. Chesterton’s Autobiography, where, having fallen into a period of
William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time: I come along where wide-horn’d cows, ’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs, Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls. The milking time
A heads-up is one of those slangy terms that are disreputable not from their semantic content but from the company they keep. It is a cliché in the mouths of dull management types. The meaning has changed in its short life. Currently it means ‘an informal briefing’: ‘I’ll just give you a heads-up on the