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
My husband tapped the notice on the wall of the train noisily with his stick. Such behaviour would be embarrassing, if I let it. ‘Ramping!’ he said. ‘Pure ramping.’ Ramping in my husband’s private language means ratcheting things up, usually in an assertive and hostile way to cow the opposition. As usual, we were the
In the Guardian Paul MacInnes last week suggested casting Russell Crowe as Derek Draper in the film McBride of Satan. The subject would of course be the filthy emails from Number 10, or Smeargate as the press has called the scandal. This means that two gates have been swinging open and shut simultaneously in the
Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks
What do you call today, the day before Easter? It is increasingly called Easter Saturday. That is what the BBC calls it in its programme guides. Robin Hood and Casualty await us as an alternative to the Easter Vigil. But Easter Monday is the Monday after Easter, and Easter Tuesday the day after that, and
My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very
The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past
‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’ Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with
The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables,
Contemplating the sad fate of Jade Goody, the reality television celebrity, Mr Gordon Brown remarked: ‘I think everybody is sad about the tragedy that has befallen Jane Goody.’ Mr Brown is unlikely to watch Big Brother or read vulgar newspapers, apart from cuttings gleaned for him by servants, so there is no reason why he
A bright rainbow on a wall caught my eye, and the building behind it turned out to belong to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. On its website, the department has a cheerful image of helicopters and cranes constructing a rainbow. When I add that the home page is headed by a picture of
While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on