Do I, asks Mr Peter Andrews, who lives romantically at the New River Head, know the origin of the phrase ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’? Does anyone know, really? One can judge its vintage from the fossilised word omnibus; one would never say ‘man on the Clapham bus’. I had thought that it was
I’ve just come back from the Army and Navy Stores, only it is not the Army and Navy Stores any more. They have changed the name, which was about the only thing that wasn’t wrong with it. It joins the Public Record Office, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and Railtrack, although in the last case neither
It might seem a little early to say so, but if there’s one word this year can do without, it is edgy. It has become a cliché and people seem to use it without any discernible meaning. Both characteristics no doubt go together. I was brought up to take edgy as meaning ‘irritable, on edge,
From 1 January 1888 ‘all substances, whether compound or otherwise, prepared in imitation of butter’ had to be offered for sale under the name of margarine. I can’t pretend that this date is exactly a round number, but it seems more admirable than some of the anniversaries trotted out over the past week. Is this
I felt, the other day, like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken. The nova in my telescope was not just a new word but a new tense. No doubt this heavenly portent bodes no good. The tense might be called the past continuous future. (It is something the
John Humphrys writes well, in this respect: his style captures exactly his broadcasting voice. That is a mixed blessing. Anyway, in his new book Lost for Words (Hodder and Stoughton, £14.99) he is worried about the mangling and the manipulation of English. On page 106 he states a principle: ‘Verbs can refresh a sentence any
A reader tells me that he had always thought ‘one-horse town’ must have derived from a 1940s film script in which John Wayne pushes open the swing doors of a saloon, gets his whisky, then inquires, ‘Whadda they call this one-horse town?’ But my correspondent finds Trollopean connections for the phrase. He does not say
‘Lord Rutherford,’ said my husband, looking up from the Telegraph and taking a glug of whisky. He might as well communicate by flags, because ‘Lord Rutherford’ means a letter to the editor from a reader who knows no more about a subject than he does about atomic physics. This time it was marmalade. ‘I was
BBC television is devoting a frenzied week to a children’s knockout spelling competition. Goodness knows, spelling needs attention, if Veronica’s vagaries are anything to go by. But even where words are spelt correctly, there is the difficulty of their pronunciation. ‘What about Julia?’ said my husband, trying to be ‘helpful’. I couldn’t think there was
‘Whodunnit?’ asked my husband mildly as I threw The Da Vinci Code into the cardboard box intended for kindling, next to the hearth. ‘Whyreadit? That’s the question.’ The Da Vinci Code, which follows so many of the clichés of pulp thrillers, also employs the airport school’s convention for titling, which applies to films too. It
The suburbs are perhaps not so despised as they were in my youth, now that every house costs £1 million. And I was delighted to learn that my friend and columnar neighbour Christopher Fildes is next month publishing a selection from his City and Suburban pages under the title A City Spectator (£12.99). ‘City and
‘Foxes’ tails are just like ladies,’ says Felix Graham, riding to a meet in Trollope’s Orley Farm. The spirited Miss Staveley replies, ‘Thank you, Mr Graham. I’ve heard you make some pretty compliments, and that is about the prettiest.’ ‘A faint heart will never win either the one or the other, Miss Staveley.’ ‘Oh, ah,
The ‘execution’ of captives, instead of their ‘murder’, is a longstanding gripe of Mr Don Barton of Powntley Copse in Hampshire, who wrote to me before the current round of deadly abductions in Iraq. I’m just wondering about the derivation of Powntley, and I’ll have to make further investigations. The point for now is misuse
In the glorious new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which came out on Thursday, the article on Colin Welch says that the Daily Telegraph in his day was for the lumpenbourgeoisie. At first I thought that was merely an ignorant error. The word Lumpen in German means ‘a rag’. Lump means ‘ragamuffin’. Karl Marx is
‘Gresham’s Law,’ said my husband unkindly, possessing himself of the zapper and hopping between channels quite unnecessarily. I had just asked him the difference between an irrational number and a transcendental number. ‘Gresham’s Law’ is his shorthand for: ‘Something you don’t understand.’ It is true that in the past every time I have asked, ‘What
‘In my opinion,’ said Doris Eades, 74, ‘the council has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it and comes up with hair-brained schemes like this.’ So said a newspaper report on a scheme by Wolverhampton to get people to use bicycles. But was it hair-brained or hare-brained? The hare once played
New Zealanders were amused to read that Mr David Blunkett required them to show fluency in English if they apply for British citizenship. New Zealand has produced some fine philologists, such as the late Norman Davis and Robert Burchfield, to teach us about our language. It has its own proper dialect that most of us
The term ‘Middle England’ has been drifting a bit in the last few years, but never so far, so fast as under the impulsion of Mr David Miliband, a young minister in the Department for Education. He said last week that educational ‘improvements have released the potential of Middle England’. This sudden reference to ‘Middle
I’m sure I can’t remember hearing it used wrongly before, and now I’ve heard it twice in a fortnight from politicians. Perhaps they catch it from each other. The phrase in question is in extremis and it has been used as if it meant ‘extremely’ or ‘in extreme circumstances’. In truth it means ‘on the
Shakespeare invented the words anchovy, well-ordered, worm-hole and zany. Or did he? I’ve been nagged at the back of my mind (a tender spot) by doubts about Shakespeare ever since I wrote (5 June) about Dr David Crystal’s remarks in his excellent book The Stories of English. Dr Crystal notes that of the 2,035 words