I’ve heard two people in the past week make a jocular remark about things just growing ‘Like Topsy’. They were both life peers as it happens, Lady Altmann and Lord Norton of Louth. Is one still allowed to make this proverbial reference to Uncle Tom’s Cabin? In a way the simile is the same as
The Ukrainians have been giving numbers of ‘settlements’ that they have recovered. A friend asked whether the word used by English-speaking broadcasters was influenced by the Pale of Settlement of Czarist times. I was surprised and tried to find out. As a starting point, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth established the Warsaw Confederation in 1573, giving religious
Sir Keir Starmer told his party that Fritz Hippler (1909-2002), in his film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), released in 1940, juxtaposed footage of swarming rats and Jewish men hurrying through the ghetto of Lodz. In the same year, the Handbook of British Birds, edited by H.F. Witherby, noted the habitat of the slender-billed
I once failed to entertain the former Master of Balliol Sir Anthony Kenny by telling him about the inscription in the lift at the London Library, the gift of the Byzantinist Sir Steven Runciman. I suddenly forgot what it said. All I could think of was Inter medium montium pertransibunt aquae, ‘Between the midst of
Sir Keir Starmer told his party conference last month that a Labour government would within a year set up a publicly owned company to be called Great British Energy. Perhaps it was thought to have a ring of the popular Great British Bake Off. (The series is called The Great British Baking Show in America
In his picture from 1932, ‘Derrière la gare Saint-Lazare’, Henri Cartier-Bresson caught the moment when a man in a hat launched himself forward from a ladder lying in some water, his leading heel not yet breaking the mirror-like surface, which reflected too a circus poster of a girl leaping. In 1952, when the photographer published
‘You’re easily pleased.’ said my husband when I told him how satisfying I found a chance discovery. It was about green grass growing, and I’m still pleased with it. Grow comes from an ancient Germanic root gro-. Green derives from the same source, and the greenery that grew was called grass, a third derivative from
The Guardian kindly tells us that green is a colour whose time has come: ‘A blazer or a cotton shirt in Wimbledon grass-court green as a pop of saturated colour against white jeans and chunky flat boots is very Copenhagen Fashion Week.’ For the Express, it’s nails: ‘With polish costing from as little as £1,
The Budget (which the revolutionary fiscal act last week was technically not) is directly connected with bilge and with one of the circles of Dante’s Hell, the eighth, which houses the financial fraudsters, speculators, extortionists, counterfeiters and false forecasters. The circle is divided into the ten ditches of Malebolge. The Malebolge, singular bolgia, take their
‘We got a gusher!’ exclaimed my husband in his idea of the accent of a Texan oil prospector. Normally, I’m not ashamed of his deranged behaviour, but now it seemed wrong. For we were watching the hypnotic livestream from Westminster Hall of people paying their respects at Queen Elizabeth’s coffin. There was many a tear
‘Dire?’ said my husband. ‘It’s something chronic.’ He was putting on his idea of an Estuary accent, in a manner that might soon be unacceptable. But it is true that everything has been called dire lately, and that’s no small claim. ‘Dreadful, dismal, mournful, horrible, terrible, evil in a great degree,’ was the semantic landscape
‘Wha, wha?’ said my husband in a slack-jawed way, throwing over a copy of the Guardian, as though it was my fault. ‘“Today,” it said, “just three crops – rice, wheat and corn – provide nearly half of the world’s calories.”’ I saw the problem. It was obvious, from a process of elimination, that by
It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard the journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway on the wireless recently noticing in a half-baffled way the tendency of pupils to call mental illness mental health. Mental health hasn’t quite achieved that meaning in standard speech, but it
‘Quicksand!’ yelled my husband, flailing his arms wildly. Since he was sitting in his armchair, his dramatic representation of a scene from a western failed to convince, though it endangered the tumbler of whisky on the occasional table next to him. He’d been set off (not that it takes much) by my mentioning the ubiquity
Someone in the Guardian wrote that Boris Johnson had his ‘out of office’ on, and the Chancellor was ‘missing in action’, but the Sun reported that ‘Downing Street denied Boris Johnson had been missing in action during the cost of living crisis’. Ed Miliband said: ‘The Tories are missing in action.’ A Liberal Democrat spokesperson
‘Got any ’ose?’ asked my husband, falling into his Two Ronnies ‘Four Candles’ routine, in which he likes to play not only the shopkeeper but also the customer, with disastrous results. In both the pantyhose and the garden hose in the sketch, the hose was originally the same word. Hose meant the leggings or trousers
‘A law against catcalls?’ asked my husband sceptically. ‘What next, criminalising booing and hissing?’ He often gets the wrong end of the stick, but in this case I hardly blame him, for the press retailed widely Liz Truss’s resolve to make a law against catcalls and wolf-whistles. But to an older generation like my husband’s,
‘Don’t you know the answer?’ asked my husband with mock surprise, throwing over to me from his armchair a copy of the Daily Telegraph. The question, from a reader on the Letters page, was what Mrs Beeton meant by flageons of veal. I had no idea and nor did the Oxford English Dictionary in 20
‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It was because I’d asked him in the far-off days of last week what woman meant, just after Rishi Sunak had said: ‘We must be able to call a mother a mother.’ Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss
There was a word I didn’t understand in Boris Johnson’s resignation speech (in which he did not resign). He spoke of ‘our fantastic prop force detectives’. Prop? Prop forwards, clothes props, proprietors, propositions, propellers? Perhaps they are personal protection officers, though I don’t think those are detectives. Or it might be family slang made up
