‘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
Before pinch as a verb appears in any written sources, it already formed part of surnames. Hugo Pinch was walking, breathing and possibly pinching in 1190, and in 1220 in Oxfordshire Ralph Pinchehaste was repenting at leisure. When William Golding wrote the painful Pincher Martin, he knew that any sailor called Martin was nicknamed Pincher.
Dominic Raab blamed distraction for Boris Johnson’s woes when the Tories failed in two by-elections last week. ‘He has track records as long as his arm of misinformation and propaganda and this is a distraction from the real issues.’ Oh, no, I beg your pardon, that was what Mr Raab said about Vladimir Putin in
When the Duke of Sussex heard about the Supreme Court judgment revoking the ruling in Roe vs Wade, ‘His reaction last week was guttural, like mine,’ said his wife Meghan Markle. ‘Men need to be vocal in this moment,’ she told Vogue magazine. If we are to take her at her word, the Duchess of
Lord Geidt said in his resignation letter that he had been put in an odious position. He meant it was hateful, though it is impossible to forget the malapropism (avant la lettre) of Dogberry in Shakespeare’s Much Ado: ‘Comparisons are odorous.’ Lord Geidt’s adjective seemed to me old-fashioned and classically inspired. Odious would have been
My husband put one foot forward at an angle to the other and grasped his left hand with his right. ‘Occidit miseros crambe repetita magistros,’ he declaimed. He was quoting Juvenal, the seventh satire (‘rehashed cabbage is the death of wretched teachers’), though I don’t think he could manage much more from any Juvenal satire,
Turkey has told the UN it wants to be called Türkiye. Even when it is written in capitals, it would still like the little dot over the i, thank you, as İ. Exports will now bear the label ‘Made in Türkiye’ instead of ‘Made in Turkey’. Turkey is of course a name for a delicious
‘That’s nice,’ said my husband, taking a Nice biscuit with his coffee. It was his little joke. The biscuit is named after the French city, though no one knows why. Like the trainers, the city was named after the goddess Nike when it was founded by Greeks in the 4th century bc. Nice, as in
In Kyiv they have voted to change the names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes of Ukraine. The station was named after the street outside, and there’s nothing wrong with the river Dnieper, which winds its S-shape through Ukraine like the Grand Canal through Venice. The trouble was that
‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before wolfing down the lemon and sultana Danish that I had thoughtfully bought him, reduced on account of its age. ‘Every day in this store,’ the till at Marks & Spencer’s had told me in a
I saw in last week’s Spectator that the tractor MP had applied for the stewardship of the Manor of Northstead. After only a few days, the Chancellor of the Exchequer granted him this office of profit under the Crown, which disqualifies him from continuing as an MP. These days, when it is hard to book
Are we living in a new pornocracy? The first one spanned six decades of the 10th century, during which there were 12 popes. Their elections were much influenced by Theodora, wife of the powerful consul Theophylact, and her daughter Marozia. The idea of loose women running the papacy so excited Edward Gibbon that in The
‘What’s that?’ asked my husband, looking at my laptop. ‘Fibonacci fossilised?’ His question made no sense, but I saw what he meant. I was looking at a diagram of ‘the fabulous semantic engine, a sort of virtual sausage machine’ that I mentioned last week. The diagram was circular, like a compass-rose with 37 points. Each
‘It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words. But he liked the sound of it. I think in its sound, suggestive of something impossible to pin down, it resembles serendipity. The obscure French original of salmagundi, a dish of chopped up meat and
To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. So dead becomes unalive, and the pandemic becomes panini or Panda Express. A technology journalist in her mid-thirties, Taylor Lorenz, drew attention to the trend last week in the Washington Post, calling the vocabulary ‘algospeak’. But why should anyone
The man who invented gifs, Stephen Wilhite, has died, aged 74. Controversy survives him – over how to pronounce the thing. A gif was a format that, from 1987, allowed graphics to be shared by otherwise incompatible computers. The name came from the initials of Graphics Interchange Format. That was not decisive, for the word
I never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the ‘inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the
