In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the doublet doom and gloom dated only from 1947, in the play Finian’s Rainbow. Three years after the 2016 referendum, Project Fear was still being applied to Brexit. Since then, to buy time in combating coronavirus,
The most emboldened man on earth must be Vladimir Putin. Everything seems to embolden him. Treating Russia as a pariah state could embolden him, wrote someone in the Telegraph, but Barack Obama’s previous attempts to engage with him had just emboldened him, wrote someone else. Liz Truss on a visit to Kiev last month, insisted
‘This will interest you,’ said my husband, looking up from the smeared screen of his telephone. For once he was right. It was a Twitter post about a memorable remark during the invasion of Ukraine. Snake Island is a small, bare outpost in the Black Sea near the Danube Delta. When a Russian cruiser invited
A strange crisis has befallen like. It had long been an object of obloquy and vilification in two functions. The first was as a filler, of the same kind as you know: ‘He was, like, my favourite guy.’ Then it evolved into a formula for reporting; so, in place of ‘I was surprised’, we find:
In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus. My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a
A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked and last month failed in his appeal. A reader wrote to me saying he came across the word pikeys in the 1970s in Oxfordshire and ‘understood it to mean dishonest low-life characters, though not necessarily
‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a play on the German Spätkapitalismus, ‘late capitalism’. There is also a German wine category called Spätlese, ‘late harvest’, and another, when the grapes are exposed to noble rot and allowed to wither on the vine,
‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the Summa Theologiae. There aren’t all that many jokes in Thomas Aquinas’s survey for beginners in the field of theology. As it’s such a large field, his summary runs to 1,800,000 words. (Incidentally, just as Dan
‘Nurse! The tenaculum!’ exclaimed my husband in the manner of James Robertson Justice playing the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. I’m not sure I should describe the work of the tenaculum, in case you’re having breakfast, but be sure it holds as fast as a Staffordshire terrier. The motive for my husband’s outburst was the declaration
My husband is forever being sent magazines from his Oxford college inviting him to give it money. I suggest he should ask it to give us money, since it has much more than we do. But the clever men at Oxford, as Mr Toad called them in his song, seem to have lost the use
‘Lashings of ginger beer?’ asked my husband when I mentioned backlash. He thought the phrase came from Enid Blyton, though it occurred only in the television parody Five Go Mad in Dorset, first shown in 1982 — 40 years ago, for heaven’s sake. Backlash, now in vogue, is often misused. The Guardian wrote about ‘the
The newspapers came out on Christmas Day in the middle of the 19th century and listed in columns of small type all the pantomimes for the next day. Among them in 1856 was Paul Pry on Horseback, or, Harlequin and the Magic Horse-shoe, a ‘grand comic equestrian pantomime’. For it was at Astley’s, which presented
My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of as a child) what it meant. ‘It’s a Millwall thing,’ she said, chanting: ‘No one likes us. No one likes us. No one likes us. We don’t care.’ I’m not talking about the established sense,
‘There once was a curate of Kew, / Who kept a young cat in a pew,’ began my husband when the news bulletin on the wireless mentioned the omicron variant of coronavirus. The naming of the variant has caused much dissension. Old-fashioned speakers of English object to the BBC’s preference for the pronunciation ommi-cron, with
Language change outdoes nonsense, just as misbehaviour outdoes satire. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice mentions to the Gnat that, where she comes from, they have butterflies. ‘“Crawling at your feet,” the Gnat said, “you may observe a Bread-and-Butterfly. Its wings are thin slices of bread-and-butter, its body is a crust, and its head is a
I had thought there were two pronunciations of Uranus. My husband, still capable of distinguishing the anatomical from the planetary, puts the stress on the first syllable. The question arose because Lord Bragg on his radio oasis of sense In Our Time was discussing William Herschel, in 1781 the first man to discover a planet.
‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage, threw his fist through a glass window and played the last act bleeding into a rubber glove before being forced into a hospital where he required 22 stitches.’ So said the New York Times in
‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce the bivalve to rhyme with dollop, there was a certain lack of contrast. There has been a scallop war with France in past days. Though both French and English enjoy them on the plate, it
‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary has just published a new entry for witch. It is less dismissive of old women. The former version spoke of a ‘repulsive-looking old woman’. Now it is ‘a term of abuse or contempt for a
The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal history’, in the words of Ian Rushton, the deputy chief crown prosecutor for North West England. To my ears, it sounds weird to call a rapist ‘prolific’. It sounds no better to refer to ‘one
