Language

‘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 volumes. The recipe was for a sort of giant hamburger or hot meatloaf made from minced veal, suet, eggs and breadcrumbs. That gave no clues about its name. It could hardly have connections with flagons or flagellation. A day later another reader found in her edition of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management from 1915

‘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 and Kemi Badenoch then tussled in a hate-crime triangle on television over who said what, when about people self-identifying in a gender. Such matters are said to belong to culture wars, which we had thought an American phenomenon. Culture wars acquired their name only in the 1980s. Since then we have grown used to language

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 by Wilfred, two: ‘Ook, Papa, prop-props…’ More cunningly deployed in the 900 words of the speech was our. Not just our props but ‘our police, our emergency services, and of course our fantastic NHS… our armed services and our agencies… our indefatigable Conservative party members… our democracy’. First he had thanked ‘Carrie and our children’.

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. A likely eponym is Admiral Sir William Martin, 4th baronet (1801-95), who headed a drive for discipline. In his biographer’s judgment, ‘his insistence on obedience was not always agreeable to captains and commanders, but if not loved, he was feared, and the work was done’. It seems to me that pinching was highly Victorian. Dickens,

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 March. What he said about the by-elections was: ‘I think we’ve had distractions because of partygate, because of too much Westminster internal, if you like, focus.’ Mr Raab hates distractions. They seem to drive him to distraction. ‘It’s a big distraction from the bread and butter issues,’ he said of June’s party vote of confidence

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 fashionable in the Regency period. Leigh Hunt remembered from the great actor Kemble examples of ‘vicious pronunciation’: odious, he complained, became ojus. Kipling went one better in the Just So Stories by making hideous an adverb pronounced in like manner: as the crocodile pulled, the ‘Elephant’s Child’s nose grew longer and longer—and it hurt him

‘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 ‘a nice cup of tea’, was a word loathed by my schoolmistresses, like got. Their cue may have been Jane Austen. ‘This is a very nice day,’ remarked Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey, ‘and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice

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 the counter-offensive in 1943 by the Soviet Union against the German invaders made much propaganda of a united effort by all nations under the Marxist flag, even though Stalin had not so long before presided over a famine that killed millions in Ukraine. Another Kyiv metro station is changing its name from Minsk to Warsaw.

‘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 tone indicating that I might be interested, ‘someone gets their shopping for free.’ Yes, I thought, it must be that bloke that exits pursued by the security man. I thought other things too, since I am afflicted by what the French call déformation professionnelle and tend to sub-edit other people’s utterances – those of machines

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 a doctor’s appointment and impossible to get most public corporations even to answer the telephone, it’s quick work on Rishi Sunak’s part. The Manor of Northstead is in Scarborough. The former manor house was reported in 1600 to have been used by a shepherd ‘until it fell down’. Previous stewards include David Cameron and Gerry

‘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 point was connected to each of the others, like a church column to vaulting tracery. It is a metaphor map: the points represent categories for pigeonholing every word in English over the past 13 centuries. An underlying 415 semantic categories sort 793,742 word forms. It is not like some delusion in which the secrets of

‘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 whatnot, must have become known in English through Rabelais’s gluttonous epic. Thomas Urquhart’s translation of 1653 speaks of the ‘Lairdship of Salmigondin’. Various rationalising respellings emerged, such as Sallad-Magundy (1710). Salad, by origin something salty, was not limited to raw greenery. ‘Sallet,’ wrote Randle Holme, the herald painter, ‘is either Sweet Herbs, or Pickled Fruits,

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 be banned for using the word dead? Because young people in chatrooms online discuss suicide, and since this is thought to encourage it, online proprietors try to weed out messages with giveaway words. Their algorithms penetrate chatrooms like those metal jellyfish in the Matrix films attacking the spaceship. (My husband, rather worryingly, knows that they

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 could be pronounced as jif if it followed common words like gin, or as gif like gig. There’s no way of telling the pronunciation of an unfamiliar word beginning gi-. There are, it is true, six or seven words gig, all pronounced with a hard g. The gig economy derives from the gig performed by

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 same parent’. So he reintroduced ‘a good Anglo-Saxon word’, and it stuck. It’s not quite that simple, for cultural anthropologists had, a decade earlier, adopted sib for a kindred group, apparently from the parallel German word Sippe. My aversion to sibling was merely its artificiality. We never used to use it in speech, but would

‘Half! Half! Half!’ exclaimed my husband like a performing sea lion. Not that sea lions perform any more, but you get the simile. He was emphasising the pronunciation of the first syllable of Hertford, which, as he rightly said, has no T sound. He had worked himself up because on Twitter there was a froth about the way to pronounce some place-names: Hawarden as Harden, Wemyss as Weems, Marylebone as Marrabun and Cirencester as Sissister. I agreed about Marylebone, though in 1909 the philologist Otto Jespersen noted that ‘now the l is often sounded’. In 1981, Klaus Forster in his Pronouncing Dictionary of English Place-Names gave 11 pronunciations of Marylebone

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 the West should strengthen relations with Ukraine. ‘If we hang back, that would only embolden the bullies,’ she said. Nato’s humiliation in Afghanistan helped embolden Putin, wrote Colonel Richard Kemp; sanctions hitting the population can embolden him too, wrote Tobias Ellwood. As Julian or Sandy, on the BBC Light Programme in the early 1960s, might

‘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 the Ukrainian soldiers stationed there to surrender, they replied, ‘Йди на хуй’, transliterated as ‘Idi na khuy’. The point of the tweet was that their remark had been translated in a rather American way as ‘Go fuck yourself’, and a more idiomatic version in British English would be ‘Fuck off’. I agree, though it is

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: ‘I was like, “That’s amazing!”’ Naturally, we sensitive speakers of English do not fall into such annoying habits. But I have recently seen examples of a baffling construction that substitutes similar to for like in a way that can surely never have tempted any of us. For example, the Sun recently asked ‘Who is Jennifer