Definitions

What is a bee? ‘A well-known insect,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary, passing the buck rather. Similarly, an ash is a ‘well-known forest tree’, an ass is ‘a well-known quadruped of the horse kind’ and asparagus is ‘a well-known delicacy of the table’ — not caviar, which is ‘eaten as a relish’.

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Arthur Roffey

Douglas Murray has been blacklisted in Berlin

Being well-known is an unreliable category. One man’s Kim Kardashian is another man’s Lyndal Roper. I remember encountering caracoles on a Spanish menu and being told that by the waiter that it was a kind of animal with horns. It took me a long time to get from that to ‘snails’. When the OED says that an aucuba is ‘a well-known hardy evergreen’, I am none the wiser till my husband chips in with: ‘That horrible variegated laurel.’

A clue sometimes deployed by the OED is the ‘voice’. Whose voice is a neigh? Yes, the ‘solid-hoofed perissodactyl quadruped’. What has ‘a barking, howling, or whining voice’? Why, ‘a domesticated carnivorous mammal’ of course, to be distinguished from ‘a well-known carnivorous quadruped’ which may be ‘kept to destroy mice’. Mice? ‘In Europe,’ says the OED chattily, ‘mice are perceived as differing from rats mainly in their consistently smaller size; elsewhere the size difference can be less clear cut and the two terms are used interchangeably.’

Another difficulty for the OED in pinning down well-known objects is that it (rightly) takes an historical view. So what is a fly? ‘Any winged insect; as the bee, gnat, locust, moth’. ‘Waiter,’ you might once have said, when a locust or moth was striking out for the closest shore, ‘there’s a fly in my soup.’ And with your soup, would you ask for ‘a well-known article of food’ and expect bread?

What’s the difference between a sheep and a goat? One is ‘noted for its hardy, lively and wanton nature, and its strong odour’ and the other’s ‘intestines are used for the strings of musical instruments’.