Society

Wednesday

Dot Wordsworth

Where does ‘knocked up’ come from?

Anthony Horowitz (Diary, 4 February) tells us he was advised by a ‘sensitivity reader’ to remove the word scalpel from a book with a Native American character lest it suggest scalps (though the words are unrelated). I’ve stumbled across the birth of a new forbidden phrase on Twitter, that social media swamp for the older swampster: knocked up. A California lawyer called Johnathan Perk declares in a tweet: ‘The phrase “knocked up”, referring to pregnancy, originated with US slavery. The Oxford English Dictionary traces the expression back to 1813. Back then the price of enslaved African women was “knocked up” by the auctioneer when she was pregnant – promoted as

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: How do I find out if someone is pregnant or just fat?

Q. I have been horribly caught out with no one to blame but myself. I was sent a large electric blanket coat of the sort you can sit in on a sofa watching television. My family and I all thought it was hideous but I didn’t want to hurt the feelings of the person who kindly gave it to me and wrote a suitably grateful thank-you letter, saying we had been using it nonstop. We had looked it up online and, because it was quite expensive, my daughter said she would return it to the shop in Oxford Street and get me a credit to spend there. When I opened the

Toby Young Toby Young

Is it your boss’s responsibility to protect you from offence?

Some readers will recall the furore five years ago about the Presidents Club charity dinner at the Dorchester. The Financial Times sent two undercover journalists to work as ‘hostesses’ at the annual fundraiser and their report made uncomfortable reading for the big hitters in attendance, including Nadhim Zahawi. It was not just a men-only event, but the 130 hostesses were instructed to wear skimpy black outfits with matching underwear, and several were groped, sexually harassed and propositioned at a party following the dinner. In the ensuing scandal, the co-chairman resigned as a non-executive director of the Department for Education and one guest was removed from the Labour front bench in

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

What really motivates workers (and it’s not money)

I recently heard a tip from an older colleague on managing a department. ‘Everyone is primarily interested in one of three things,’ he said. ‘To motivate them, all you need do is discover which one drives them most.’ People want some leeway to apply their imagination, creativity and knowledge What are the three? They are power, money and autonomy. I wish I had heard this 20 years ago, as it explains a great deal about the stark differences between colleagues’ working motivations which had often baffled me in the past. A huge amount is written about power and money, but very little thought is devoted to autonomy. Yet it is

Peter Jones

Plato, Aristotle and the power of music

A fast-food restaurant in Wrexham will play classical music during the evenings in a bid to stop antisocial behaviour. While some ancient Greeks denied that music per se provided anything for you apart from an unimportant kind of pleasure (though the words of a song might make a difference), others thought that music could have powerful mood-altering effects, for good or ill. For example, we are told that Pythagoras developed a form of musical therapy, consisting of songs and pieces for the lyre designed to help students get up and active in the morning and sleep well at night. Once, when he was out stargazing, he came across a young man

Julius Strauss

Collecting the dead in Ukraine

Dovhenke, Ukraine The Russian soldier lay where he had fallen. His plastic combat belt and flak jacket were still intact, but his legs were splayed at an unnatural angle, and where his face and scalp had once been there was now only a skull with dark stains on it.   ‘The guys who died protecting our country need to go home to their mothers, fathers, daughters and sons’ Oleksiy, leader of the Black Tulip, a small team of Ukrainian men who collect bodies from the country’s eastern battlefields, gingerly tied a rope around the decaying corpse. ‘These bodies are sometimes booby-trapped,’ he said. ‘We have to be careful.’   We all walked

The Spectator

Letters: How to stop the Ukraine war

A negotiated end Sir: Owen Matthews’s piece hinted at the likely outcome of the Ukraine conflict, but his conclusion was too pessimistic (‘Spring loaded’, 4 February). It seems probable that the war in Ukraine will drag on without a decisive conclusion and that there will not only be disagreement among Nato members about supplying further arms, but that other governments will get tired of it. The only way to stop it will, therefore, be by negotiation. Given that the most successful negotiated settlements end with all sides being reasonably satisfied with the outcome, Russia, Ukraine, Nato and the EU will have to make compromises. Ukraine will have to agree to

Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

Only a proper shock can jolt Britain out of comfortable decline

Fifty years ago I was hitchhiking down the Eastern Seaboard towards Miami overnight. It was midwinter, icy and way, way below zero. Through miscalculation, I had ended up being dropped near the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I walked up a ramp to the elevated carriageway and began trying to thumb another lift. Utterly stupid: no car was likely to stop. But I was tired, and getting desperate. We’re in slow, apparently relentless but quite comfortable decline; and no chasm yawns ahead, or not yet After about an hour the intense cold was biting deep into the bone. Though I had gloves, I lost feeling in my hands. Still I persisted, exhausted but

The Spectator

Who first floated the idea of spy balloons?

Something in the air A US fighter plane shot down a Chinese surveillance balloon which had drifted across Canada and the US. Balloons have a long history in military operations, being deployed widely in the American Civil War and in the Siege of Paris in 1870, when they were used to get messages out of the city. But the first use of a balloon in wartime goes back to the Battle of Fleurus in 1794, when the French flew a hydrogen balloon, L’Entreprenant, over the battlefield for nine hours to spy on Austrian positions. The French won the battle but Napoleon was not convinced of the role of military balloons

Daniel Thorpe

Time is running out for Turkey’s earthquake victims

The confirmed death toll from the two huge earthquakes which struck southern Turkey and northern Syria on Monday has now passed 9,000. Aid officials fear the final toll could reach 20,000. Rescuers continue to work around the clock to save people, but many locals are angry over the inadequate response from the Turkish authorities. Antakya is the capital of the Hatay province, wedged between Syria in the east and the Mediterranean in the west. The earthquake completely devastated the city, flattening whole neighbourhoods. Around half of the upper-end apartment buildings along the city’s main Atatürk Boulevard have collapsed. Forty-eight hours after the first quake, residents are still cut off from

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

Why publishers are such cowards

After publishing 17 books, I’m no stranger to the publicity campaign. In my no-name days, my publicist would purr that my novel’s release would be ‘review-driven’ – which decodes: ‘We don’t plan to spend a sou on your doomed, inconsequential book.’ By contrast, as we’ve seen writ large with Prince Harry’s Spare, your volume can be cast upon the public waters as not a mere object but an event. The intention is to convince book-buyers that unless they snap up a copy sharpish they’ll be caught up short at cocktail parties. It’s now a truism that white males have a vanishingly small chance of being published anywhere Thus quite some

Douglas Murray

Where have all the grown-ups gone?

Last week 100,000 civil servants from 124 government departments went on strike. This fact prompts a number of questions, not least – who knew there were so many government departments? Also, when was the last time anyone saw that number of civil servants? Since Covid, the most noteworthy thing about the civil service has been that it has completely inverted its working week. Alongside those members who never turn up to the office, a goodly portion have managed to arrange it so that they spend a couple of days a week at their desk and a five-day stretch at home recuperating. Meaning that last week civil servants finally went back

Hannah Moore

In defence of amateur sleuths

Two weeks have passed since Nicola Bulley went missing while walking the dog in her Lancashire village. The police say their working theory is that she fell into the river but that they are also ‘keeping an open mind’ and pursuing ‘many inquiries’. The head of the underwater team searching the Wyre for Ms Bulley says that in 20 years he has never seen so unusual a case. The police say they would like to speak to ‘as many members of the public as possible’ and yet have also called the level of online speculation ‘totally unacceptable’. But is public speculation really so wrong? There’s a big difference between hindering

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Time for cautious optimism, not FTSE jubilation

What comfort can we draw from the FTSE 100 Index’s all-time high of 7905 last Friday? Yes, in a limited sense, it’s a reason to be cheerful: first, because it’s a boost to the value of pension and tracker funds; second, because it fits the current narrative of gloom receding, in which inflation has probably peaked, interest rates look set to follow soon and the Bank of England says the coming recession will be shallower than first thought. But the new top is less than a thousand points above the ‘dotcom bubble’ record of 6930 at the turn of the millennium, so no spectacular reward for long-term equity holders. And

Janet de Botton

Bridge | 11 February 2023

The Reykjavik Bridge Festival is one of my favourites – two days pairs and two days teams. Brilliantly organised, friendly and a very high standard – what’s not to love? I played with Artur Mali, and Thor Erik Hoffa found himself a new partner, 15-year-old Nicolai Heiberg-Evenstad, a Norwegian Junior of limitless talent, who lives, breathes and dreams bridge. Today’s hand was played by me for 1 off. I should have heeded that old adage: when you have made a plan look for a better one. My 2♠ was weak. 3NT would have been a breeze but, understandably, 4♠ was the contract in both rooms. West led a high Heart.

Robin Oakley

Our Twelve to Follow are on sparkling form

Trainer Olly Murphy was trying hard at Sandown Park last Saturday not to get carried away after his Chasing Fire had extended his unbeaten career to five with a convincing win in the Virgin Bet Novices’ Hurdle. ‘He’s good but I don’t know how good,’ he declared. ‘Could he win a Supreme? I’ve had a second and third but never the winner. I’ve only been training for five years and haven’t had a champion, but I hope this one can be good.’ Particularly delighted that the gelding had won in the familiar blue colours of Diana and Grahame Whateley, the stable’s biggest backers, Olly noted that you have to throw

Melissa Kite

Surrey is the capital of denial

Driving through the road widening works at junction ten, I noticed a horse being ridden down a muddy passageway that was about to become the hard shoulder. It had not yet been tarmacked, but the diggers had cleared away the trees from the slice of heathland and it was being flattened, in readiness for surfacing works. A woman with a determined look on her face was coaxing her mount along this clearing, next to the machinery and the workers in their Day-Glo outfits, the Portaloos and logging machines, the lorries taking vast piles of felled trees away, and the hundreds of cones dividing this stretch of cleared woodland from the

Jeremy Clarke

It was cannula carnage at the hospital

I was silently mourning the death of Brigadier General Charles FitzClarence at First Ypres when a young male nurse entered the crowded waiting room and called out my name. I must look fairly decrepit because he offered an arm for me to lean on as he walked me up the aisle and into the CT scanner anteroom. Kind, I thought. He was a dark, solid-looking chap in his early twenties. His uniform was all white: white jacket, white T-shirt, white trousers, white Crocs. He directed me to a chair beside a medical trolley and suggested I remove my jacket and fleece. Next, a female nurse with an unmistakable air of

Taki

My Swiss Shangri-La

Gstaad As everyone knows, snobbery is nothing but bad manners passing itself off as good taste. Past American society dames were terrible snobs, until they met their French and British counterparts, who put them in their place. I’m not going to mention any names because most of them are dead, but looking around me up here in the Alps I’ve seen some new horrors, money snobs who promise to make the older type look like nuns. Mind you, I’m quite snobby myself when it comes to nouveaux riches with bad manners. As Yogi Berra remarked: ‘You can observe a lot just by watching.’ What I see here in Gstaad is