Mind your language

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: ‘I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.’ She has so far made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. ‘She would be

‘“I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’ By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in

‘Oh, no!’ cried my husband from the other room in the tones of one who has upset the goldfish bowl on to a rare book. I rushed in, despite previous experience, and found the problem was that the BBC had just referred to ‘Princess Catherine’. To take his mind off it, I told him about

‘It’s got to be greenlighted,’ said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price,

Harry Cole wrote in the Sun that ‘like the sweating hero trying to diffuse a bomb in a Hollywood movie, Sir Keir Starmer looked a little green around the gills’. For his part, the top cop Gavin Stephens said: ‘Anybody in a leadership position should think about how we can reduce and diffuse tensions.’ Or

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until

Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvellous bob hairdo, this month became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people the King likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here

Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before. Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian;

‘Do you know how many people Hallmark cards employs?’ asked my husband. I didn’t, and nor would he, had he not just looked it up on Wikipedia. ‘Seven?’ I replied. ‘No.’ ‘A million?’ ‘Now you’re just being silly.’ The reason that the birthday card people had come up was because James Heale began his column

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock.

When this century began we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely. But now I reach

I spent some time looking for the connection between the ancient city of Canopus and the English canopy. Nelson won the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay. The bay was named after the city of Abu Qir, which was named after a Christian martyr, St Cyrus. Abu Qir stands on the site of the

‘Spook or spoof?’ asked my husband, throwing a copy of the paper over to me, and only missing by a foot. When I’d picked it up, I read the headline: ‘Fully Chinese-made drone spooking Ukraine air defence.’ Then I read the introduction of the report: ‘A new Russian decoy drone used to spoof Ukrainian air-defences

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often

The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on

‘Am I housebound?’ asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role in life. ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.’ Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically.

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would be amusing. But it is true that the political wrangle over personal independence payments would have been harder to popularise without the cheery abbreviation. Some of us remember Denis Healey’s promise to ‘squeeze property speculators

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a