‘Is it connected to plant-based?’ asked my husband, as though we were playing Twenty Questions. ‘Anything to do with Homebase, drum and bass, Prisoners’ Base?’ I was trying to interest him in the 21st-century meaning of based, of which he had never heard. The New York Times never stops trying to give a new etymology
‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of
‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria – about the same amount as those little bottles of milk we had at school.’ I had been talking about billions, trillions and quadrillions and had suggested that our bodies’ cells were outnumbered ten to
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’ Well,
My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its
‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp. Damp in English originally
‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been trying to work out what intentional living meant, with regard to the Duchess of Sussex’s new brand of flower sprinkles and raspberry jam. ‘The collection is infused with joy, love, and a touch of whimsy,’
‘Here’s a piece of filth for you,’ said my husband encouragingly. He was ‘helping’ me, as a cat might help wind wool. He’d come across a letter to the Guardian from 2015, in which Pedr James, who had directed a television dramatisation of Martin Chuzzlewit, drew attention to the name in the book for the
In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published.
‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the
To ‘kickstart economic growth’ is the first (‘number one’) of Labour’s five ‘missions’ to rebuild Britain. That is what the manifesto announced last year. The mission is not just economic growth, but kickstarting it. On 29 January, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that she was ‘going further and faster
‘My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’ Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts
My husband was so delighted with the new-found term perigee-syzygy that he kept repeating it, until the syllables merged into his regular breathing and he fell asleep in his chair. The compound word means what the vulgar press call a supermoon. A syzygy is the lining-up of the moon, Earth and sun, producing a full
‘Why can’t you have legacy tomatoes?’ asked my husband. ‘There are plenty of heritage tomatoes.’ He might well ask. Heritage tomatoes, usually called heirloom tomatoes in America, are cultivars valued for flavour lost in many modern hybrids. They include the Black Krim from the Crimea and the delicious Raf, grown in Almeria, its name an
The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole. When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the
The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The
My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings. My mnemonic
I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside
‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One
John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one
