‘Ask your telephone,’ said my husband satirically when I made an innocent enquiry on a point of fact. My telephone was having a little rest, since it had run out of juice in the annoyingly capricious way these machines have. But my husband had unwittingly hit upon a trend in modern culture: that we hardly
‘What we want to see,’ David Cameron said last week, ‘is a de-escalation.’ Or, as the Tanaiste of Ireland put it: ‘If the Russian authorities do not de-escalate this crisis, the EU will take consequential action.’ In other words: make it less serious, or we’ll take it very seriously. De-escalate sounds a nasty new word.
My husband was surprised by quite a bit when we travelled by Underground in London the other day. Although he has a Nelson Mandela Memorial Freedom Pass, he seldom chooses to join us Morlocks down below. ‘Is this the work of a Chinaman?’ he asked, nodding towards a poster. ‘You mustn’t say “Chinaman”, dear,’ I
They were talking on the wireless about Brazilians in the flooded areas, or so I thought. Once the kettle had finished boiling, it turned out that they wanted resilience in new houses in floody places. That meant fitting electrical sockets above waist height and not using plasterboard downstairs — things they have been doing in
Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question that Charles Moore raised last week about the name of the country if Scotland leaves. My husband, naturally, is all for calling it England. Even the Oxford English Dictionary defines England as ‘The inhabitants of
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was using the whining intonation that some seem to think the proper voice in which to recite verse. So I was glad that Bernard O’Donoghue came on, with an accent formed by a childhood in Co.
A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of interest to Catholics, complaining that the newly revised translation of the Mass is ‘lumpen, difficult and odd’. What would you think he meant by lumpen? Or try this, from a recent review in the TLS
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it at his club. It had a very enjoyable review by Sir Brian Vickers of the Cambridge edition of Ben Jonson. I understood much of it and agreed with most. A point I applauded was the
‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to know what you mean by that,’ I replied, hoping not to encourage him. ‘Being challenging,’ he said, ignoring my implied request. We had been discussing a report in the Daily Telegraph about the
The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011, sounded more like a threat than a prediction. No one knows the originator of the slogan, but that is not surprising. It is a commonplace of the struggle. In 2011, for example, a pair of
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into a store.’ But in my experience, lottery tickets are sold mostly in shops, along with confectionery and tobacco. You can, it is true, get them in Sainsbury’s, but I wouldn’t call that a store either,
If Manchester University is to be believed, last year saw a creeping advance of effete southern language into the gritty north. Roll, for example, is more widely accepted as the name of a little loaf of bread. Certainly I remember 40 years ago asking in a Manchester baker’s for some rolls. The shop assistant genuinely
The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed pantomimes. But as far as I can make out, Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Scamp, in which the widow, played by James Rogers, made her entrance, was not a Christmas pantomime but a burlesque, for which the
Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I recognised the chain reaction from somewhere else. It was from Start the Week on Radio 4, where somebody spoke of pushing back. Before the programme was over, everyone seemed to say push back. They applied
‘Here,’ said my husband, chucking a folded-back copy of the Daily Telegraph to me, ‘this’ll interest you.’ For once he was right. It was a reader’s letter. ‘My distress at the Paul Flowers debacle (I am a Methodist) has been increased by the BBC and others referring to “the Reverend Flowers”,’ wrote Lesley Barnes of
Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other eccentricities) by Rosemary Hannah, I came across this seasonal horror for Stir Up Sunday. In the Greek islands that Bute toured, they laid out grapes to dry as currants. ‘The beds these currants are laid
‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the shop, but it seems rather distant to me, either verbally or associatively (the shops, being lit by fluorescent tubes, are staring rather than sparkly). The popular name is Marks and Sparks, but merely as a
I saw an advertisement for Active Gold Collagen, and I realised I didn’t know what collagen means. My husband just laughed and said, ‘Horse hides,’ but this seemed unfair since the small print on the website of Boots (which sells it) said: ‘Does not contain porcine, bovine or other animal sources.’ I thought that odd,
‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, sounding like George V commenting on an Impressionist painting. ‘Someone in the Telegraph says that the French shouldn’t borrow English words.’ Once I had managed to wrest the paper from his dog-in-the-manger grasp, I found it didn’t quite say that, but rather that foreigners ought not to plaster
‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly puzzling tangle of disinformation. My husband had just been reading about the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood (south London), which has banned its pupils (or students as they all seem to have become) from using
