Mind your language

Last August President Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. He repeated the phrase in December: red line. Why should the line be red and what happens if it is crossed? A simple, unhelpful answer is that the metaphor is taken from a safety gauge indicating

‘One good term deserves another,’ said my husband in his infuriating way of almost making a joke. As he was talking to the wireless, it hardly mattered. His provocation, a serious one, I admit, was someone saying ‘in terms of’ when she meant no such thing. It is happening more and more, and my husband’s

Was the Ancient Mariner a Conservative party member? Coleridge tells us several times that he had a ‘glittering eye’, an infallible sign of a screw loose somewhere. The S.T. Coleridge school of political psychiatry came into its own last weekend when the newspapers were told that Tory party ‘associations are all mad, swivel-eyed loons’. The

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending

In the days when we had bottles of milk delivered, some tits discovered how to peck through the foil tops and consume the cream beneath. Suddenly all the tits were at it. This illustrated what the alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance. Something similar has happened over the past days with the phrase game-changing.

‘A cab?’ said my husband. ‘Was the Underground out of order?’ I had been telling him about an interesting notice that I’d seen in a taxi, but he’d chosen to focus on thrift — never mind that I’d fought my way back from John Lewis with an extendable paint roller, a tray and 2.5 litres

In the sobriquet Iron Lady, isn’t lady too deferential for a mocking nickname? Its author, Yuri Gavrilov, hardly knew that in current English, lady is a genteelism when used by those who fear that if they say woman it will be taken as an accusation that someone is no lady. This has had the perverse

Ian Hislop mocked Stephen Mangan, when he put in a turn as the man asking the questions on Have I Got News For You last week, for saying ‘masination’ (for machination), but Hislop himself used the unjustified modern pronunciation ‘mashination’. The version with ‘mash-’ is not known for sure until 1961, although a book published

‘French,’ cried my husband. ‘It’s bloody French.’ We were clicking on a computer screen in response to the dear old Telegraph’s invitation to ‘test out your etymological knowledge’. The little game accompanied news of an exhibition in London called The English Effect, mounted by the British Council. I had already got one of the 20

Why has behalf so rapidly collapsed into misuse? Everyone says things like ‘On my behalf I don’t want money’, or ‘The car crashed through bad driving on your behalf’. Rather than attributing the action to a vicarious agent, they simply mean ‘for my part’ or ‘on your part’. I should like to see what the

They were worrying in Canterbury about a clash between the inauguration of the Pope and the enthronisation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a near miss. You might think the word enthronisation sounds like something that George Bush had coined. Yet it has been in use longer than enthronement, which is not known until

‘Remember snoek?’ asked my husband, as if I were old enough to be his mother. In 1947, ten million tins of this distinctive-tasting fish, Thyrsites atun, were imported from South Africa to take the place of sardines. The Conservatives complained in Parliament that the Labour administration’s austerity diet was damaging the health of British people.

My husband made a little joke. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lurch,’ he said, looking up from his Sunday Telegraph. In it, David Cameron had declared: ‘The battle for Britain’s future will not be won in lurching to the right.’ Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally.

A shrouded skull flanked by serpents above a tureen inscribed with the words, ‘There is death in the pot’ (2 Kings 4:40), ornaments the title page of A Treatise on the Adulterations of Food by Frederick Accum (1820). Accum details hair-raising additions to food in the pursuit of profit, not just alum to bread but

The centenary of George Barker’s birth was mentioned in the Times Literary Supplement recently. His ‘first two books — one of verse, the other prose — were released in 1933’. Released? Isn’t that what happens to films and Engelbert Humperdinck? Released suddenly seems to have replaced published. Certainly Amazon is reinforcing the trend, because if

At the age of 55, Gervase Markham set off to walk from London to Berwick without using any bridge or boat, and without swimming, but relying only on a staff to help him leap. That was in 1622. When he returned, with a certificate from the mayor of Berwick, many of his friends — 39

‘I’m a vulnerable adult,’ said my husband when I asked him why he was shouting the other morning. He had spilt some water from the hot kettle on his slippered foot. Unlike Achilles, his vulnerability extends beyond the pedal extremities. But I shouldn’t like it to be thought that he was making fun of anyone

The onesie has brought Britain one step nearer fainéant infantilism than the slanket. The slanket, a portmanteau of sleeved and blanket, reached a height of popularity in 2009. It looked like a monk’s habit, except it fastened at the back, like a hospital gown. The slanket’s purpose was cosiness while watching television, which people in