An advertisement for birdfood said: ‘To differentiate between the imported niger oilseed, used to feed wild birds, and thistle — as well as to eliminate any possibility of offensively mispronouncing the word “niger” — the Wild Bird Feeding Industry trademarked the name Nyjer in 1998.’ They might have done, if an industry can, but I’ve
Those who indulge in the ‘infuriating genteelism’ of saying Christmas lunch must be castigated, a reader from Leicester, Mr Clifford Dunkley, tells me. Castigate them, do. But they won’t stay castigated. Yet it must be Christmas dinner, for the phrase is fossilised, as much as ‘God save the Queen’ is fossilised in preserving the subjunctive.
Some years ago The Spectator was sued for libel. It was a silly case, but it went to court and, early on, the counsel for the defence explained that The Spectator had no connection with the periodical of that name founded by Addison and Steele in 1711. But in the summing up the judge said,
He’s the man who gave us The Meaning of Tingo, full of words that look funny in English (bum, Arabic for ‘owl’) or encapsulate an idea that it takes a sentence in English to explain. Very amusing it was too. My husband kept reading bits out while I was peeling the potatoes. Then doubts crept
Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf
Hansard does not show that, when the acting leader of the Liberal Democrats, Dr Vincent Cable (as he likes to be called, having a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Glasgow), made his response to Mr Gordon Brown’s speech in the debate on the Loyal Address, something went wrong that took the steam out
Encouraged by those blancmange-makers of the linguistic kitchen, the Queen’s English Society, listeners have recently been having a go at the BBC. One left a website comment: ‘“He was going too fast” — the word fast is an adjective not an adverb but you wouldn’t know it these days!’ But fast is an adverb too,
When Gisela Stuart was talking to the dear old editor on the wireless the other morning, she used the phrase ‘between a rock and a hard place’. This impression is reinforced by the obscurity of ‘hard place’. We should not be surprised if it had been adopted by a biblical translator to render something from
‘Let your little tike show off their little trike with this trendy shirt’, read an advertisement for toddlers’ T-shirts that Veronica showed me. In British English, tyke means ‘bitch, cur’ or ‘Yorkshireman’. In American English it is often used innocently enough for ‘child’. But it was the slogan on the advertised T-shirts that struck me:
When the postal strike was in full spate we heard quite a bit about ‘Spanish practices’, or at least we did sometimes. On one morning the BBC referred to ‘Spanish practices’ in the nine o’clock news and merely to ‘practices’ in its later bulletins, presumably for fear of offending any Spaniards who were listening in.
A mondegreen is a term for a misheard word or phrase from a poem, song or piece of prose. It derives from a couplet in an old ballad, ‘They hae slain the Earl Murray/ And laid him on the green’, with the last line misheard as ‘And Lady Mondegreen’. Mondegreen was coined in Harper’s Magazine
I was having lunch with friends last week in a fairly swanky gastropub, and the menu promised a ballontine of quail. The waiter told me that ballontine meant that the quail had been deboned, then stuffed. It was quite nice to eat, but I have only just discovered what the menu intended to say, which
I have stumbled across a translation of Shakespeare into English on a website called No Fear Shakespeare. Hamlet’s well-known soliloquy goes: ‘The question is: is it better to be alive or dead? Is it nobler to put up with all the nasty things that luck throws your way, or to fight against all those troubles
Walking to the station the other day I was thinking how annoying it is that, when people are invited to name their favourite words, so many answer serendipity. Then, blow me if the next news report I read didn’t detail an invitation from Education Action, a charity, to send in favourite words to celebrate Literacy
English-speakers working in Russia generally go through a stage where they jokingly refer to a restaurant as a pectopah. The joke consists in pronouncing the cyrillic letters as if they were Roman. I was surprised to discover that the Germans fighting in Russia in the second world war made a joke on the same lines
A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old English in blue. A company called Optimum has written drawing attention to a website it runs which analyses passages of writing and highlights the words that come from Old
Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to
I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my
The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but
After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting