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
‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone. I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors,
‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. ‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. It was the memorial to
The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895). Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian,
I heard someone on the wireless, in talking about the Freedom of Information Act, refer to the ‘information-requesting community’, as if they all lived together and had much in common. You could, though, legitimately refer to me as a member of the annoyed community. I do have something in common with thousands of readers and
We have enjoyed, or not, a certain amount of hoo-ha about whether Scotland should be independent. But independent from what? What is this country called? In 1604 James VI of Scotland was proclaimed ‘King of Great Britain’, as well as of France and Ireland. The geographical term ‘Great Britain’ thereupon assumed a political unity, although
Whoever said, ‘Don’t give me problems, give me solutions’, was asking for it. Everyone seems to be claiming solutions now. I went past a children’s nursery the other day with a sign on the wall reading: Bright Horizons Family Solutions. ‘Bright Horizons Family Solutions,’ the company tells the world, ‘is the nation’s leading provider of