Mind your language

Are we now more ignorant than Bertie Wooster? Orwell, in his essay defending P.G. Wodehouse, noted that when ‘he describes somebody as heaving “the kind of sigh that Prometheus might have heaved when the vulture dropped in for its lunch”, he is assuming that his readers will know something of Greek mythology’. Orwell characterised such

On BBC television’s Newsnight they have got one of their reporters to live for a year ‘ethically’. By this they do not mean that he must remain faithful to his wife, eschew false expenses claims, be patient with his children and observe a strict adherence to the truth, though no doubt these virtues already come

There has been a dramatisation of some Jeeves stories on the wireless. The great flaw has been presenting them as slapstick, which hardly works without pictures and ill serves Wodehouse’s writing, which depends so much on playing with language. In what must have been additional dialogue, I heard some annoying anachronisms. Wodehouse’s books have acquired

I thought my husband had fallen unconscious on the doormat, for I could not push the front door open. But I was mistaken. It was a huge drift of post complaining that I had used the word quick as an adverb. The problem was solved by a bit of jiggling backwards and forwards

‘Veronica,’ I said when she was taking her Wellingtons off outside the back door and couldn’t run away, ‘what does cotching mean?’ ‘Haven’t the foggiest. I thought you were Mrs Language.’ But cotching is meant to be young person’s slang, and, although Veronica has taken her degree, she still seems a young person to me.

I’m stuck in a fine old barney with Prof Michael McCarthy, the co-author of the new Cambridge Grammar of English. This grammar calmly notes that like can be used to introduce direct speech, instead of said, as in ‘I was like, “Wow!” He was like, “Come off it”.’ I can’t abide this construction, which is

My husband lives almost entirely in the past, generally finding it a more agreeable place to make his habitation as, often, do we. To sustain him, the television has recently screened a number of dramatic reconstructions of the last days of Harold Wilson, and on some other channel a retrospective of the Thatcher years under

‘The government are entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that. ‘The government is entitled to pry into our bedrooms’ — there is nothing wrong with that either. In British English (as opposed to American English) collective nouns may take either a singular or a plural verb. Americans prefer singularity.

A semantic challenge of the genuine kind comes to me from the distinguished geographer Professor Alice Coleman. She has been responsible for a survey of the whole country’s land use, or utilisation as her project called it, though that distinction is not the semantic question under discussion. She is also the author of more than

My husband has discovered ‘organic’ dried apricots, which lack the traffic-light glow of their coloured cousins and the concomitant taste of sulphur. He chews them while watching rugby on telly, then complains that he has lost his appetite for dinner. The apricot seems a fruit straight from the Arabian Nights. One is so used to

A reader, whose name is beyond recall because my husband put his letter in a safe place, is unhappy at the general ignorance of the origin of the word dog, and wonders if I can throw any light. My lamp is burning, with spare oil at hand, but the footsteps of the dog are as

I am not much comforted by those notices in railway stations and shopping centres reading, ‘Caution: slippery when wet.’ A variant is, ‘Slippery in conditions of ice or rain.’ If they can put up expensive signs, why not do something about the slipperiness? I can understand a sign at the back of the church, ‘Ladies:

I shall look upon two vegetables in 2006 very differently from the easy regard in which I held them in 2005. The first is the aubergine. I had assumed that it owed its name to Arabic, which, only a couple of steps removed from English, it does. The Portuguese took the Arabic word al-badindjan and

In Michael Wharton’s novel Sheldrake, the hero, Major Sheldrake, finds himself in the northern town of Borewich where he is given unsought information about the local speech. ‘Food for thought! That’s an old Borewich expression the Major won’t have heard of,’ he is told. ‘Ah, Major, come and have some tea. The cup that cheers

The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a

The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel

In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen … 15/-’). It was

You know how you can tell a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard in a crowd without hearing them speak a word? Well, a friend of my husband’s who is interested in anthropology refers to that bundle of cultural characteristics as the jizz. It was not a word with which I was familiar outside a fairly grubby

I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of