I’ve just got round to reading Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London, which I enjoyed very much. She says, ‘As I read my way through contemporary writers, a few words caught my eye.’ Among them is kick the bucket. I wish Mrs Picard had mentioned where she saw it, for the earliest citation in the dictionary
‘I could have told you that,’ said my husband, as if this were the general state of reality. Normally if I ask him any question about his native tongue, he says, ‘Don’t ask me, you’re the expert.’ The thing he could have told me was the meaning of ‘son of Attenborough’, about which I had
Mind your language ‘Coo, coo, coo,’ said my husband. ‘Like a pigeon.’ This was not, fortunately, a command, though, heaven knows, it might have been. He was merely giving his opinion, fairly strongly, on how the first syllable of cupola should be pronounced. The next two, he said, should sound like ‘po’ and ‘la’. It
A 14-year-old man, as I learn I should call a Wykehamist, Benjamin Nicholls, has written to me about a suggestion by his 12-year-old sister. She thought that, as the word intelligent means ‘clever’, there should be a word telligent, meaning ‘stupid’. The sister was aware that the prefix in- signifies negation or privation. She is