Etymology

‘At least he didn’t say “Cut the cheese”,’ said my husband, suddenly making a barking noise like a seal, which is his attempt at laughter. He was commenting on a remark by Amol Rajan, the affable presenter on Today. An interviewee was invited to ‘cut to the quick’. Of course he meant ‘cut to the chase’, as he might have realised, without time to revisit the slip. The quick in cut to the quick does not mean something fast. It is the sentient flesh that might be nicked when you trim your nails. When I looked at the earliest quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I had a momentary vision

‘I hate sneak previews,’ said my husband. I think he was talking to the wireless, as he often does, not to me, since a broadcaster had just promised him a sneak preview. I agree that the terminology is annoying, as it is generally used as a ploy to pique interest in a subject, otherwise of no interest, by offering stolen pleasure. I am just as annoyed by an attempt to train our consumption as though we were pet dogs. On a train I was given a free shortbread biscuit, and on the wrapper it was labelled ‘Sweet treats’. Now, I regard shortbread as tolerable only if I am very hungry. But

Books that one often used to see in secondhand bookshops, when there were such things, were the World’s Classics editions of the novels of Constance Holme. Humphrey Milford, publisher to the University of Oxford 1913-45, put all of them into the handy blue-bound format. The Spectator gave her second novel, The Lonely Plough (1914), a short but respectful review, declaring the book to be about Lancashire farmers, even though it repeatedly makes clear that the setting is Westmorland, the county where the author lived all her life. The anonymous reviewer also said that ‘she contrives to use admirable English’. I found it interesting that Holme used aquascutum, as people did

Beau Brummell, denouncing the fashion for a vegetable diet, was asked if he had never tried it himself: ‘Oh yes, I remember I once ate a pea.’ His remark sounded funnier then, because the normal way of talking about the little green spheres was as a collective, pease, as in pease pudding. Brummell was not the first to talk of one pea. Robert Boyle, the natural philosopher, wrote in 1666 of a bud the size of a pea. Alternatively a single example was called a pease. I mention peas because their harvesting was done in the 18th century with two implements: a pix (shaped like a pickaxe, I suppose) to pull

‘Don’t be daft,’ said my husband. It was a valid but unhelpful piece of advice in response to a question I’d asked him. The question was: ‘Have you read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?’ I didn’t want him to explain it (which would indeed have been daft), merely to explain the numbering system of the text. ‘The decimal numbers of my remarks absolutely must be printed alongside them,’ the philosopher had demanded, ‘because they alone make the book perspicuous and clear: without the numbering it would be an incomprehensible jumble.’ I had thought they might be connected with the adjectival 101 (as in ‘art history 101’). That usage comes from American university

The Sun reported that a woman sold a pair of rings which, if worn on two fingers, spelt out NTCU. Or they might be swapped round, with ruder consequences. When someone objected, the maker’s followers on TikTok apparently ‘flocked to the comments to weigh in on the situation’. In a report on some other matter, the BBC mentioned an Australian who ‘has form for wading into sporting rows’. So do people weigh in or wade in? Have they weighed in or waded in? The earliest citation given by the OED for wade in, meaning ‘intervene energetically’ is in a poem from 1863 called ‘How are you, Sanitary?’ The title is

‘Don’t they know what prolific means?’ asked my husband, looking up in a bad-tempered way from a headline on the BBC website: ‘Lucy Letby: Investigating the UK’s most prolific child killer.’ Sky News, the Mail, Reuters and the CheshireLive website used the phrase too. Prolific comes from the Latin prolificus, meaning ‘producing or capable of producing offspring’. It can be used figuratively to mean ‘abundantly creative’ or just ‘productive’. A poet might deliberately use the phrase prolific child killer as a harsh oxymoron. For a journalist to use it in such a context is deplorable. A word far less easy to pin down is now widely used as a weapon:

The term black market should be replaced with illegal market because it could suggest racial bias or discrimination, according to UK Finance, a trade body for British banking and financial services. I suppose it is asking for the black never to be used with negative connotations. That will be a black day for the language. Who ever thought that black market had anything to do with black people? It’s not as if black people are stereotyped as illicit money-changers. It cannot be long before Penzance changes the name of its principal street, Market Jew Street. The name has nothing to do with Jews but derives from the Cornish Marghas Yow,

That Coutts dossier on Nigel Farage said in passing: ‘He is considered by many to be a disingenuous grifter.’ I didn’t quite know what grifter here meant. According to the Telegraph, a podcast host at Spotify called the Duke and Duchess of Sussex ‘grifters’. That does not limit the semantic field. It feels to me like a synonym for chancer, which in an 1889 dictionary of slang was defined as ‘one who attempts anything and is incompetent’.  Stephen Frears’s film The Grifters (1990), not to be recommended to anyone of a nervous disposition, deals with fixing racecourse odds, running confidence tricks, and even faking one’s own death. Get the Grift

Last year, Oxford Languages’ word of the year was goblin mode. Apparently 300,000 voters decided upon it, but I haven’t heard anyone use it. It rocketed into view after someone posted online a fake headline about the break-up of Julia Fox and Kanye West after a month together. ‘He didn’t like when I went goblin mode,’ it read. Fox later made it clear she had said nothing of the kind. It means ‘self-indulgent, lazy, or greedy behaviour that rejects social norms’. I suspect goblin mode is a vogue term that will disperse like the morning mist. Talking of mist, vape has made another advance in establishing itself in the language.

‘Is that something to do with oratory?’ asked my husband, looking up from the Guardian, which he only reads to annoy me, though it doesn’t. He was talking about the word oracy, which featured in Sir Keir Starmer’s speech last week about ‘smashing the class ceiling’. I think that, like my husband, most people assume it is a word that has been around from time immemorial, though not often used. In fact it was invented in 1965 by Andrew Wilkinson in a book called Spoken English: ‘The term we suggest for general ability in the oral skills is oracy; one who has those skills is orate, one without them inorate.’

Radio 4 has just run a series of programmes called Marianna in Conspiracyland made by its disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring. Prefatory remarks for one episode asked: ‘Do you know someone who’s fallen down the rabbit hole?’ I think this phrase has changed its connotations recently. The reference to Alice in Wonderland is evident. The podcast reinforced it by quoting a phrase from the book, ‘curiouser and curiouser’. In Wonderland, Alice had mixed feelings: ‘I almost wish I hadn’t gone down that rabbit hole – and yet – and yet – it’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life!’ The OED, finding a first usage for it from 1938, defines

Justin Trudeau has attracted a certain amount of mockery by referring in a tweet to people who are 2SLGBTQQIA+. The Canadian Prime Minister was referring to people who are Two Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex or asexual, plus anything else that might come to mind. The official website of the Canadian government only stretches to one Q and doesn’t bother with the A, but declares that ‘terminology is continuously evolving’. Continuous evolution means that yesterday’s approved term is today’s hate speech. The Canadian government website says that ‘the term homosexual has fallen out of favour, as it is associated with the historic medical understanding of same-sex attraction

At dinner the other night I was wedged between two friends of my husband’s, with another facing me. They had made their living as university academics and were, frankly, old men. None of them, I was surprised to find, knew what a terf was, despite its frequent discussion in The Spectator. Feminists of my acquaintance believe that everyone in the world knows what a terf is. In the past five years, terf wars has turned from a joky headline into a standard reference to permanent hostilities. Since I wrote about terf here in 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary has given it an entry, and its earliest citation for the word

‘Their purpose from the beginning has been to find me guilty, regardless of the facts. This is the very definition of a kangaroo court.’ So said Boris Johnson, in announcing his departure from parliament, with reference to the Commons Privileges Committee. What have kangaroos got to do with it? Perhaps a kangaroo court’s essence is not in fact that of finding the accused guilty. That is the work of a show trial: ‘A judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, and typically having a predetermined verdict,’ as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it. A kangaroo court is more like lynch law, named after

‘I know the antidote to toxicity,’ my husband shouted, waving a copy of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, even though there was nobody to shout down. Toxicity has become a fashionable word, particularly since the resignation of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Toxic is to poisonous what erotic is to sexual: an elevated term. Over the past fortnight it has been deployed in that storm in a television set: the fall of Phillip Schofield. Someone called Dr Ranj Singh declared that the culture at This Morning – the ITV programme that is generally on when one is waiting at an airport – had ‘become toxic’. Schofield, a presenter of the

Last month hundreds of Westminster street signs were auctioned off. Their design with san-serif capital letters was the work of Sir Misha Black in 1967. One for Thirleby Road went for £240. It is not a famous street but my husband and I know people who live there, though they were not the lucky bidders. I had never got a satisfactory answer from our friends about how the street is pronounced. They do not know. I find this odd. How do they get home by taxi? The crux is whether it is two syllables or three. By chance, a trip with my husband to North Yorkshire last week resolved the

When The Spectator took the pulse of Paris in 1897, it reported: ‘Macabre pictures, Macabre poems, and Macabre music are all the fashion. We hear of cafés where the tables are shaped like coffins.’ Macabre was a new word in English, and this was its sole 1890s Spectator appearance. Its connections are indicated by a phrase in a song by that uneven chansonnier Georges Brassens: croque-macchabée. It means ‘undertaker’, macchabée being ‘a corpse’. The French slang macchabée and the English macabre both originate in the Danse Macabre. There was a 14th-century French book called La Danse Macabré, with an accent, and Macabré seems to be an alteration of the Old

‘So, are the Tories going to win the election?’ asked my husband after listening to the engaging psephologist Sir John Curtice. I’d been paying attention, but was distracted by Sir John’s phrase ‘the rub in the ointment’. Typical of extempore speech, this a metaphorical mixture of the fly in the ointment and the rub. Ointment might suggest a rub like Vicks VapoRub, which originated in America in 1905. The Oxford English Dictionary says such a rub is likely to be a liniment, though I can’t quite see the difference. I do remember Sloan’s Liniment, its label bearing an engraved portrait of the thick-moustached inventor, Dr Earl Sloan (another American, a doctor

‘Why is there water all over the bathroom floor?’ asked my husband, without doing anything about it. It was my fault. During a bank holiday soak, I heard the Radio 4 book serialisation of Hands of Time by Rebecca Struthers say that ‘the origin of the modern word hour’ is the Egyptian god Horus. I rocketed up a few inches, like a surprised killer whale, then flopped back down, displacing a few cubic inches of water each side. It’s funny how ordinary words attract erroneous stories. Hour does not, of course, come from Horus. Few English words come from ancient Egyptian; pharaoh and oasis are exceptions. Hour derives from Norman