Language

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

‘Is it connected to plant-based?’ asked my husband, as though we were playing Twenty Questions. ‘Anything to do with Homebase, drum and bass, Prisoners’ Base?’ I was trying to interest him in the 21st-century meaning of based, of which he had never heard. The New York Times never stops trying to give a new etymology for based, according to Jeff Bercovici, who is co-head of the newsroom of the San Francisco Standard. His actual words were ‘trying to retcon the etymology’, but I didn’t know that retcon means to give ‘retroactive continuity’ to a thing, as Dallas did by saying that Bobby Ewing’s death was just a dream. On Twitter

‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’. I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B

‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria – about the same amount as those little bottles of milk we had at school.’ I had been talking about billions, trillions and quadrillions and had suggested that our bodies’ cells were outnumbered ten to one by bacteria. But since 2016, apparently, the reliable estimate is of 30 trillion human cells with 38 trillion bacteria wandering about inside us. The language of those large numbers remains ambiguous. In 1974 Harold Wilson, the prime minister, refused a request by a Tory MP for ministers to use billion only in its British

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’ Well, yes and no. Her children were registered as Mountbatten-Windsor at birth. That was a name invented by a declaration in the Privy Council in 1960. But Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess now and need not have a surname. The trouble is that other descendants of the late Queen made up surnames for their

My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules. And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is

‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp. Damp in English originally meant ‘a noxious exhalation’. Caxton used it in the 15th century when writing of a prophecy of Merlin about a goat breathing from its nostrils a ‘damp’ that would betoken hunger. By the 17th century various kinds of damp were feared in mines, fulminating damp or firedamp, which caught fire from the miners’ candles, and

‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been trying to work out what intentional living meant, with regard to the Duchess of Sussex’s new brand of flower sprinkles and raspberry jam. ‘The collection is infused with joy, love, and a touch of whimsy,’ says the publicity. ‘Thoughtfully curated, As Ever celebrates intentional living.’ Intentional living could be the opposite of assisted dying, I suppose. It is quite a puzzle.      ‘The debut As Ever collection showcases eight intentionally designed products, personally developed by Meghan, Duchess of Sussex,’ says another bit of PR. In the OED, the meaning ‘on purpose’

Scarcely a day passes without a newspaper story about some absurd ‘language guide’ issued by a public body. This week the Daily Mail reported that Wokingham Borough Council had told its staff not to use the phrase ‘hard-working families’ in case it offended the unemployed. Other verboten words included ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitewash’, and staff were warned that ‘sustained eye contact could be considered aggressive’ in some cultures. I don’t think they meant supporters of Millwall football club, but you never know. Not to be outdone, Cardiff University has told its students to avoid using ‘British-English’ phrases such as ‘kill two birds with one stone’, ‘break a leg’ and ‘a piece

In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published. Published 34 years posthumously, however, in 1981, were Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, a commonplace book edited by J.A. Gere and John Sparrow, with a foreword by his friend Harold Macmillan. One entry lists 17 lives in the Dictionary of National Biography ‘of interest and not usually read’, such as John Selby Watson (1804-84), ‘author and murderer’;

‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the New York Times last year. A problem experienced in 2010 was, he had said, ‘caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died’. ‘No, if it was cysticercosis,’ my husband insisted, ‘it would have been a larval form of the tapeworm forming a cyst in the brain.

To ‘kickstart economic growth’ is the first (‘number one’) of Labour’s five ‘missions’ to rebuild Britain. That is what the manifesto announced last year. The mission is not just economic growth, but kickstarting it. On 29 January, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that she was ‘going further and faster to kickstart economic growth’. I can see that she might be going further, but it is not easy to see what ‘faster’ means here, although it is true that, since economic growth has slowed down since the election in July, there is more opportunity for going faster. I suppose the word kickstart was chosen because

‘My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’ Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts at this time of year. The astrologer Russell Grant warns Pisces about ‘a loved one’s wellbeing weighing on your thoughts’. At other times, loved ones are dead, the phrase being used without irony in broadcast reports of air disasters, war and inheritance tax. It annoyingly presumes that all relations who die are loved. The Oxford

My husband was so delighted with the new-found term perigee-syzygy that he kept repeating it, until the syllables merged into his regular breathing and he fell asleep in his chair. The compound word means what the vulgar press call a supermoon. A syzygy is the lining-up of the moon, Earth and sun, producing a full moon (or a new moon, which is invisible because only the far side is illuminated). The perigee is when the moon is nearest the Earth (its furthest being the apogee). The distance varies because the moon orbits the Earth in an ellipse. The funny-looking word syzygy, used in English since the 17th century, merely comes

‘Why can’t you have legacy tomatoes?’ asked my husband. ‘There are plenty of heritage tomatoes.’ He might well ask. Heritage tomatoes, usually called heirloom tomatoes in America, are cultivars valued for flavour lost in many modern hybrids. They include the Black Krim from the Crimea and the delicious Raf, grown in Almeria, its name an unromantic acronym from Resistente al Fusarium, since it is resistant to a fungus. Only since the 1970s has heritage been used as a label for things of historical, cultural or scenic interest. The fashionable term was applied in 1983 to the new quango English Heritage. Like heritage, a legacy was something we were glad to

The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The title has no legal force. As far as etymology goes, minster comes from the Latin monasterium, which had already in the 8th century acquired the meaning ‘cathedral church’ in addition to ‘monastery’. Before the Norman Conquest, minster in English had come to mean a large, important church. Before the recent efflorescence, we had a hotchpotch