Language

Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that I remember Macmillan using in the 1970s. But it was in 1908, a year after Kipling, that Eucken won the Nobel prize for literature. (Anyone read a book by him?) His belief was that truth is arrived at through active striving after the spiritual life, and he called this principle activism. Within a decade, Eucken’s fellow Germans were concentrating on quite a different meaning of activism. It was the name of a movement, in neutral Sweden and among Flemish nationalists in Belgium in particular, in favour of the Axis Powers.

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only man on a five-person shortlist for a place on the Bank of England monetary policy committee. Mrs Miller herself chairs the Commons Women and Equalities committee, which has two men among its 11 members, but that’s fine. She is most widely celebrated for her 32-second apology to the House in 2014 in which she said

John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003 he was asked if the Marine Corps forces he led might be defeated by the strong Iraqi army defending Baghdad. ‘Hell these are Marines,’ he said. ‘Men like them held Guadalcanal and took Iwo Jima. Baghdad ain’t shit.’ Now he must cope with Donald Trump. At the end of last month it was reported, from an anonymous source, that he had remarked that the President was ‘becoming unhinged’. Before midnight that day, Mr Trump tweeted that ‘the Fake News is going crazy’ and ‘are totally unhinged’. Eleven minutes later, another

In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College School, after 32 years’ service, for discussing matters avoided by other masters when they appeared in Greek and Latin passages, ‘in direct opposition to the feeling of the age’. No improper acts had occurred. Cockayne was a clergyman and a pioneer philologist whose pupils included the great W.W. Skeat and Henry Sweet. His father’s name was Cockin. Perhaps he had changed the spelling to avoid offending the ‘feeling of the age’. The word cocaine was not invented until 1874. But the Land of Cockayne was a medieval fantasy world of pleasure.

Why do so many academics write so badly? Those who make the study of language their life’s work are as bad as any. I saw two books about English in the 18th century reviewed in the TLS and thought I might buy them, until I read quotations from them that the reviewer had chosen, not by way of mockery, but to explain their arguments. In Multilingual Subjects, Daniel DeWispelare argues that ‘anglophone translation theorists gravitated towards one specific set of metaphors in order to advocate for protocols of linguistic inclusion and exclusion that would improve anglophone literary aesthetics within the space of global linguistic multiplicity’. I would guess that he means by

In 1872, the 27-stone figure of the Tichborne Claimant was insisting he was Sir Roger Tichborne Bt, an heir thought lost at sea as a slim young man. To raise funds he undertook a series of public meetings, and at one in the East End, the cry ‘Three groans for the Attorney-General’ was repeated every five minutes. Dickens describes the classic 19th-century groan in The Pickwick Papers (1836) at the Eatanswill election hustings. When Horatio Fitzkin is proposed, ‘the Fizkinites applauded, and the Slumkeyites groaned, so long, and so loudly, that both he and the seconder might have sung comic songs in lieu of speaking, without anybody’s being a bit

It’s like whipping cream. All of a sudden it goes stiff and you can turn the bowl upside down without it falling out. In the same way, a common mistake in speech solidifies and becomes firmly attached to the language. I don’t think bacteria has quite been whipped into a singular shape yet, even though one is always reading thing like ‘bacteria’s ability to evolve its way around antibiotics’. Such mistakes often occur in newspapers, where rush preserves erroneous forms that in oral speech bubble up and burst, to be lost to any record. A word just on the turn is media. The first example of it found by the

No, hang on, don’t turn to Dear Mary yet. This is not as dull as it sounds. It’s just that I was mystified by not having heard of the term mechanistic insight when, to my husband, it was a common as an August blackberry on a Sussex hedgerow. ‘Look,’ he said, shaking some printouts from medical journals. ‘Mechanistic insights are two a penny.’ At first I thought it was simply a silly scientistic way of saying ‘How it works’. For example, one paper had the title: ‘Mechanistic insight into how multidrug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii response regulator AdeR recognises an intercistronic region.’ There is no need to know what any of

‘I love the pumping station,’ said my husband, waving a copy of the Docklands and East London Advertiser which reported the architectural listing of the Isle of Dogs storm water pumping station. ‘I’d been looking for that,’ I said patiently (I thought). ‘The listing is not the point.’ A reader had sent the paper to me because of the strange language used by John Outram, the architect of the Grade II* building, put up between 1986 and 1988: ‘Decoration is the origin and essence of architecture. It can mediate, in the theatre of a built room or a big city, the epiphany of a meaning. I aimed to invent that

Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip in Great Expectations, while noting how coarse his hands were. Words like the and of are also useful shibboleths to show someone doesn’t belong to our club. ‘No denim’ says the advice for entry to today’s Queen’s Birthday Parade, on pain of entry being refused. It is the occasion of Trooping the Colour. Of course my husband, especially, and I too call it, Trooping the Colour, never interpolating the fatal of. The ceremony is said to go back to Marlborough, but one of the earliest references cited by the Oxford English

‘It’s like Pin number,’ said my husband, drifting into lucidity. So it is, in a way. The construction under discussion was one-year anniversary. Just as Pin embraces personal identification number (making the addition of number pleonastic), so the concept of a year is plain in anniversary, rendering the cobbling on of year redundant. I am sorry to say there is bad news for all of us who think one-year anniversary and its family repugnant. The construction is so rampant and widespread that we are stuck with it. It’s worse than ground elder. No one can dig up all the language and remove the virulent white roots that spread the usage.

Don’t tell my husband, but I have been having doubts. (He never reads this column, so our secret is safe.) The doubt is about meet with. I always regarded it is a pleonasm, and a rebarbative one, being of American origin. Theresa May made a mark, one way or another, by meeting President Trump. She didn’t meet him by chance, she met with him (by appointment), as several British papers said, never mind the American ones. And she didn’t meet with him as one meets with a misfortune. Meet with and its ampler form meet up with are examples of the ‘phrasal verb’, a term that (though found here and

What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m glad he supplied an answer, for I know no Yiddish and less Hebrew, and the Oxford English Dictionary is reticent. Kippah first appeared in the OED in 1997, with the bare etymology ‘from Hebrew’. Philologus observes that it denotes ‘any skullcap worn by a Jew for religious reasons’. He suggests that kippah derives from a word in early rabbinic Hebrew (from the time of the compilation of the Mishnah, the first century in AD-dating). That Hebrew word meant ‘dome’ or ‘vault’, either of a building or of the heavens. This

I have long pondered the motive with which Michael Wharton, for long the author of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, gave a memorable detail in his second volume of memories, A Dubious Codicil, about the habits of his rival Colin Welch: ‘He had a habit of picking his nose, occasionally tasting the extracted mucus or “bogey”, without any attempt to conceal himself, as most people would, behind a newspaper.’ Since they are both dead, I am unlikely to find out. But I have been piqued recently by another kind of pick, mostly relating to Donald Trump, and now spilling over into British affairs. The choice for one of his cabinet

The number of things I don’t know is infinite — or infinite minus one, if such as number exists, since I discovered something the other day: the most unlikely origin for a common phrase. I could hardly believe it at first. A perfectly current idiom in English is to talk of people currying favour, in the sense of ‘ingratiating themselves’. I knew that currying here had nothing to do with the kind of curry we eat with rice, the name of which we borrowed from Tamil in the 17th century. I supposed, right enough, that the currying of favour was the sort done with a curry-comb when rubbing down a horse.