Language

He won’t be remembered as Lord Bannside, but Ian Paisley will be remembered for shouting: ‘Never, never, never, never.’ The fourth never was hardly a shout, by his standards, but merged into the roar of the crowd. Never is a useful word for rhetoric. In our mind’s ear we remember how Churchill stressed the word and paused as he said: ‘Never in the field of human conflict.’ That auditory memory is something of an illusion, for Churchill made his great speech about the ‘Few’ in the Commons, in 1940, and proceedings were not recorded in sound. What we have heard is the version he delivered again for a recording in 1951.

A little joke by Paddy, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, turned upon something to be shunned. Conservative ministers, he said, had ‘indulged in a spasm of knee-jerking which would have made even St Vitus feel concerned’. He has, I think, got his spasms in a twist. Apart from saying ‘Aaah’, the cartoon task for a patient at the doctor’s is to cross a leg for it to be hit with a little hammer. ‘Striking the tendon below the patella gives rise to a sudden extension of the leg, known as the knee-jerk,’ wrote the physiologist Sir Michael Foster in 1890. He was a busy man, sitting on committees to rid Victorian

Shaun Wright, the police and crime commissioner for South Yorkshire, spoke to Sky television last week about how little he knew of sexual exploitation of young people in the area. ‘This report demonstrates that lots of information was not escalated up to political level or indeed senior management level,’ he said. ‘For that I am hugely shocked and hugely sorry.’ He did not apologise for having used the word escalated, no doubt because he thinks it is a fine and proper thing for a man in his position to use the word escalate. Mr Wright uses escalate in a different sense from the escalation reported in the papers last week

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ is one of husband’s stock phrases — jokes he would think them — in this case trotted out if anyone says, of the weather, ‘Bitter’. (The joke must come from Colonel Chinstrap in ITMA, even though my husband wasn’t born then.) Mr Verdant Green, notionally at Oxford in the mid 19th-century, called drinking bitter beer ‘doing bitters’, a bit of slang he picked up from Mr Bouncer. We don’t say that any more, but we still enjoy bitter beer, despite the Oxford English Dictionary defining the adjective as ‘causing “the proper pain of taste” (Bain)’. By ‘Bain’ it means Alexander Bain (1818–1903), as if that

‘Our first priority,’ David Cameron said this week, ‘has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq.’ One knows what he means, but isn’t humanitarian an odd way of putting it? If it had been a vegetarian crisis or a disestablishmentarian crisis, it would be one either caused or suffered by people who professed either of those schools of thought. Humanitarians used to be people who followed the teachings of Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), who believed in the spontaneous perfectibility of the human race. He’d soaked up the ideas of Saint-Simon and squeezed them out over Auguste Comte and George Sand. The dogma-free religion of humanity was

‘Boris Johnson broke cover yesterday to declare that he will run for parliament,’ the Times reported last week. The Mirror had him running too. The Independent and the Guardian had him standing for Parliament. The Express said rather oddly that he would ‘stand as an MP’, as did the Evening Standard, though the latter made amends by speculating that Zac Goldsmith was being urged ‘to stand as the Tory candidate for Mayor of London’. There is no doubt that running for election was originally an American phrase, though it hardly blew in yesterday. Andrew Hamilton, a founding father of the United States, wrote in a letter that ‘either Governor Clinton, or

My chickens do not usually come home to roost so rapidly. Only a fortnight ago I wrote that ‘some people use basta in English, but to my ears it sounds like saying ciao — inauthentic’. Then I went back to reading Jane Ridley’s Bertie, the life of Edward VII (and how much I enjoyed it too). What should I find on page 357? I found Queen Alexandra writing about what she would wear at the coronation in 1901. ‘I know better than all the milliners and antiquaries,’ she wrote. ‘I shall wear exactly what I like, and so shall all my ladies — Basta!’ I can hardly accuse a queen of England of speaking

‘Take a trip to Marylebone station,’ chanted my husband. ‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.’ I had been to the station to take the rather nice Chiltern Railways train to Stratford-upon-Avon. En route I had developed doubts, not about my destination, but about the pronunciation of Marylebone. I’ve always said marry-bun, with the vowel of bun indeterminate. But a taxi driver and a ticket collector had said marly-bun. So, back at home, I turned to How to Pronounce It by Alan S.C. Ross, the man who invented U and non-U, but a proper linguistician for all that, and a man guaranteed to take into account traditional tendencies. He