Language

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Check my privilege? I have, thanks. You’re still wrong

This week, I bring you a dispatch from the frontline of pseudo-intellectual, metropolitan navel-gazing. This is, after all, what you pay me for. So right now the big thing for people who consider themselves warriors against nasty isms and phobias (of the sexism and homophobia varieties, not the Blairism and arachnophobia varieties) is to undermine each other constantly via accusations of intrinsic privilege. ‘I am a feminist!’ declares somebody, via a book or blog or Tumblr or tweet. ‘Aha!’ retort others, ever vigilant for this sort of thing. ‘But have you canvassed the views of Somalian refugees who are weekending female impersonators in Anglesea?’ ‘Um, no?’ replies our proto-feminist. ‘Check

Monday

Austen Saunders

Discovering poetry: John Donne, from deviant to Dean of St. Paul’s

Holy Sonnet 7, John Donne At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go – All whom the flood did, and fire shall, overthrow, All whom war, dearth, age, agues, tyrannies, Despair, law, chance, hath slain, and you whose eyes Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.     But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space For, if above all these my sins abound, ‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace When we are there. Here, on this lowly ground, Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Grocery

Was Margaret Thatcher brought up in a grocery? I wouldn’t say so. The Americans would. I’d call her father’s shop in Grantham a grocer’s. He sold grocery. Yet I saw the Times refer to ‘her father’s grocery store’, which sounds doubly American. It’s not just Margaret Thatcher. The Daily Mail referred to Prince Harry befriending a woman ‘who worked in a grocery store near Eton’. The Americans have been calling a grocer’s a grocery for some time, and a baker’s a bakery. Frances Trollope, the novelist’s mother, noticed it in her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), and a decade later Dickens wrote of the Americans’ ‘Bakery’, ‘Grocery’, and ‘Bookbindery’. I

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Game-changing

In the days when we had bottles of milk delivered, some tits discovered how to peck through the foil tops and consume the cream beneath. Suddenly all the tits were at it. This illustrated what the alternative scientist Rupert Sheldrake called morphic resonance. Something similar has happened over the past days with the phrase game-changing. Trevor Kavanagh, in the Sun, commented: ‘The local elections delivered a ground-breaking, game-changing, seismic political moment.’ In the Independent, Donald Macintyre compared ‘Ukip’s position to that of the game-changing SDP’. Except, in the days of the Gang of Four, the obligatory epithet was not game-changing but breaking the mould. That metaphor was used erroneously almost

Tuesday

Mary Hannity

Schroder – one man’s journey into night

Erik Schroder is an East German who last saw his mother when he was five years old. In 1975 only his unspeaking father crossed the Wall with him into West Berlin and on to America. It is here that Erik Schroder becomes Eric Kennedy – his fateful, fictional second skin. It is Kennedy, deflecting wide-eyed enquiries in to his ancestry with a modest shrug (‘I wanted a hero’s name’), who is accepted in to college, who gets a job in real estate, who marries a woman named Laura and has a daughter named Meadow. But after the failure of this marriage, it is Schroder who kidnaps Meadow and takes her

Monday

Austen Saunders

In defence of William Shakespeare’s nonsense

‘It was a lover and his lass’ from As You Like It It was a lover and his lass With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, That o’er the green cornfield did pass In springtime, the only pretty ring-time, When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding Sweet lovers love the spring. Between the acres of the rye, With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, These pretty country folks would lie In springtime…etc. This carol they began that hour With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, How that life was but a flower In springtime…etc. And therefore take the present

Thursday

Mark Mason

The Ize Have It

She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its cover, ‘authorized’. Iain Dale isn’t happy (and I’m sure he’s not alone). ‘I am appalled,’ he writes on his blog, ‘that they have used the American spelling … It’s certainly not what she would have wanted and it grates. Penguin ought to remember its British roots.’ Good news, Iain – it turns out ‘-ize’ isn’t

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Cravat

‘French,’ cried my husband. ‘It’s bloody French.’ We were clicking on a computer screen in response to the dear old Telegraph’s invitation to ‘test out your etymological knowledge’. The little game accompanied news of an exhibition in London called The English Effect, mounted by the British Council. I had already got one of the 20 questions wrong, because I didn’t know the origin of honcho and clicked on the option ‘Mexican’ (whatever that means) instead of Japanese. In a way honcho is American, having been ‘brought back from Japan by fliers stationed there during the occupation and during the Korean fighting’, according to the journal American Speech in 1955, as

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Climate wars: I’m being attacked by my own side. Why?

There’s nothing more irritating then being asked to apologise for something you haven’t done. No, wait, there is: when the person demanding the apology is one of the friends you admire most in the world — and when the alleged victim of your non-existent crime is one of the people you most despise. The friend’s name is Anthony Watts, meteorologist and fellow happy warrior in the great global battle against climate change nonsense. He runs the world’s most widely read climate sceptic website, Watts Up With That?, which got to the Climategate story before I did. Recently, we were both winners in the 2013 Bloggies Awards: he deservedly won best

Thursday

Mark Mason

How To Pronounce It – U and non-U. A guide for George “innit” Osborne.

Sometimes, in the joyous lotteries we call ‘secondhand bookshops’, you find a volume that takes you back to a different era because of its physical appearance. Sometimes you find one that adds to the effect by its content – a book about Victorian cricket, perhaps, or 1950s industrial policy. But sometimes you find one that goes beyond even that: it shows you a world where books mattered in a way they simply can’t today, and indeed never will again. That’s what happened to me recently, when I bumped into a copy of the sublimely archaic How To Pronounce It by Alan S.C. Ross. Published in 1970, it has a dust-jacket

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Enthronisation

They were worrying in Canterbury about a clash between the inauguration of the Pope and the enthronisation of the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was a near miss. You might think the word enthronisation sounds like something that George Bush had coined. Yet it has been in use longer than enthronement, which is not known until 1685. Two centuries earlier, Malory was writing of intronyscacyon in the Morte d’Arthur. In the succeeding centuries the word was applied to Archbishops of Canterbury, to the King, the Great Sophi of Persia, the Pope, the Ark of the Covenant and to Satan. Enthronisation is not just a word from distant centuries. ‘The enthronisation of

Toby Young Toby Young

What is this word?

‘What are you writing?’ I asked my nine-year-old daughter as she sat at the kitchen table doing her homework. ‘A recount,’ she said. ‘What’s a recount?’ She looked at me with utter disdain. ‘Duh! A recount.’ I calmly explained that you could recount an event in a piece of writing, but that didn’t make what you’d written a ‘recount’. The only sense in which you can use ‘recount’ as a noun is when referring to the act of recounting something. ‘What’s this then?’ she said, waving a piece of paper in my face. Sure enough, the exercise she’d been given by her teacher was to write a ‘recount’ of something

Julie Bindel

From Cockney to Jafaican

My mother always had a keen ear for slang and lazy pronunciation when I was growing up. Because my siblings and I were working class and attended an absolutely dreadful school in the North-east in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents made sure we were as educated as we possibly could be in manners. My father, a proud northerner, has always taken umbrage at what he calls ‘Cockney’ (in reality just phrases popular among Londoners such as ‘at the end of the day’, ‘basically’ and ‘strike a light’.) Over the past decade, however, the Cockney of my generation has been replaced with the street slang known as ‘Jafaican’, a form

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Budget Day: should our times really be called ‘the age of austerity’?

It is Budget Day. Prepare for another barrage of “messages” about the virtues or perils, depending on your point of view, of ‘austerity’. From where has this ubiquitous term come? And should it apply to our times? Dot Wordsworth, our language columnist, has some answers: ‘If we are invited to think we are experiencing austerity, despite the heaps of cheap clothes in Primark or expensive food in Waitrose, then it is Mr Cameron’s doing. In April 2009, not so long ago, at the Conservative spring conference (that needless enterprise) he promised an ‘age of austerity’. In the same speech he promised a ‘People’s Right To Know’, a plan under which

Monday

David Blackburn

Help! What is ‘lurching’?

David Cameron is not for lurching. No lurch to the right, he says. The word ‘lurch’ underscores commentary on the government’s difficulties; but what does it actually mean? As so often in these matters, Dot Wordsworth, our language correspondent, has a few erudite suggestions, one of which is this: ‘Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally. The word suddenly popped up in the 19th century. No one is known to have used it earlier than Byron in 1819, in Don Juan, where he contrives a Byronic rhyme: ‘A mind diseased no remedy can physic/ (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.’)’

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 7 March 2013

Gove’s history lessons Sir: ‘The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered,’ says Professor Jackie Eales, ‘but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age.’ This is not true. Primary education is, or should be, all about just such a body of knowledge. This gives children a foundation of fact, preferably facts learnt by heart. Without it, they cannot begin to reason, and develop valid ideas, in the secondary stage. It may be a tight squeeze to get them through English history up to 1700 by the age of 11, but it is better than not covering the ground at

Dot Wordsworth

Lurch

My husband made a little joke. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lurch,’ he said, looking up from his Sunday Telegraph. In it, David Cameron had declared: ‘The battle for Britain’s future will not be won in lurching to the right.’ Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally. The word suddenly popped up in the 19th century. No one is known to have used it earlier than Byron in 1819, in Don Juan, where he contrives a Byronic rhyme: ‘A mind diseased no remedy can physic/ (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick).’ Its origins are mysterious but nautical. A clue may

Christopher Howse

‘Ware’s Victorian Dictionary of Slang and Phrase’, by J. Redding Ware – review

James Redding Ware, with his idiosyncratic treatment of slang, plunges the reader straight into the late 19th-century Bartholomew Fair of undeserving paupers, loafers, Ally Slopers, theatrical types and demi-mondaines. He drew on his own Grub Street life for this discursive lexicon, from A.D. (‘a drink’) to Zulu Express (the nickname for a Great Western service), published, days before his death in 1909, as Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase. The Bodder has faked it up nicely in smudgy facsimile, with burgundy end-papers, a new title and an introduction by John Simpson of the OED, who devours dictionaries with his morning porridge. Ware,

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters | 28 February 2013

Healing the world Sir: We most warmly commend the courage of Professor Meirion Thomas (‘The next NHS scandal’, 23 February) in lifting the lid on the appalling abuse of the NHS by foreign visitors. It has been going on for years but has been covered up by the culture of fear that has pervaded that organisation. We stand ready to support the professor in parliament if that should prove necessary. Regrettably, the present position is even worse than he described. The relevant quango (the Primary Care Commissioning group) issued instructions last July that GPs must accept an application for registration from any foreign visitor who is here for more than

Melissa Kite

Real life | 28 February 2013

Two pedantic nerds should not be allowed to come together in a small space. In any case, the guy who runs quiz night at The Black Swan and I have a history of locking horns. On Halloween, we had a terrible row about Greek semantics. He asked, ‘What animal would you turn into if you were suffering from lycanthropy?’ I wrote down ‘wolf’ and assured my team that we were on firm ground as I happened to be an avid reader of period horror stories. But when it came to the marking, the pub quiz compère said the answer was ‘werewolf’ and that we couldn’t have a point for writing