Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon ‘has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews’. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: ‘give
On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: ‘babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped’. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It
With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his
‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not
During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a
‘Six!’ cried my husband, waving his notebook as he monitored the by-elections. He wasn’t counting Reform wins but the ways of pronouncing mayoralty. The most inventive seemed to be Jonny Dymond on Radio 4, who called them mayoralities, introducing an i, as in words such as realities or moralities. Although mayoralities wasn’t exactly the required
‘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
‘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
‘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
‘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
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,
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
‘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
‘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,’
‘Here’s a piece of filth for you,’ said my husband encouragingly. He was ‘helping’ me, as a cat might help wind wool. He’d come across a letter to the Guardian from 2015, in which Pedr James, who had directed a television dramatisation of Martin Chuzzlewit, drew attention to the name in the book for the
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.
In 2015, an orthopaedic surgeon called Limb, with three other doctors called Limb, wrote a paper on whether people’s names were correlated with their medical specialties. The findings were striking. In general surgery there were practitioners called Gore, Butcher, Boyle and Blunt. In cardiology, Hart and Pump. In anaesthesia there was a Payne but also
‘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
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
‘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