Dot Wordsworth

‘Sleaze, sleaze, sleaze!’ exclaimed Sir Keir Starmer in Prime Minister’s Questions last week, hoping that a triple serving might stick. He meant to suggest financial corruption, though his language came from the hospitable semantic field that also corrals sexual meanings. The sexually dirty also overlaps constantly with the literally dirty. In 2013 Ukip’s Godfrey Bloom

‘Wizard,’ said William. ‘Super,’ said Ginger, in William and the Moon Rocket (1954). More recently we have had Alex Salmond, the leader of the new Alba party (a grand coalition embracing albinos, Albanians, albatrosses and Albigensians) declaring that it can achieve in Scotland ‘a supermajority for independence’. Is a supermajority even a thing? (This form

A favourite piece of graffiti to spray on the Cenotaph or the plinth of Churchill’s nearby statue is ACAB. It stands for ‘All coppers are bastards’, though Americans substitute the word cops for coppers. In graffiti form it is sometimes rendered 1312, from the place of the letters in the alphabet. As a slogan, ACAB

A reader sent in a television preview from the Daily Star for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds in which ‘Brad Pitt leads a squad of Jewish-American soldiers on a Nazi killing spree’. The film, it added, is ‘not as funny as ’Allo ’Allo! but Pitt raises laughs out of his shonky language skills’. The reader was shocked

‘Think yourself lucky,’ said my husband when I told him about poor John Stuart Mill’s mother, who had nine children by a man strongly in favour of birth control and who brought up his children ‘in the absence of love and in the presence of fear’. Parenthetically, I have only just discovered that the Mill

‘This is the book that horses wish every equestrian would read,’ says the blurb for Sacred Spaces: Communion with the horse through science and spirit by Dr Susan Fay. It might sound like putting the cart before the horse to have equines deciding our reading list, but everyone wants a bit of space at the

If I ever again accompany my husband to a medical conference in Spain, and want to tell my hosts that I am embarrassed (as he often makes me), I should not say embarazada, for that word means ‘pregnant’, which at my age would be unusual. Such false friends can add to the gaiety of foreign

‘Blame Kingsley Amis,’ said my husband, with the carelessness of one defying a man out of earshot. The blame, such as it was, lay in the title of the novel Take a Girl Like You (1960). The ambiguity in the title, he maintained, was between like meaning ‘such as’ and like meaning ‘resembling’. There is

What do people think espouse means? It looks fairly plain, since spouses are to have and to hold, or indeed embrace. That applies to opinions, metaphorically. But King’s College, London, mounted a survey in 2019 and found that 26 per cent of students agreed or strongly agreed with the statement: ‘If someone is using hate

‘I’ll stick to being Brazilian,’ said my husband. It was a family joke. Every time a politician on the radio says resilient, the first to shout out Brazilian wins. I haven’t yet discovered what the prize is, though we have been playing the game since 2014, when I wrote about resilience here. My husband may

I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator, 6 February) that it is a shame the Times is dropping its use of titles of courtesy — Mrs, Mr, Lord — at the second mention of anyone in a report. Now it’s Charles Moore first mention, and Moore after that. Even when I see Jane Austen referred

‘Thus I refute Bishop Berkeley,’ said my husband, multitasking by kicking the stone and slightly misquoting Samuel Johnson at the same time. It was his (my husband’s) notion of a little joke. Dr Johnson had demonstrated with his own kick the falsehood of thinking that all things are merely ideal, not material. The stone my

Suzanne Moore, the Telegraph columnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at the ends of emails. Her real gripe was with false claims to kindness. So what should you put at the end of an email? Yours sincerely is conventional in letters to people whom one

In discussing the German low-life cant called Rotwelsch, Mark Glanville (Books, 9 January) referred in passing to Polari, ‘the language of gay English subculture’, being used ‘by members of a marginalised group to converse without being understood by outsiders’. I’ve never been convinced by this description of Polari. Undercover policemen in Soho before 1967 may

Veronica brought me a hundred newspapers so that I could check on one word. Well, she didn’t bring a wheelbarrow, but she has at her office one of those online databases that bring up published articles. The word was performative, by which I had been annoyed on the wireless recently because a couple of speakers

In the aisle of Tesco I stood like one thunderstruck. It was not the print of a man’s naked foot that took me aback, as it did Crusoe, but a tin of ‘Mandarin segments in juice’. These days we get our entertainment where we can, and I had toyed with buying tinned goods against the

In 2015 smombie became the Youth Word of the Year in Germany. In January 2016 a survey found that 92 per cent of the young people asked did not know the meaning of smombie. Smombie is a portmanteau word composed from smartphone and zombie, used for those people who stumble about the street looking at

‘Try the sports pages,’ said my husband, stirring in his armchair. I was looking for examples of fortuitous used as though it meant ‘fortunate’. You and I know that it means ‘produced by chance’, and it seems a pity to lose the distinction. The sports pages were indeed thronged with fortuitous. Football, it seems, is

‘Forget coronavirus,’ said my husband, ‘the word of the year is strange.’ The strange thing is he’s right. This wasn’t determined by online polls or fixed by dictionaries. It emerged spontaneously and distinctly when the lockdowns got going. About lockdown I am still not quite happy. The word seems a little extreme for the episodes