In Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, a young dog called Ellis Carter takes a girl for a drive in a dogcart (a little open carriage pulled by a horse, not a dog, the use of which for traction was made illegal in 1854) on a Sunday afternoon, until the spirited mare he is
Billie Eilish, who has just won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the next Bond film. ‘James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist,’ she said. ‘I’m still in shock.’ My husband tells me that the symptoms of shock include pale, clammy skin and bluish fingernails. Since Miss Eilish’s fingernails
At this time of year in Colorado the crime of puffing is widespread. It is so cold that in the morning people often leave the car engine running to warm it up while they finish getting ready indoors. This is called puffing. It leads to dozens of cars being stolen. Characteristically, the police penalise victims,
When Francis Hurt inherited the Renishaw estate in 1777, he changed his surname to Sitwell. His eight-year-old son and heir Sitwell Hurt thus grew up to be Sir Sitwell Sitwell. ‘Perhaps his hypersensitive descendant should resume the patronymic and call himself Sir Hurt Hurt,’ Evelyn Waugh once remarked of his contemporary Osbert Sitwell. I was
When an MP announced she was pansexual I didn’t know what she meant. Indeed I didn’t know what she could mean. Was everything the object of her sexual desires? So I asked my husband. ‘Oh, that’s what they used to call Freud’s ideas,’ he said patiently. I was surprised to find he was right. Pansexual
Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It was because Washington Post columnist George Will had used it in a piece about the US senator Lindsey Graham. ‘During the government shutdown,’ he had written, ‘Graham’s tergiversations — sorry, this is the precise word
‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response did not chime with the spirit of the Cambridge Dictionary in naming it: ‘We think that our fans resonated with upcycling not as a word in itself but with the positive idea behind it.’ I
‘What,’ asked my husband teasingly, by way of an early Christmas game, ‘connects wolf’s-bane with Woolwich Arsenal?’ It took me a little time, but I got there via aconite. Ovid put its origins most vividly. When Cerberus was dragged by Heracles from Hades, triply barking as the steel chain was twisted round his necks and
A point that many people mentioned amid the horror and heroism of the attack at London Bridge was the enterprising use of a narwhal tusk taken from the wall of Fishmongers’ Hall to belabour the murderous knifeman. I am surprised to find that the first person known to use narwhal in English was good old
‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James Russell Lowell where he found decuman, meaning ‘big wave’. The line ‘Spume-sliding down the baffled decuman’ came in Lowell’s ‘The Cathedral’ (1870) about Chartres. Lowell was Longfellow’s big-beardy successor as professor of belles-lettres at Harvard.
‘I know the difference between ictal and icteric,’ said my husband proudly, reminding me of Tweedledum in Through the Looking-Glass. He explained, accurately enough, that ictal was to do with strokes and icteric with jaundice. But he hadn’t heard about the bird. Pliny in his Natural History says that there is a bird called ikteros
People in different regions like to think their dialects incomprehensible to outsiders, yet they can usually come up with quite a short list of words that differ from the norm. In Norfolk a favourite is bishy barnabee for ‘ladybird’. Ladybird, as I have mentioned before, refers to Our Lady, the Virgin Mary. But there have
‘Why is whilst only ever used in letters?’ asked my husband, casting aside an argumentative letter from his sister written in curly script and blue ballpoint. Why indeed? It cannot be wrong to use whilst, any more than amongst or amidst. But it goes with a certain register of genteel speech that can merge into
‘Hospitals named after sandwiches kill five,’ ran a headline in the Times in June. When it was tweeted by the journalist Adam Macqueen, people pointed out that there really is a Mayo Clinic (in Minnesota), though egg or tuna is not specified, and there had been a BLT group of hospitals (Barts and the London
Lewis Carroll, in his Phantasmagoria, and Other Poems (1869), constructed a poem that yielded a double acrostic, with the first and last letters of 13 words that were suggested by the 13 stanzas spelling out ‘quasi-insanity commemoration’, a reference to an Oxford commemoration ball. The first stanza, which yields the word quadratic, goes: ‘Yet what
In the Times, Janice Turner wrote that she had been watching Remainers and Leavers ‘like degenerate gamblers, double down, bet all their chips to bag the purest prize, then throw in the farm and their firstborn child. Anything but fold.’ There is much doubling down at the moment. Beatrice Wishart, a Lib Dem MP, said
It is easy to speak a sentence never spoken before since the world came fresh from its mould. It’s not so easy to say a word unsaid by any other lips. In its second edition (1989) the Oxford English Dictionary recorded numbskullism with a single illustrative quotation, from Anne Seward, a younger contemporary of Samuel
On my way to a party in Ealing I saw a shop called Pan Rings. A mental image popped up of a saucepan with marks from milk round the sides. It is, in fact, a jewellery shop. Fashion outlets happily attract attention with negative names. Nasty Gal was founded in 2012 and has I think
The title of the television review and discussion programme Late Night Line-Up is a curious one. I’d be interested if anyone knows how it was chosen. After the throaty sax notes of Gerry Mulligan’s Blue Boy, Joan Bakewell would leggily engage earnest folk in chatter long after the pubs had closed. Did the guests smoke?
I asked my husband if I should spend £59 on 20 millilitres of Estée Lauder Advanced Night Repair Intense Reset Concentrate. He laughed and said: ‘Try chicken soup.’ This did not quite answer my question. An ingredient of the concentrate is hyaluronic acid. It is not, as far as I can tell, an acid. It