My husband has ordered a copy of Craig Brown’s new book, out next week, a bit late for my birthday. I know he’ll grab it while I’m doing the washing up and later read out bits, which would be nice if he were any good at it. I wonder if the book explains the title:
In The Importance of Being Earnest Jack Worthing was given his surname by Mr Thomas Cardew, who happened to have a first-class ticket for Worthing in his pocket when he found him in the cloakroom at Victoria station – the Brighton line. When told, Lady Bracknell exclaimed: ‘The line is immaterial!’ This turns out not
The word that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, chose to describe the action of rioters was more interesting than he perhaps knew. ‘I won’t shy away from calling it what it is – far-right thuggery.’ Thuggery throve in India, was suppressed by imperial authorities and has been revived in a different form in the
The singer Charli XCX (or ‘Ninety Ten’ as my husband insists on pronouncing it) has endorsed Kamala Harris, in a way. ‘Kamala is brat,’ she tweeted. Since the slippery meaning of brat includes elements of dirtiness, drunkenness and hedonism, it might not define all that Americans want in a president. Not that Charli is American.
My husband has taken to crying out or braying ‘Haar, ha!’ at the wireless whenever he hears something particularly foolish, which is quite often. His bray was even louder than usual when one of those endless trailers invited us all to ‘dive deeper’. Like a tornado, this figure of speech has thickened into reality within
Logan Paul, a wrestler with 23 million YouTube subscribers, called Donald Trump’s immediate reaction to his shooting ‘the most badass thing I’ve ever seen in my life’. It helped that it was photographed with Old Glory flying against a blue sky and Trump, fist in the air, mouthing ‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ with blood trickling down
Lord Peter Wimsey said to the nurse: ‘Now about the old lady herself. I gather she was a little queer towards the end – a bit mental, I think you people call it?’ This is in Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, from 1927. The 1920s were the heyday of mental, which occurred then about
Graham Norton’s latest novel ‘blends dark humour and emotional weight with ease’, says the Radio Times. That may well be, but it was the title that struck me: Forever Home. It seems to me a childish phrase, heard in the imagination in a high-pitched American accent, as perhaps in Boys Town (1938), which was Ronnie
‘That’ll be the old pivot again,’ said Amol Rajan on Today last week. He was interviewing Pat McFadden, who is the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, since the Duchy needs its chancellor shadowed. Amol, as I think of him since he sounds so young (though he is 41 on election day), suggested that
‘Evelyn Waugh,’ said my husband when I asked who came up with the analogy of carrying a Ming vase. He was, in a way, right, but wrong too. Every political commentator, it seems, has been talking of Sir Keir Starmer’s Ming vase strategy in approaching the election. In April 2021 Decca Aitkenhead was reminded of
The National Galleries of Scotland is singular. In its public pronouncements its pronouns are it and its. Fair enough. Though it appears plural, I shall not misuse its chosen pronouns. Visitors must also learn a new language to visit its three galleries, for they are not now called galleries. They are called National, Portrait and
‘Bear with me,’ said my husband on the phone and then let out a loud roar. It was intended to be the sound of the bear with him. There are no circumstances in which that would be amusing. It is bad enough when people say ‘Bear with me’ and then spend unfathomable minutes trying to
‘It sounds like Polari to me,’ said my husband, who can remember Julian and Sandy (Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams) on Round the Horne, 1965 to 1968. They used Polari, an assorted camp slang popular in the years when homosexual acts were still illegal. It was the phrase Genny Lex that my husband had heard,
‘You make the cotton easy to pick, Mame,’ sang my husband with execrable delivery. ‘No,’ I said, ‘You can’t sing things like that now. In any case, I was talking of Bame, not Mame.’ The hit musical from 1966, starring Angela Lansbury, has only the most tangential relevance to the latest lurch in approved terminology
‘Is it anything to do with cockle-picking?’ asked my husband, confident he was on the right track. Naturally he wasn’t. We’d just heard that the economy, growing by 0.6 per cent, was ‘going gangbusters’. The nearest my husband could get was gangmasters, a word we had both learned in 2004, when at least 21 Chinese
‘Sparks,’ said my husband, after a short pause. I had asked him what one could spark. His answer was true but not all that helpful. I had come across a headline on the BBC News website that said: ‘Record hot March sparks “unchartered territory” fears.’ The inverted commas around unchartered territory were not meant as
‘He did it years before William Donaldson did The Henry Root Letters,’ said my husband querulously, as though I had accused him on peak-time television of saying the opposite. The ‘he’ in question was Humphry Berkeley, who as a Cambridge undergraduate just after the second world war pursued an elaborate hoax by assuming the identity
Pelham, the hero of the novel of the same name (which came out in 1828, the first year of The Spectator’s existence), visiting his old friend Glanville, is conducted by ‘the obsequious and bowing valet’ into a room where his host sits ‘opposite to a toilet of massive gold’. (Yes, words change meaning. This toilet
My husband thought it brave and manly of the BBC’s Amol Rajan to resolve publicly to change his pronunciation of the letter-name aitch. He’d said haitch all his life, but declared in a blog: ‘Dear reader, I’m here to tell you: it’s aitch.’ This attracted wide attention. He also announced that biopic is pronounced bio-pic,
Why do people say: ‘You might very well think that; I couldn’t possibly comment’? Are they using it as they would a Shakespearean quotation such as: ‘The lady doth protest too much’? Or do they think that by speaking the line made famous by Ian Richardson in House of Cards, they generate wit anew so
