‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t want to know what you mean by that,’ I replied, hoping not to encourage him. ‘Being challenging,’ he said, ignoring my implied request. We had been discussing a report in the Daily Telegraph about the
The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011, sounded more like a threat than a prediction. No one knows the originator of the slogan, but that is not surprising. It is a commonplace of the struggle. In 2011, for example, a pair of
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into a store.’ But in my experience, lottery tickets are sold mostly in shops, along with confectionery and tobacco. You can, it is true, get them in Sainsbury’s, but I wouldn’t call that a store either,
If Manchester University is to be believed, last year saw a creeping advance of effete southern language into the gritty north. Roll, for example, is more widely accepted as the name of a little loaf of bread. Certainly I remember 40 years ago asking in a Manchester baker’s for some rolls. The shop assistant genuinely
The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed pantomimes. But as far as I can make out, Aladdin, or, The Wonderful Scamp, in which the widow, played by James Rogers, made her entrance, was not a Christmas pantomime but a burlesque, for which the
Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I recognised the chain reaction from somewhere else. It was from Start the Week on Radio 4, where somebody spoke of pushing back. Before the programme was over, everyone seemed to say push back. They applied
‘Here,’ said my husband, chucking a folded-back copy of the Daily Telegraph to me, ‘this’ll interest you.’ For once he was right. It was a reader’s letter. ‘My distress at the Paul Flowers debacle (I am a Methodist) has been increased by the BBC and others referring to “the Reverend Flowers”,’ wrote Lesley Barnes of
Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other eccentricities) by Rosemary Hannah, I came across this seasonal horror for Stir Up Sunday. In the Greek islands that Bute toured, they laid out grapes to dry as currants. ‘The beds these currants are laid
‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the shop, but it seems rather distant to me, either verbally or associatively (the shops, being lit by fluorescent tubes, are staring rather than sparkly). The popular name is Marks and Sparks, but merely as a
I saw an advertisement for Active Gold Collagen, and I realised I didn’t know what collagen means. My husband just laughed and said, ‘Horse hides,’ but this seemed unfair since the small print on the website of Boots (which sells it) said: ‘Does not contain porcine, bovine or other animal sources.’ I thought that odd,
‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, sounding like George V commenting on an Impressionist painting. ‘Someone in the Telegraph says that the French shouldn’t borrow English words.’ Once I had managed to wrest the paper from his dog-in-the-manger grasp, I found it didn’t quite say that, but rather that foreigners ought not to plaster
‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly puzzling tangle of disinformation. My husband had just been reading about the Harris Academy in Upper Norwood (south London), which has banned its pupils (or students as they all seem to have become) from using
The BBC is to broadcast what is now referred to as the ‘C-word’ in a drama about Dylan Thomas. ‘It was in an actual letter by Dylan Thomas,’ the screenwriter Andrew Davies said at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, ‘and the word was being used in a tender and affectionate way. We won that battle.’ No
In his New Year message for 1940, Joseph Goebbels complained that the ‘warmongering cliques in London’ hated the German people because they were ‘hard-working [arbeitsam] and intelligent’. I certainly found it odd that the Conservatives in their party conference should use ‘hardworking’ as their catchphrase. But it was odd not because of Dr Goebbels, but
I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading at all. A paragraph of his in Seven Types of Ambiguity, concerning one line in Sonnet 73 by Shakespeare, is called a great example of literary criticism. In the London Review of Books, Jonathan Raban
‘It’s not right, is it?’ said Veronica, pointing to a poster for H&M women’s blazers at £17.I agreed. But she meant it was not right to sell clothes for so little,if it required people abroad to work for such low wages. I meant that it was not right to call the garment a blazer. I
Was it sexual in reference or wasn’t it? According to the BBC radio news, after Godfrey Bloom, elected as a Ukip MEP, had said that all we women who didn’t clean behind the fridge were ‘sluts’, he justified himself by saying he had used the word in the ‘old-fashioned’ sense. I’m not sure history is
One man’s grammatical nicety is another man’s grotesque solecism, I thought, as I perused a report in the Gulf News, where gold prices and prayer times jostle at the masthead. It concerned standards of grammar at schools in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. ‘Our students should be trained on getting the message across,’ said a
Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a large screen’, a portmanteau word, from phone and tablet) or jorts (‘jean shorts’, another portmanteau word). I can’t see much future in them, nor could I in squee, until I had a conversation with Veronica.
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had held that Tory backbenchers were now self-whipping. When she aired this opinion on Radio 4, Michael White of the Guardian did a Frankie Howerd-style, ‘Ooh, Missus!’ routine. Surprisingly, self-whipping is no neologism. The satirical Nonconformist