Dot Wordsworth

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

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

Even my husband is not old enough to recall the wheelchair archery competition at Stoke Mandeville on the day the 1948 Olympics opened in London. Such games came to be organised by the British Paraplegic Sports Society and so were called the Paralympic Games. It was a true portmanteau word, packing together paraplegic and Olympic.

There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally as ‘virtually, as good as’ — in other words, the reverse of its established meaning. Pedants were literally up in arms (in the new sense). The funniest thing was that the offending entry in the

Alexandra Shulman was on Desert Island Discs this summer and one choice was ‘Bongo Bong’. Its words tell a simple story: ‘Mama was queen of the mambo. / Papa was king of the Congo. / Deep down in the jungle / I start bangin’ my first bongo.’ Such were his talents that: ‘Every monkey’d like

‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack,’ replied my husband unwittily when I asked how he’d feel if shale gas was discovered at the bottom of our garden. But he did illustrate why the word has proved so good for campaigners. Someone at Balcombe had painted a sign saying: ‘Frack off.’ The word enables

Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In his ‘Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’ (published 1747), he had written of gales (presumably lesser ones, scarcely registering 8 on the Beaufort scale) that seemed ‘redolent of joy and youth’ and able

‘Planes don’t run off batteries,’ declared my husband, his finger unerringly on the pulse of technology as ever. I had merely mentioned that two Dreamliner aircraft had earlier this year seen fire and smoke emerging from their batteries. The batteries do not make them fly, but are used for lights and brakes when the engines

On 21 June 1785, James Woodforde was in Norwich and in the evening went to Bunns pleasure gardens, where ‘there was tolerable music, indifferent singing, some pretty transparencies and tolerable fire works’. These transparencies, lit from behind, depicted natural, mythological or allegorical subjects. Later, the word was transferred to magic lantern slides and in our

Swathe is a popular word at the moment, and ignorance of its meaning, spelling and pronunciation deters no one. It is in the papers every day (swathes of empty seats at Wimbledon), and I was interested to hear it on the wireless the other evening pronounced to rhyme with moth. Can that be right? The

Unaccountably, people have begun to pronounce women ‘women’, if you see what I mean. For centuries we’ve been pronouncing it ‘wimmin’. The new version has the first syllable rhyming with room and the second like men. I heard that Green MP Caroline Lucas say it when addressing a committee at Westminster. What makes it all

An Iranian on the wireless was complaining that disqualification of presidential candidates had left voters with ‘Hobson’s choice’. No doubt this idiom was learnt from a careful teacher, but I wondered how many English people would use it or even know its meaning. All Spectator readers do, of course. In the original Spectator for 10

‘Scatter ye rosebuds while ye may,’ sang my husband, reckless of words and tune, thereby offending the ghosts of Herrick, William Lawes and my good friend standing nonplussed on the hearthrug, who had been seeking a sympathetic ear. I really wonder if these outbursts of disinhibition indicate the onset of dementia. My friend had been

Last August President Barack Obama said that the use of chemical weapons in Syria would cross a red line. He repeated the phrase in December: red line. Why should the line be red and what happens if it is crossed? A simple, unhelpful answer is that the metaphor is taken from a safety gauge indicating