Dot Wordsworth

Hurrying for the Underground, I thought I saw a poster for a film by Madonna called Wee. It seemed a strange title even for her, and indeed the film turns out to be called W./E., the initials of Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII. Nevertheless, wee has suddenly become a frequent word in public utterances. On

Many middle-class parents would (it is said) prefer to hear their little children say fuck than toilet. A similar system of class shibboleths governs the choice of children’s name. The most popular in 2011, it turns out, was Harry. It is unexceptionable, being of ancient royal lineage (‘Cry God for Harry…’), and, like Jack, uniting

The word of the year is across. Earlier this month someone on the radio spoke of hospital experiences ‘across the patient journey’. The meaning was ‘throughout’. It is universality that across is now felt to express. A widely favoured, seldom understood figure of speech is across the piece. Proof of the obscurity of its application,

A national hobby during the screening of Downton Abbey was to spot supposed anachronisms in behaviour and language. It drove poor Lord Fellowes into a frenzy. When last week I read Death Comes to Pemberley, P.D. James’s whodunnit set in the world of Pride and Prejudice, I soon found myself tempted to play the Downton

‘Because I said so’ is the most common phrase mothers find themselves using to their children that their own mothers used to them, according to a deeply unscientific survey undertaken by a baby-outfitters. Other such phrases included: ‘Take your coat off or you won’t feel the benefit’; ‘Wait and see’; and ‘Were you born in

I feel a jarring sensation to hear business as usual employed in a strange sense. It is frequently used at the moment to suggest that bankers and other wicked people have gone back to their greedy ways. The dog has returned to his vomit. Although I am not old enough to remember the war, I

 ‘Technocrats?’ said my husband, turning his face from the television and the latest news from Italy, looking at me for a change, and putting his whisky glass down in puzzlement. ‘Aren’t those the chaps who helped Franco out?’ ‘I don’t think they can be exactly the same people still, darling,’ I replied soothingly. But he

Some man in the Daily Telegraph was going on about English not being only for the English. Dr Mario Saraceni, the man in question, an academic at the University of Portsmouth, goes further. He says: ‘It’s important the psychological umbilical cord linking English to its arbitrary centre in England is cut.’ But why should it

Of course I live in the past — where better? But I found out this week exactly how many years in the past. The answer is six, which seems to me indecently like futurism. The occasion for my discovery was hearing in a politics programme that there were a harmful number of spads in government.

A baffling news report appeared last week in the newspaper that I read while I was waiting for my husband to have his hair cut — long enough considering how little he still has. ‘Traditional British words are dying out, because text speak has become so popular, research has found,’ said the report. Right, texters

To be told that onycha is made of opercula is not always helpful. ‘Take unto thee sweete spices, Stacte, and Onicha, and Galbanum,’ says the Bible (Exodus, xxx 34). The words are poetic, as referring to something oriental that we don’t know from everyday life. Perhaps that is why Edith Sitwell used onycha towards the

If I had neglected to brush my hair, my grandmother would say that I looked like a birch-broom in a fit. Untidy clothing made me look as though I had been pulled through a hedge backwards. If I appeared unhappy she would say that I had a face like a wet week. These similes, exaggerated

‘A gibbous moon,’ my husband observed the other night, as indeed the moon must be for almost half the time. But when he asked me where the word came from, I could hardly say. That is because, as a girl, I was denied a proper classical education. I did know where to find out, though,

Most people think polar bears attractive animals, at least when not sharing space with one. Yet, ‘polar bears are, unquestionably, the world’s largest land predator,’ a popular magazine remarks. It’s the way some animals are. Beasts of prey are called predators by extension. The Latin praedator was a ‘plunderer, pillager, robber’. But words don’t mean

When the friends of John Wycliffe set about translating the Bible, about 650 years ago, they came to the bit in St Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians about charity, ‘which endureth all things’, and chose to make their own translation: ‘susteyneth alle thingis’. The Latin word it translated was sustinet and the original Greek

Eponymous should be an unusual word, like haplology or apotropaic, used in a narrow semantic field. Yet it is all over the place, in the press and on the lips of media talkers. Properly, it applies to someone who gives his name to anything, especially, the OED notes, ‘the mythical personages from whose names the

Someone was commenting in the paper about Catholics adopting an extra syllable in the translation of the Mass from this month by saying, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ instead of ‘Glory to you, Lord’. It does sound more polite. O with the vocative sounds archaic now. I seldom say, ‘O my husband.’ But O still

‘Does it have fart ?’ asked my husband, when he saw the centenary facsimile of The Concise Oxford Dictionary (£20). His question reminded me of the woman who looked for rude words in Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and then congratulated him on omitting them. In 1911, when H.W. Fowler and his brother F.G. Fowler (who was to

Libyan rebels called Colonel Gaddafi a ‘rat’ before he lost power — not because he was in a hole, but just as an all-purpose insult. And he had called them rats too in a similar spirit. Yet the only Arabist I have been able to catch told me that rat is not a usual animal