William Barnes, that remarkable Dorset schoolmaster turned rector, with his buckled shoes and knee-breeches, and eccentric ideas on the English language, wrote a poem on milking time: I come along where wide-horn’d cows, ’Ithin a nook, a-screen’d by boughs, Did stan’ an’ flip the white-hoop’d païls Wi’ heäiry tufts o’ swingèn taïls. The milking time
A heads-up is one of those slangy terms that are disreputable not from their semantic content but from the company they keep. It is a cliché in the mouths of dull management types. The meaning has changed in its short life. Currently it means ‘an informal briefing’: ‘I’ll just give you a heads-up on the
My husband tapped the notice on the wall of the train noisily with his stick. Such behaviour would be embarrassing, if I let it. ‘Ramping!’ he said. ‘Pure ramping.’ Ramping in my husband’s private language means ratcheting things up, usually in an assertive and hostile way to cow the opposition. As usual, we were the
In the Guardian Paul MacInnes last week suggested casting Russell Crowe as Derek Draper in the film McBride of Satan. The subject would of course be the filthy emails from Number 10, or Smeargate as the press has called the scandal. This means that two gates have been swinging open and shut simultaneously in the
Coley (not a fish but Veronica’s dog, which we were looking after) yelped, from surprise rather than pain, when my husband threw down the paper on the spot where the poor dog was taking his rest. ‘What’s he mean, “convince”?’ The culprit was a writer on the sports pages who had referred to Tom Hicks
What do you call today, the day before Easter? It is increasingly called Easter Saturday. That is what the BBC calls it in its programme guides. Robin Hood and Casualty await us as an alternative to the Easter Vigil. But Easter Monday is the Monday after Easter, and Easter Tuesday the day after that, and
My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very sheltered life.’ All I had done was to ask what cascading meant in the sense that the Local Government Association wanted to ban. My husband shook his head in a sorrowful, dismissive fashion and said: ‘You’ve lived a very
The youth in front of me in Starbucks said: ‘Can I get a tall skinny latte and a blueberry muffin?’ The girl behind the counter said: ‘No problem.’ A sign that the language has changed is when foreign phrase books give sentences that it would never occur to me to use. It has gone past
‘Quantitative easing?’ said my husband with an unpleasant iatrical chortle. ‘Reminds me of that bit in Humphrey Clinker.’ Tobias Smollett had trained as a surgeon, and he set up practice in Downing Street, surprising as it might sound, where his initial physical interventions proved no more financially rewarding than Gordon Brown’s decade of fiddling with
The country around Down House in Kent was nothing but ‘a congeries of muddy lanes’ according to Darwin’s eldest daughter Henrietta (1843-1927). I realised, shortly after reading this, that I had never uttered the word congeries and hardly knew how. Recourse to the OED alarmed me. Congeries, it stated, is a word of four syllables,
Contemplating the sad fate of Jade Goody, the reality television celebrity, Mr Gordon Brown remarked: ‘I think everybody is sad about the tragedy that has befallen Jane Goody.’ Mr Brown is unlikely to watch Big Brother or read vulgar newspapers, apart from cuttings gleaned for him by servants, so there is no reason why he
A bright rainbow on a wall caught my eye, and the building behind it turned out to belong to the Department for Children, Schools and Families. On its website, the department has a cheerful image of helicopters and cranes constructing a rainbow. When I add that the home page is headed by a picture of
While my husband was at a conference among the ancient surgical props of Padua, I took Veronica to Venice, to take her mind off the recession and Justin (who embodies it). At station buffets, the Italians have a funny way of making you pay before even ordering the goods (which would have precluded comment on
‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. ‘Isn’t there a Barack in the Bible?’ asked my husband, stirring briefly in his chair during a programme about the American president. That was more than I knew, but he is almost right.
I am not going to go on about the word Paki, though it has an interesting enough history. But when I used the word Spaniard recently, my husband asked: ‘Are you allowed to say that these days?’ I wondered, until I heard a Spaniard use it himself on Radio 4. So it must be all
When my husband can’t put his chair-side whisky glass on the old familiar mat, he gets quite agitated. It seems like Asperger’s disorder. My own irritation is more rationally provoked, I hope. A recent irritant was the foolish philology that I came across in the Daily Mail: ‘Politicians and the Catholic Church have warned that
When Veronica came to stay, over the New Year, we watched one of those late-night television programmes designed for drunk young people. It was a compilation of popular virals. (Viral has not yet made it into the Oxford English Dictionary as a noun, but was added in 2006 as a adjective that describes marketing by
One of my Christmas presents was a book by the agreeable Dominican, Fr Timothy Radcliffe, called Why Go to Church? On page 61 I found the assertion that ‘in Persian there is a word, nakhur, for a camel that will not give its milk unless its nostrils are tickled’. One of my Christmas presents was
What new word has dominated 2008? Nonebrity, perhaps? No, I have never used it either. It is a portmanteau term for a ‘celebrity nonentity’ and is one suggestion for words of the year proposed by Susie Dent, who appears on Countdown, a programme that anyone claiming incapacity benefit is obliged to watch on pain of
Dot Wordsworth wades through clichés Clichés gather on the tide and stick on the shingle of daily life like tarred bladder-wrack. A curious species of cliché sets a stereotyped pattern, into which words may be fitted to taste. A particularly annoying example, because it has pretensions to humour, is exemplified by: ‘The words door, horse