The events of 1 May seem a long time ago, and so does their sequel, a so-called fightback by the Labour party. A press briefing last Sunday declared in a fine froth of mixed metaphors: ‘Gordon Brown will seek to kick-start Labour’s fightback today after its mauling at the polls.’ Fightback is a handy word
‘Twenty-five years ago,’ writes Mr Peter Gasson from Aylesbury, ‘policies were implemented; services were provided; changes were made or brought about; promises were fulfilled. Now they are uniformly delivered. I suppose the word has become so popular because it sounds emphatic.’ I know just what you mean, Mr Gasson, and so must we all, which
The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward. The last two words of my column last week were ‘in future’. The new annoying equivalent to this phrase is going forward. It is much used by management-brains and media-types. I told my
‘I wonder,’ writes Kim Parsons from Helston, or nearby, ‘if you have seen the new government-generated No Smoking signs which declare: “It is against the law to smoke in these premises.” Since when has on in this context become in?’’ I have seen the signs, because there is one at the church door in my
Dot Wordsworth on why locust may sometimes not mean ‘locust’. When the Bible says that John the Baptist ate locusts and wild honey, what does it mean by locusts? The question may be a chestnut, but I’ve found some jolly new material in seeking the answer. Jews are forbidden to eat winged insects that walk around,
Dot Wordsworth follows a hissing S with a nasal N. A musician, Alexander Faris, writes with a list of words beginning with hissing S and nasal N: snarl, snatch, sneak, sneer, sneeze, snicker, snigger, snip, snob, snore, snort, snot, snub, snuff and snout, all of them negative in connotation. He makes the point that they seem
I’ve found the origin of the football cliché ‘over the moon’. Or I thought I’d found it. In a speech written in 1857 for W.E. Gladstone by Lord Lyttelton, his brother-in-law, in a family dialect known as Glynnese, comes the following sentence: ‘The Dolly was over the moon with a magpie sandwich which she took
A medical friend of my husband’s came to me in some distress, having stumbled upon an advertisement in the New Yorker mentioning a ‘documentary débuting November 6’. He was amused by the careful use of an acute accent, puzzled by the word’s pronunciation and shocked by the brutal transformation of a French noun into an
My husband went to a medical conference, paid for by a pharmaceutical company, in Padua, where the university has been teaching medicine since the 14th century. So I went too and popped over to Venice, taking with me Mrs Ruskin. I mean Effie, who, poor thing, ran away from John Ruskin in 1854 after six
During the martyrdom by the press of Dr Rowan Williams, the Sun carried as its front-page splash headline ‘Bash the bishop’. I was surprised that a sentence of which the demotic meaning must have been familiar to the supposedly ill-educated readers of that paper was completely unknown to a brilliant and highly educated friend of
In my husband’s coat pocket when I took it to the cleaner’s I found a piece of paper that he had brought home from the dentist’s. It contained remarks about the word merry, for his dentist is a well-read man of letters. I should have written about this before Christmas, but it was still hidden
Dot Wordsworth on why Scots is no more than a dialect See if you can understand this: ‘We want tae mak siccar that as mony folk as can is able tae find oot aboot whit the Scottish Pairlament dis and whit wey it warks.’ It looks at first like one of those annoying novels that represent dialect
A reader, whose letter I have put somewhere safe, asks me whether I cannot blast the misuse of broker as a verb. Indeed I should love to blast away, if it would stay still in the water. The usage annoys me as a cliché. It is generally a deal or settlement that is brokered, according
It is not fair to blame the Americans for every element of speech that we don’t like, but there are a couple of pieces of syntax that have blown like some New World bacterium over our islands and have grown on the blank petri dishes of the English mind. (I was going to say ‘like
I caught my husband perusing a menswear catalogue. I don’t know where he got it. It can’t have been sent to him. It was the kind that leans towards nightshirts and Barathea blazers. The language used was extraordinary. The ‘striking set of gentleman’s pure silk-club ties’ — ones with thin stripes — would be, it
An advertisement for birdfood said: ‘To differentiate between the imported niger oilseed, used to feed wild birds, and thistle — as well as to eliminate any possibility of offensively mispronouncing the word “niger” — the Wild Bird Feeding Industry trademarked the name Nyjer in 1998.’ They might have done, if an industry can, but I’ve
Those who indulge in the ‘infuriating genteelism’ of saying Christmas lunch must be castigated, a reader from Leicester, Mr Clifford Dunkley, tells me. Castigate them, do. But they won’t stay castigated. Yet it must be Christmas dinner, for the phrase is fossilised, as much as ‘God save the Queen’ is fossilised in preserving the subjunctive.
Some years ago The Spectator was sued for libel. It was a silly case, but it went to court and, early on, the counsel for the defence explained that The Spectator had no connection with the periodical of that name founded by Addison and Steele in 1711. But in the summing up the judge said,
He’s the man who gave us The Meaning of Tingo, full of words that look funny in English (bum, Arabic for ‘owl’) or encapsulate an idea that it takes a sentence in English to explain. Very amusing it was too. My husband kept reading bits out while I was peeling the potatoes. Then doubts crept
Although a badger does not hibernate in the true sense of the word, it lies low for long periods in winter, just as my husband does, stirring only (in his case) to fetch the whisky bottle. He is, I have long suspected, a sort of shape-shifter, but turning neither into anything alarming like a werewolf