Does it matter when we lose battles as language changes? In Oxford the other day, I saw another piece of evidence that in the High Street has changed to on the High Street. A newsagent’s near Teddy Hall has for some time been called Honey’s of the High. It is now usually called Honey’s on
Dot Wordswoth on pens and puns ‘Why,’ asked my husband, looking up from his book, ‘is Joseph Gillott a very bad man?’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Because,’ he replied, as if I had acknowledged defeat, ‘he wishes to accustom the public to steel pens and then tries to persuade them that they do write.’ By the
Queens’ College, Cambridge or Queens’ College, Cambridge I was interested by a note on the website of Queens’ College, Cambridge, because the use of the apostrophe in English is governed by such simple rules that it is hard to see how there can be much dispute about it. The college says that everyone is told
Dot Wordsworth gives it her best shot I hardly wish to interpose my body between Anthony Horowitz and Simon Hoggart, even though the former invoked me. He declared (Letters, 10 May) that he is puzzled by Mr Hoggart’s remark in his television column that ‘in 1945 nobody ever said, “I’ll give it my best shot”,’ as
‘What’s so super about these superdelegates?’ asked my husband from the other room, while I was washing the Jersey Royals. I do not intend trying to explain the American political system here. These delegates are not necessarily super at all. I wonder what connections superdelegates suggests in the American mind. If it suggests superman, the
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