I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my husband was off on some drug-sponsored jamboree in Tallinn) the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation (£14.99) — a work of the BBC Pronunciation Unit — that someone had given me for my birthday. I was reading in bed (quietly for a change, since my
The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but there is now a vogue for using the inflected genitive with inanimate objects. The songs did not go, ‘Keep right on to the road’s end’ or ‘The railroad runs through the house’s middle’, but
After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting Salman Rushdie, Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Saanei chipped in on Sky News: ‘When your Queen awards Salman Rushdie and turns him into a knight, what do you expect? This is a blasphemy.’ After al-Qa’eda’s no. 2 said that Britain would be attacked for knighting
‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Darling,’ I asked, ‘In your day did they call them specialities or specialties?’ ‘Do you know,’ replied my husband, ‘I can’t remember.’ So that’s his last useful function gone. I was asking because, in a discussion of hospital posts for young doctors,
‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. ‘What’s this?’ exclaimed my husband as we came round the corner between the Foreign Office and the Treasury on the edge of St James’s Park. It was the memorial to
The poet Hugo Williams, in an entertaining ramble around changes in language in the TLS the other day, noted that curate’s egg is now widely used to mean ‘a mixed blessing’, which is far from the intention of its originator, the cartoonist George Du Maurier (Punch, 9 November 1895). Du Maurier, that grand old bohemian,
I heard someone on the wireless, in talking about the Freedom of Information Act, refer to the ‘information-requesting community’, as if they all lived together and had much in common. You could, though, legitimately refer to me as a member of the annoyed community. I do have something in common with thousands of readers and
We have enjoyed, or not, a certain amount of hoo-ha about whether Scotland should be independent. But independent from what? What is this country called? In 1604 James VI of Scotland was proclaimed ‘King of Great Britain’, as well as of France and Ireland. The geographical term ‘Great Britain’ thereupon assumed a political unity, although
Whoever said, ‘Don’t give me problems, give me solutions’, was asking for it. Everyone seems to be claiming solutions now. I went past a children’s nursery the other day with a sign on the wall reading: Bright Horizons Family Solutions. ‘Bright Horizons Family Solutions,’ the company tells the world, ‘is the nation’s leading provider of
The curious case of the cup has been gripping traditionally minded Catholics for a few years now. I mention the question because a secret text of the new translation of the Mass has been bouncing about the internet for a few weeks now. People who seldom go to church often get more annoyed about the
The unbeatable duo of Judas Iscariot and Jeffrey Archer have teamed up to bring the world The Gospel According to Judas, published this week at a mere £9.99. The scholastic midwife to this monstrous birth is a previously respectable biblical professor called Francis J. Moloney. He must have copied out the bits from the gospels
I wonder how much of our hatred of certain words and phrases is really a hatred of people. My husband, no mean hater, is given to self-defeating outbursts in response to some triggers. I’ve known him slam down the telephone when the person at the other end says, ‘Bear with me,’ even though he has
I was baffled when I heard last month that British troops in Iraq would be ‘drawn down’. Byron’s Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold, but he didn’t need to be drawn down. To me, as to George Herbert, being drawn down is the sort of thing we worry we might do to
If 2006 was the year of issues, when the word problem gave way to ‘issues around’ things, then 2007 looks as if it will be the year of challenge. Dreary management-speak types have long invited workers to see negative problems as positive challenges. All that this has meant is that the new word challenge has
A reader wrote in to share his triumph at thwarting an attempt by an organisation to which he belongs to change the title ‘chairman’ to ‘chair’. The current chairman happens to be a woman. ‘It is ridiculous,’ our reader writes, ‘what person has four legs and is made of wood? The syllable man does not
Every now and then, I come across a way of using language that is so divergent from the norm that I wonder how anyone can have adopted it. This seems to have happened to spectrum. Ofcom declared in 2005, ‘One of Ofcom’s primary statutory duties is to ensure the optimal use of the radio spectrum
Casket looks as if it will be an early victor in 2007 as a triumphant Americanism. In 2006 it was train station. A letter to the Daily Telegraph noted that even English Heritage had entitled a snowy scene of a Victorian railway station on its website as ‘Train Station’. Even before the New Year, casket
With the intention of making us healthy they sell us meat now with no fat. What is the point? If you cook it, it shrivels into dry toughness. During the period we have just survived, when cooking large birds is customary, I was amused to come across this sentence from Hannah Glasse (1747): ‘When I
Conversation is an art in which we all prefer to think we excel, and Stephen Miller has written a whole book on the subject (Conversation, Yale, £15), which turns out to be mostly about Samuel Johnson and David Hume, who never did meet and talk. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu comes into it too, and Mr
A word hound from Leeds has sent me a basketful of unconsidered truffles. ‘Are you aware of the increasing use of the word über,’ asks Mr Donald Adams, ‘with or without the umlaut which it should have in German?’ Well, I had come across it, but I had not quite realised what an infestation it