I was trying the other day to find out who first came up with the term moral equivalence, and so I turned to Twentieth Century Words, edited by John Ayto (Oxford). He doesn’t list it, though he has Moral Rearmament (1938) and Moral Majority (1979). Dr Ayto arranges his words by decade, and gives the
Mr Peter Bonnett from Downham Market, Norfolk, appeals to me as ‘The Spectator’s custodian of language’. God forbid! I have troubles enough! Mr Bonnett is worried about the prevalent confusion between deprecate and depreciate, and I had just written down my deprecatory exclamations when what should I come across in the fat OED but a
A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he’d seen a programme dated 1862 for an ‘Enthronization’
‘What do you mean, “gapering”?’ asked my husband during a pause from shouting at the television. ‘Is it like capering?’ He wasn’t following, because he had been busy excoriating a television reporter for invoking global warming on the local news. (Local news means uninteresting things that have happened near you. It is even worse in
Veronica tells me she is ‘against the war’. At least she hasn’t joined up for the Baath party. While she was making a placard or two on the kitchen table, I have been puzzling over a letter from an anaesthetist. But before that, may I mention a couple more figures of speech that the war
I’ve just been reading with pleasure a facsimile of a little book called Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World, by Johannes Amos Comenius, as published in London in 1672. Dear old Comenius (1592-1670), a Bohemian by origin, sought a universal sharing of knowledge, hoping that ‘scarecrows may be taken away out of wisdoms Gardens’. His
Dr C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as ‘Caucasian’. She wondered what connection she was supposed to have with a mountain range. She might well. We are all familiar
The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, ‘If I’d have known that…’. At first he wondered if I’d here stood for ‘I would/should’ or ‘I had’. Then he heard
Mind your language In They Came to Baghdad, a topical-sounding novel by Agatha Christie, the heroine, Victoria Jones, finds ‘all was above board, mild as milk and water…. Various dark-skinned young men made tentative love to her.’ Or so I am told by Mr Bruce Harkness from Kent, Ohio. He also has, on occasion, to
I am excited by a letter from Kensington, but before that let me notice a fearful symmetry between Martin Bashir’s interview with Michael Jackson and the advertisements that punctuated it. These were intended to appeal to young people. One, for the Disney rehash of Treasure Island called Treasure Planet, has the animated Jim Hawkins saying,
‘Are you interested in penises, darling?’ I asked my husband. ‘Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?’ The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by
I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer
The vogue word of the year so far is extreme. It has been around for centuries, deriving from the Latin superlative extremus, ‘outermost’. But for the English word recently a flavour of danger and convention-breaking has developed. ‘Extreme’ sports are those like mountaineering or paragliding that offer physical risks. Now extreme is taking on a
‘These yours?’ asked my husband with his back to me, his head ostrichised in a cardboard box and a sheaf of envelopes in his upraised hand. They were, indeed, a bundle of letters from 1999 caught up in his circulars from cricket clubs and rubbish from pharmaceutical companies. He was tidying up four years late.
I lapped up Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas. In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as
People seem to lose the use of their native wit when they consider the origins of words. That idiot’s sorting office, the Internet, has a well-intentioned site (at io.com/gibbonsb/words.words.words.html) edited by Gibbons Burke that discusses nautical terms used by Patrick O’Brian, who, Mr Burke remarks, uses expressions ‘in a way that allows the reader to
‘Is having personal demons like having a personal trainer?’ asked my husband, casting aside a newspaper magazine to the peril of his glass of whisky. (It survived, briefly.) He might well ask, for these ‘personal demons’ have been having quite an outing in the newspapers recently. Anne Diamond, according to a so-called friend quoted in
I was last in Zaragoza when my husband was bribed by a drugs company to make the sacrifice of attending a conference in a luxury hotel. I was on my own. It was hot and dusty, the dustier for the demolition of a neighbourhood of a seedy but engaging character around ‘El Tubo’ (east of
Mr Iain Duncan Smith, with his calm, Japanese face, introduced an American note into his ‘unite or die’ speech last week. He quoted Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), or almost did, when he said, ‘We must hang together or we shall hang apart.’ People were uncharacteristically kind in not mentioning that the joke does not work like
‘That’s telling ’em,’ said my husband, rubbing his hands. He is something of a connoisseur of angular language and enjoyed an inscription in an old book I showed him. It was in Ninety-six Sermons by Lancelot Andrewes, the fifth edition, of 1661. On the fly-leaf it says, ‘R. Bathe Semper eadem. This booke is not