When I was a girl, it was bad manners to dunk a biscuit. Then I went abroad and found that Italian biscotti could scarcely be consumed in any other way. Back home, dunking a ginger nut seemed less criminal. Now I hear people using dunk and dump indifferently. Can this be right? After all, words of similar pronunciation, such as bought and brought, are often misused, one for the other, though the meaning is very different.

I’m not sure what word people used before dunk turned up, which was little more than 100 years ago. Did they say sod, seethe, soak? I was surprised to find that dunk is a borrowing from Pennsylvania German. This is often called Pennsylvania Dutch, but is a form of Palatine or southern German. So dunk derives from the same Indo-European origin that gave us Latin tingere, ‘to moisten’. Anyway, the earliest citation recorded in the OED is from the New York Tribune in 1917: ‘The first person we see dunking we shall apprehend as a German spy.’

US basketball players used dunk to describe thrusting the ball down into the basket ‘much like a cafeteria customer dunking a roll in coffee’ in the words of a New York Times journalist in 1936. It wasn’t until the late 1960s that slam dunk appeared. But now I find in English papers sentences like this in the Guardian: ‘Fossil fuel companies don’t need to dunk on nuclear power because many environmentalists have done it for them.’ I think basketball people do talk about dunking on opponents. But the usage spreading in Britain must derive from dump on. In 1967 the journal American Speech noticed the use of be dumped on with the meaning ‘to have one’s arguments continually defeated by a particular opponent’. It remarked that ‘the phrase evidently derives from dump shit on’. No doubt. There may be an element of genteelism in dunk, a reluctance to use a crude slang term. But it might simply be a cliché.