‘Is this legacy beetroot?’ asked my husband, poking a yellowish slice on his plate in a restaurant. He meant heritage beetroot, a ludicrous enough phrase. But legacy has been extending the hedges round its semantic field, so his question may sound normal in a few years’ time.

A report in the Telegraph the other day referred to apprentice stonemasons as entering a legacy trade. This edges into the territory of heritage. Historic England is the government’s statutory adviser on the landscape and built heritage. From 1984 to 2015 it operated as English Heritage. But English Heritage remains as a charity that looks after national monuments, such as Stonehenge. Perhaps Historic England or English Heritage will one day change its name to Legacy England.

Legacy as an adjective describing something surviving from a previous era has been in use only since the end of the 20th century. In 1998, the Telegraph referred to the old currencies such as the franc as legacy currencies. Rather differently, the Guardian is quoted in the OED calling wolves an example of a legacy species.

Certainly an inheritance may be good or bad. ‘Oh dear, unhappy Babe! Must I bequeath thee only a sad Inheritance of Woe?’ exclaims Phaedra in a translation by Edmund Smith of Racine’s tragedy. It ran in a handful of performances from 1707 until about 1785. Smith had been sent down from Christ Church and avenged himself with a satire on Dean Aldrich of which Samuel Johnson remembered a ‘single line too gross to be repeated’. Its author died after eating and drinking too much and prescribing himself a purge that ended his life at 38, leaving little enough by way of legacy. Theresa May wanted to set things in law as her legacy, such as the obligation to cut carbon emissions to net zero by 2050. That, some found, was like a cod fillet left hidden in the airing cupboard. Elon Musk views legacies as leftovers. On 18 March he tweeted on X: ‘With rare exception, almost the entire legacy media industry is a politically far left cheering squad.’