Do civil servants need to be 'robust' or 'resilient'?
‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of…
The language of lounging around
At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been…
What’s the difference between ‘gifting’ and ‘giving’?
Boris Johnson, the Telegraphsuggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers…
Alas, ‘alas’ is losing its irony
Boris Johnson looked unhappy, as well he might, standing at his indoor lectern last Saturday to announce the new lockdown:…
The real problem with the Fatima advert
An advertisement from GCHQ provoked angry comment because it seemed to suggest that some ballet dancers would be better working…
The truth about Adrenochrome
QAnon, the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theory, teaches that President Donald Trump is in secret warfare with a worldwide network of…
Are you guilty of ‘genteelism’?
‘Everyone’s been very kind to my husband and I,’ said someone behind me in a (spaced) queue. That is the…
Let’s talk about sex: the brilliance of ‘bonk’
I take it personally that a word I practically saw being born is now unrecognised by people almost old enough…
Ask Jeeves: who first came out with ‘What ho’?
In the First Act of Othello, just as things are getting interesting, the audience hears someone calling from offstage: ‘What…
Where did ‘herd immunity’ come from?
‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the…
How a ‘back’ gets confused for a ‘bat’
My husband may not often be right, but he had some cogent criticism of the much-quoted words of Geoffrey Howe…
From Covid to football, the rise in ‘upticks’
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone…
The hijacking of the Scots language
A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the…
What’s the difference between ‘reticent’ and ‘reluctant’?
Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William…
Why ‘The’ Queen should not be capitalised
I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy,…
Did Taylor Swift really ‘overthink’ her album release?
Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just…
Why must we ‘live with’ coronavirus?
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
Might ‘may’ kill ‘might’?
‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was…
The Chancellor’s strange connection to cancel culture
The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there…
What has ‘deadweight’ got to do with Rishi Sunak’s magic money tree?
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with…
The increasingly irritating language of ‘love’
It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of…
Does ‘swathe’ rhyme with ‘bathe’ or ‘moth’?
At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the…
The inappropriate history of ‘ventriloquising’
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Was Priti Patel really ‘gaslighting’ MPs?
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Where did ‘taking a knee’ come from?
That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici…
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