The Metaphor Map
‘What’s that?’ asked my husband, looking at my laptop. ‘Fibonacci fossilised?’ His question made no sense, but I saw what…
Salmagundi
‘It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words.…
Aesopian
To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. So deadbecomes unalive, and…
Gif
The man who invented gifs, Stephen Wilhite, has died, aged 74. Controversy survives him – over how to pronounce the…
Sib
I never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was…
Cirencester
‘Half! Half! Half!’ exclaimed my husband like a performing sea lion. Not that sea lions perform any more, but you…
Doomscrolling
In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the…
Embolden
The most emboldened man on earth must be Vladimir Putin. Everything seems to embolden him. Treating Russia as a pariah…
Idi na khuy
‘This will interest you,’ said my husband, looking up from the smeared screen of his telephone. For once he was…
Similar to
A strange crisis has befallen like. It had long been an object of obloquy and vilification in two functions. The…
Mystery
In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4…
Pikey
A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked…
Late capitalism
‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a…
Helpmeet
‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the…
Untenable
‘Nurse! The tenaculum!’ exclaimed my husband in the manner of James Robertson Justice playing the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. I’m…
Alumni
My husband is forever being sent magazines from his Oxford college inviting him to give it money. I suggest he…
Backlash
‘Lashings of ginger beer?’ asked my husband when I mentioned backlash. He thought the phrase came from Enid Blyton, though…
Word of the year
Cis
Based
My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of…
Omicron
‘There once was a curate of Kew, / Who kept a young cat in a pew,’ began my husband when…
Ramp down
Language change outdoes nonsense, just as misbehaviour outdoes satire. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice mentions to the Gnat that, where…
Uranus
I had thought there were two pronunciations of Uranus. My husband, still capable of distinguishing the anatomical from the planetary,…
Trash
‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage,…
Scallop
‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce…
Witch
‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary…
