Mind your language
Gaslight
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Take the knee
That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici…
Hashtag
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls…
Scaffold
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the…
Spick and span
I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband…
Floor
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…
Pasture
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…
Odd
‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank…
Furlough
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to…
Stir crazy
My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard…
Ramp up
My husband is fond of an old pub in Northumberland called the Red Lion, once a drovers’ inn, it says.…
At home
My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He…
Barley
‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood…
The Green Book
I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like…
Behaviours
‘Somebody loves me,’ said my husband, waving a copy of The Spectator above his head as though pursued by wasps.…
Elbow
Before the Covid-19 scare I never thought that one particular Spanish proverb would come in useful. It goes: ‘Los ojos…
Connectivity
Facebook recently told readers of the Sun that satellites could ‘bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is…
At pace
In Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, a young dog called Ellis Carter takes a girl for a drive…
In shock
Billie Eilish, who has just won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the next Bond film. ‘James…
Step back
At this time of year in Colorado the crime of puffing is widespread. It is so cold that in the…
Hyphenated names
When Francis Hurt inherited the Renishaw estate in 1777, he changed his surname to Sitwell. His eight-year-old son and heir…
Pansexuality has been around longer than you think
When an MP announced she was pansexual I didn’t know what she meant. Indeed I didn’t know what she could…
What is a ‘tergiversation’?
Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It…
What were the words that defined 2019?
‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response…
Where did ‘aconite’ spring from?
‘What,’ asked my husband teasingly, by way of an early Christmas game, ‘connects wolf’s-bane with Woolwich Arsenal?’ It took me…
