Mind your language
Big changes in little words
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it…
Challenging 'challenging'
‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t…
Where did ‘No justice, no peace’ come from?
The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011,…
Dot Wordsworth: How online shopping is changing English
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into…
Dot Wordsworth: Lost in England? Ask for a bread roll
If Manchester University is to be believed, last year saw a creeping advance of effete southern language into the gritty…
Why twerking sounds so stupid
The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed…
Dot Wordsworth: Jostling aggressively with 'selfie' and 'twerk', we have 'push back'
Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I…
Dot Wordsworth: Don't call him Revd Flowers!
‘Here,’ said my husband, chucking a folded-back copy of the Daily Telegraph to me, ‘this’ll interest you.’ For once he…
Aunt
Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other…
Dot Wordsworth: Is M&S really 'Magic & Sparkle'?
‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the…
Collagen
I saw an advertisement for Active Gold Collagen, and I realised I didn’t know what collagen means. My husband just…
The week in words: 'Pull & Bear' is all style, no substance
‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, sounding like George V commenting on an Impressionist painting. ‘Someone in the Telegraph…
The bare-brained youth of south London
‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly…
Word of the Week: Does it matter who uses the N-word?
The BBC is to broadcast what is now referred to as the ‘C-word’ in a drama about Dylan Thomas. ‘It…
The week in words: When politicians use 'hard-working'
In his New Year message for 1940, Joseph Goebbels complained that the ‘warmongering cliques in London’ hated the German people…
Dot Wordsworth's week in words: Did William Empson have the first clue what 'bare ruined choirs' meant?
I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading…
Word of the Week: If your jacket isn't blazing, don't call it a 'blazer'
‘It’s not right, is it?’ said Veronica, pointing to a poster for H&M women’s blazers at £17.I agreed. But she…
Capital letters
One man’s grammatical nicety is another man’s grotesque solecism, I thought, as I perused a report in the Gulf News,…
Mind your language: the dark side of squee
Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a…
Dot Wordsworth: We've been self-whipping since 1672
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…
Vikings
‘What’s he saying now?’ asked my husband in a provoking manner when an actor read out a bit of the…
After ‘literally’, is it time to start a Neighbourhood Watch for the OED?
There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally…
Bongo
Alexandra Shulman was on Desert Island Discs this summer and one choice was ‘Bongo Bong’. Its words tell a simple…
Mind your language: Frack vs frag
‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack,’ replied my husband unwittily when I asked how he’d feel if shale…
Mind your language: The springs before the Arab Spring
Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In…
