Mind your language
Rehash
My husband put one foot forward atan angle to the other and grasped his left hand with his right. ‘Occiditmiseros…
Turkey
Turkey has told the UN it wants tobe called Türkiye. Even when it is written in capitals, it would still…
Nice
‘That’s nice,’ said my husband, taking a Nice biscuit with his coffee. It was his little joke. The biscuit is…
Mind your language: Stations
In Kyiv they have voted to changethe names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes…
Sparks
‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before…
Chiltern Hundreds
I saw in last week’s Spectatorthat the tractor MP had applied for the stewardship of the Manor of Northstead. After…
Porn
Are we living in a new pornocracy? The first one spanned six decades of the 10th century, during which there…
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
