Etymology
Must Harry and Meghan’s son really learn to ‘essentialise’ race?
‘Ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he’d made a joke. ‘Here’s one for you.’ He waved a page of…
The Lib Dems are wrong – it’s ‘ballocks’ to Brexit
I agree with James Joyce on the spelling ballocks. The Liberal Democrats made their MEPs wear T-shirts printed with ‘Bollocks…
Who really invented the word ‘posh’?
Two rules of grammar are certain: never split an infinitive and never end a sentence with a preposition. As for…
Watch out for ‘watch on’
In Casablanca, Mr and Mrs Leuchtag resolve to speak English to each other in preparation for emigration to America. Mr…
The barking world of ‘doggo lingo’
Doggy sounds childish. ‘How much is that doggie in the window?’ asks the popular song. (The song title used the…
How many words were coined by Thomas Browne?
‘How many words will you use today, first used by Thomas Browne in the 17th century?’ asked a trailer on…
The tangled roots of ‘artichoke’
My husband has been growling: ‘You cross-legged hartichoak.’ He tries it on obstructive pedestrians hypnotised by their mobile phones. He…
Just who – or what – are the men in suits?
After he invented the term young fogey (in The Spectator in 1984), the much lamented journalist Alan Watkins coined the…
Why is a book like a sarcophagus?
‘Is it like a packet of fags?’ asked my husband, less annoyingly than usual, but still in some confusion. I…
‘Bolection’ and how the language of architecture was moulded
A pleasant menagerie of words grazes in the field of architectural mouldings (the projecting or incised bands that serve useful…
Do MPs actually know what ‘fungible’ means?
‘No darling,’ I said, ‘nothing to do with mushrooms.’ My husband had responded to my exclaiming ‘What does she think…
A duck ducks and a swift is swift – so what about the lapwing?
Some birds seem inherently comical. I can’t help being amused by the duck taking its name from its habit of…
Did ‘haggis’ steal its name from thieving magpies?
Someone on The Kitchen Cabinet remarked that sambusa, as samosa is known in Somalia, came from Arabic. Perhaps it does,…
Epics are hard and dull – but today’s are ‘great’ and ‘nice’
Spoiler alert: in Henry Fielding’s play Tom Thumb, the hero is swallowed by a cow ‘of larger than the usual…
‘Shame’ is no longer one’s greatest fear, it’s offence culture’s default response
In 1663, just before Samuel Pepys visited the stables of the elegant Thomas Povey, where he found the walls were…
There’s a lot of interrogating going on – and not just by policemen
My husband sat in his usual chair, interrogating the contents of his whisky glass with his old, tired nose. In…
Illeism: the weird habit of talking about oneself in the third person
Someone has been putting about reports that Sajid Javid, the Home Secretary, refers to himself in the third person as…
Word of the week: ‘Granular’, a word used to suggest in-depth analysis
‘Just two sugars,’ said my husband as I passed him his tea. He is cutting down. I doubt he would…
Collins dictionary has got ‘gammon’ all wrong
In the annual dictionary wars to nominate words of the year, in the hope of attracting publicity, Collins has made…
At sixes and sevens about seven and six
Someone on the wireless was talking about marrying in the Liberty of Newgate before the Marriage Act of 1753, and…
Getting on – and falling off – the wagon
Radio 3 tries to distract listeners from music by posing little quizzes and hearing quirky details of history from a…
The polite origins of the police
My husband, who fancies himself as something of a classicist, was delighted to see the Turkish investigators of the Khashoggi…
Mind your language: Woman, women, womxn
When I say that it has given comfort to my husband, you can judge how foolish the Wellcome Institute was…
Was everyone a psychopath before 1909?
My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert…
Optics: stingy pub measures and politicians’ images
If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours…
