Language
Robust
‘Why do they keep saying they need Brazilians?’ asked my husband, coming up for air from a hazy mixture of…
War of words
How to win at Scrabble
Lounge pants
At the Austrian embassy in Naples, a German diplomatist asked the great beauty Madame de Ventadour if she had been…
Gifting
Boris Johnson, the Telegraphsuggested last week, is understood to have a personal interest in rewilding, ‘recently gifting his father beavers…
Alas
Boris Johnson looked unhappy, as well he might, standing at his indoor lectern last Saturday to announce the new lockdown:…
Cyber
An advertisement from GCHQ provoked angry comment because it seemed to suggest that some ballet dancers would be better working…
Adrenochrome
QAnon, the conspiracy theorist’s conspiracy theory, teaches that President Donald Trump is in secret warfare with a worldwide network of…
Are you guilty of ‘genteelism’?
‘Everyone’s been very kind to my husband and I,’ said someone behind me in a (spaced) queue. That is the…
The rise of the left-wing language police
This week, after many hours of questioning during the Senate hearings deciding her nomination, Judge Amy Coney Barrett used the…
Bonk
I take it personally that a word I practically saw being born is now unrecognised by people almost old enough…
What ho
In the First Act of Othello, just as things are getting interesting, the audience hears someone calling from offstage: ‘What…
Herd immunity
‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the…
Uptick
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone…
Scots
A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the…
Reticent
Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William…
the vs The
I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy,…
Hyperbole radicalism and the politics of exaggeration
‘All I want for Christmas is White genocide.’ So remarked George Ciccariello-Maher, then professor of politics and global studies at…
Overthink
Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just…
Living with
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
Might
‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was…
Cancel culture
The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there…
Deadweight
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with…
Love
It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of…
Swathe
At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the…
Ventriloquising
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
