Language
Gaslight
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
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…
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…
Behaviours
‘Somebody loves me,’ said my husband, waving a copy of The Spectator above his head as though pursued by wasps.…
Connectivity
Facebook recently told readers of the Sun that satellites could ‘bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is…
Step back
At this time of year in Colorado the crime of puffing is widespread. It is so cold that in the…
A remarkable, common skill
Probably most of the world is bilingual, or more than bilingual. It is common in many countries to speak a…
A young Rwandan scholar left a profound impression on me
In the Rwandan Genocide Memorial gift shop I bought a handy Kinyarwanda–Kiswahili–English phrase book. The tipping point in the decision…
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…
What exactly is a narwhal?
A point that many people mentioned amid the horror and heroism of the attack at London Bridge was the enterprising…
Where did ‘decuman’ come from?
‘What made you chase that hare?’ asked my husband with rare geniality. John Ruskin was to blame. He asked James…
From Pliny to poetry: the history of ‘ictus’ and ‘ductus’
‘I know the difference between ictal and icteric,’ said my husband proudly, reminding me of Tweedledum in Through the Looking-Glass.…
What’s the different between ‘while’ and ‘whilst’?
‘Why is whilst only ever used in letters?’ asked my husband, casting aside an argumentative letter from his sister written…
Letters: What would be the point of a second referendum?
Another referendum? Sir: Matthew Parris’s article ‘What question should a second referendum ask?’ (26 October) occasioned a wry smile from me…
An ‘I’ for a ‘my’: why we’re terrified of getting our grammar wrong
Jonathan Agnew recently described off-the-record interviews as those where you agree that it’s ‘between you and I’. Last month, Jess…
Trump uses provocative terms because he wants to provoke
We should be bored by now — perhaps we are. Certainly, the anger against Donald Trump’s tweets isn’t quite as…
