Language
Mistakes
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was…
Lumpen
A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of…
Out
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it…
No justice, no peace
The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011,…
In store
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into…
Believe
‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the…
Bare ruined choirs
I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading…
Self-whipping
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…
Letters
Some doctors write Sir: Professor Meirion Thomas (‘Dangerous medicine’, 17 August) may be an excellent surgeon but he is uninformed…
Hopefully
There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally…
Fracking
‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a frack,’ replied my husband unwittily when I asked how he’d feel if shale…
Arab Spring
Two hundred and forty-years ago next Tuesday, Thomas Gray was buried in his mother’s grave in Stoke Poges churchyard. In…
‘Correct names’
In a very rum letter to the Daily Telegraph, the Mother’s Union of all people joined with some other bodies…
Dreamliner
‘Planes don’t run off batteries,’ declared my husband, his finger unerringly on the pulse of technology as ever. I had…
