Language
Ask Jeeves: who first came out with ‘What ho’?
In the First Act of Othello, just as things are getting interesting, the audience hears someone calling from offstage: ‘What…
Where did ‘herd immunity’ come from?
‘It was the pyres,’ said my husband. He meant the effect of television pictures of cattle, hooves silhouetted against the…
From Covid to football, the rise in ‘upticks’
Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone…
The hijacking of the Scots language
A teenager in North Carolina has been revealed as the creator of a fifth or even a half of the…
What’s the difference between ‘reticent’ and ‘reluctant’?
Anna Massey had no dramatic training before appearing on stage in 1955 aged 17 in The Reluctant Debutante by William…
Why ‘The’ Queen should not be capitalised
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…
Did Taylor Swift really ‘overthink’ her album release?
Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just…
Why must we ‘live with’ coronavirus?
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
Might ‘may’ kill ‘might’?
‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was…
The Chancellor’s strange connection to cancel culture
The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there…
What has ‘deadweight’ got to do with Rishi Sunak’s magic money tree?
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with…
The increasingly irritating language of ‘love’
It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of…
Does ‘swathe’ rhyme with ‘bathe’ or ‘moth’?
At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the…
The inappropriate history of ‘ventriloquising’
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Was Priti Patel really ‘gaslighting’ MPs?
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
The French have made a hash of the hashtag
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls…
What’s the difference between ‘scaffold’ and ‘scaffolding’?
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the…
The link between spick and span, spanking and spoon
I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband…
Do we wrestle coronavirus to the floor – or the ground?
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…
From milk to prayer: the curious connections of ‘pasture’
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…
How ‘odd’ became normal
‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank…
How ‘furlough’ became mainstream
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to…
What does it mean to go ‘stir crazy’?
My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard…
Why my husband is throwing socks at the TV during the Covid-19 crisis
My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He…
