‘How many letters?’ asked my husband, as though it were a crossword we were doing together. ‘Five,’ I replied. ‘Begins in b, ends in h.’ The clue, according to the Daily Telegraph, was that the head of Norfolk county council had told opponents not to ‘b—h and moan’. ‘Belch?’ asked my husband optimistically, adding at
“They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,” said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. Britain’s Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer was used instead. “Language has moved on and
“Why doesn’t anyone ever do what you ask them to?” inquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the question, I should have thought. He was referring specifically to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: “I am reaching out to you.”
“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837)
Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: “I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be
“‘I am not screwed,’ replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. ‘Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.’ So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.” By screwed he meant “drunk” of course. The Caterpillar is the nickname of a pupil in The Hill (1905) by Horace Annesley Vachell about
I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer
The vogue word of the year so far is extreme. It has been around for centuries, deriving from the Latin superlative extremus, ‘outermost’. But for the English word recently a flavour of danger and convention-breaking has developed. ‘Extreme’ sports are those like mountaineering or paragliding that offer physical risks. Now extreme is taking on a
I lapped up Liza Picard’s Dr Johnson’s London on holiday, and now someone (not my husband) has given me her Restoration London for Christmas. In a small section on the words used in the Restoration period, she brings in two expressions that she has come across in contemporary books, not in secondary sources such as
‘Is having personal demons like having a personal trainer?’ asked my husband, casting aside a newspaper magazine to the peril of his glass of whisky. (It survived, briefly.) He might well ask, for these ‘personal demons’ have been having quite an outing in the newspapers recently. Anne Diamond, according to a so-called friend quoted in