Mind your language

‘That’s not a facepalm,’ said my husband. ‘It’s a headslap.’ He proved the point by making contact between the flat of his hand and his noble brow, producing a percussive sound. Then he covered his eyes with outstretched fingers and said: ‘That’s a facepalm.’ He was right to make a semantic distinction between these two non-verbal gestures. The headslap signifies usually comic frustration at another’s stupidity. The facepalm conveys embarrassment. The names are recent. Facepalm is not found earlier than 1996 in the Oxford English Dictionary. Those who like to employ emojis (which I do not) will find one for the job. The headslap has not yet been noticed by the OED.

‘Italians are not inventing any new words,’ the head of the Italian language academy told the Telegraph. ‘They’re not creating anything. They take everything from English.’ Professor Paolo D’Achille is the head of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583. Crusca means ‘bran’, which is what the academy wants to keep out of the fine flour of Italian. English is of course bran. There was a big hoo-ha in Italy a decade ago when a recruiting poster appealed to young people: ‘Be cool and join the navy.’ I suppose there’d be a bigger hoo-ha in Britain if a recruiting poster was printed in German. These things have their degrees of unacceptability.

When Labour blocked Andy Burnham from standing as its candidate last time around, Douglas Alexander, the Scottish Secretary, rejoiced at avoiding ‘three months of psychodrama – who’s up, who’s down, who’s getting on with who…’ But as Gareth Roberts remarked in The Spectator’s Coffee House, ‘I’m not quite sure what the difference is between psychodrama and good old-fashioned plain original-flavour drama.’ Indeed, Mr Alexander’s characterisation of psychodrama sounds like the essential lineaments of pure politics: ‘Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out,’ as King Lear puts it. King Lear itself might be a classic psychodrama, if madness is the defining feature.

‘Here you are. This is a funny one. It would suit you,’ said my husband unkindly, showing me online a picture of a tight-skinned model wearing an XS size barn-style ‘Balmoral’ cotton jacket made by Helsa, with faux-fur collar and cuffs and a cinched-in waist: £419. He found the idea of me with a cinched waist irresistibly funny. For another £80 I could have bought a Balmoral 1700mm Double Ended Roll Top Bath with White Claw & Ball Feet, reduced from £899. Balmoral seems to figure frequently in the nomenclature of sanitary ware, along with Sandringham, Windsor, Richmond, Clarence (butt of Malmsey), Carlton (Prince Regent) and Worsley (the late Duchess of Kent), as though past members of the royal family had sanctified them with their bottoms.

‘As the door turneth upon his hinges,’ says the Book of Proverbs, ‘so doth the slothful upon his bed.’ But today nothing turns, neither the door, nor the slothful, nor his ox, nor his ass. It pivots. I read in the paper that Meg O’Neill, the new CEO of BP is ‘expected to double-down on the pivot back towards oil and gas’. Doubling down on a pivot must take some gymnastic skill. Saudi Arabia meanwhile is trying out a new snooker shot: ‘to pivot away from less lucrative projects’ – such as snooker. Here the writer might as well have said ‘turn away’, as in the Bible. Pivot has the restrictive extra sense of remaining in one place as you turn. We English borrowed the noun pivot from the French in the 14th century, and they used it to mean ‘hinge’.

Marks & Spencer’s (as we still call it) has designated 27 June National Picky Bits Day. It entails eating things like olives and dips straight from their packaging. An evening meal of this kind is called a picky tea. It is, of course, a class minefield. ‘So what’s going on here, are we having a children’s party?’ asked Mary Berry when she was presented with a picky tea on Radio 1 three years ago. ‘I think I’m right in saying you have cooked none of this,’ she continued as she inspected the goods. On St George’s Day this year, the Scottish edition of the Times had a strap across the front page declaring that readers would find inside details of ‘The best supermarket “picky bits”.

‘Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,’ said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – ‘his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office’, according to another source of the Daily Mail’s. Every young person tries to convince their chosen ‘uni’ that they are passionate about law or sport science. ‘When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,’ observed Marie-Louise Eta, the football coach, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged.

When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking up courage, while I’m busy in the kitchen. Normally he sits idly by. It’s the loitering that is unsettling. He might get a job, if he could fly, as a loitering munition. These drones hover or circle until they detect a target. In 1988 an article in the American Air Force Magazine mentioned unmanned aircraft being developed to ‘loiter on high and then swoop down’. In 2022, Britain declared it would send ‘hundreds of loitering aerial munitions’ to Ukraine. Loitering, in use since Chaucer’s day, comes from a Dutch word meaning ‘to wag about (like a loose tooth)’.

The public disturbances in Clapham, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. ‘You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, ‘The surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.’  Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three ‘flash mobs’, as they called themselves, were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028.

‘The creep of “AI slop” in writing on the arts is everywhere,’ complained the Telegraph’s music writer Ivan Hewett the other week, and it’s up to us readers, he says, to stop it. For others, it means weirdly disjointed videos of anthropomorphic cats. But where did the forceful term AI slop come from? For prisoners, slopping out meant emptying chamber pots in the morning. For two centuries slop has been swill or food for pigs. At the same time it could be dirty household water. Long before that, it meant unappetising, semi-liquid food. Sloppy Joes were, from the 1940s, a kind of mushy hamburger (and also a loose-fitting sweater). I remember from the 1960s a probably ironic use of slop in the lyrics of a song by Arthur Lee on Love’s Forever Changes (1967).

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits. Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: ‘When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.’ A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years ago was up the Straits, meaning ‘in the Mediterranean’.

When I hear surveil on the wireless I often imagine it is spelt surveille, since it is a back-formation from surveillance. But the spelling has settled down as surveil. The Telegraph had a report the other day about someone who found his iPhone had been infected with spyware ‘in order to surveil him’. The word sounds unhappy to my ear, as new back-formations often do, though it has been in use for 60 years. Back-formation appeared in the OED before it had an entry there. Its entry came in the Supplement of 1933, but it was coined by Sir James Murray in 1888 and used by him in the dictionary’s entry for burgle. This was marked as originally colloquial or humorous (as burgling probably was in The Pirates of Penzance in 1879: ‘When the enterprising burglar’s not a-burgling.

‘That’s really meta,’ said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a review in the Guardian of James Acaster playing a tribute act to James Acaster and ‘making meta-merry in a carnival of self-satire’. Before we get there, I think we must clear the ground with a brief visit to metaphysic. This was first found in a translation made in 1387 by the estimable John Trevisa, the Cornish-born vicar of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, and Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

To me, grandee goes together with Tory. So it was a surprise to find Lord Mandelson called a Labour grandee in recent reports. The Sun even called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor ‘Grandee Andy’, though that spoils the original joke of calling party bigwigs grandees as though they were the truly grand grandees of Spain. At the last count, all but one of the 153 dukes in Spain were grandees, as were 264 other nobles. Grandees were exempt from paying tax, but so were hidalgos, whose numbers were reckoned by 1683 to have reached half a million. I got my daughter Veronica to search a database for references in the national press to Tory grandee in the past year. She found it applied to 31 men and one woman, Dame Priti Patel.

‘It’s lunchtime and it’s raining. Both things can be true at the same time,’ said my husband, putting on the face that makes him look like John Betjeman on a windy day. The use of this gnomic formula has grown so popular that not many minutes go by without encountering it. Danny Fortson, in the Sunday Times, wrote: ‘If the question is “is AI ‘real’ or a bubble?”, the answer is “yes”. Both can be true.’ A leading article in the Times observed that ‘violent crime has dropped to historic lows, yet a rise in antisocial behaviour has made many Londoners feel less safe. Both phenomena can be true at the same time.

‘Can you tell us what a stela [pronounced stealer] is and describe it for us?’ Misha Glenny asked the learned guest Fran Reynolds on In Our Time, blessedly continuing after Lord Bragg’s long innings as presenter. The episode was on Hammurabi, King of Babylon. Professor Reynolds managed to get quite far before saying: ‘There’s the most beautifully carved cuneiform inscription on the stele [pronounced steely].’ Misha Glenny then mentioned that in Paris, the week before, he had gone to ‘see the stele, as I gather it’s pronounced’, on which Hammurabi’s laws are carved. Later he picked up the courage to return to stela.

Misuse of myself ‘should be a capital offence’, suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. ‘As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),’ he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered. Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that ‘both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly’. There it is used as part of a compound subject.

‘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 intervals, in exactly the same hopeful tone: ‘Blush? Birch? Bunch? Bleach?’ ‘Too many letters,’ I replied to the last suggestion. Obviously the intended word was bitch. But I wondered why it had to be blanked out. Is bitch taboo in every sense? Would it be blanked out in the Crufts sense of a female dog? The doublet ‘bitch and moan’ is quite common.

In October, Nicolas Sarkozy took with him to prison a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Its hero, Edmond Dantès, was imprisoned in the Château d’If for 14 years. Mr Sarkozy was in for 20 days. In his instant memoir, Journal d’un prisonnier, he says the food was horrible. Yet, ‘neither wishing nor knowing how to cook’, he left the hotplate in the cell untouched, even though a former chief of staff had taken the trouble to provide written instructions on how to boil an egg. He relied on yoghurt, cereal bars, apple juice and ‘quelques douceurs sucrées’. These are translated into English as ‘sweet treats’. I have an aversion to the jangling phrase sweet treat.

My husband made a noise which he thinks is like a klaxon but sounds as if he is choking on his whisky. Even though I was in the middle of making a roux, I had to hurry from the kitchen to make sure he wasn’t. The klaxon was to signal that he had found in the paper a cliché that had led to complete nonsense. ‘Sir Tony’s position on the board was marred in uncertainty because of his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,’ someone said in the Telegraph. The cliché he was aiming at was mired. But, as clichés are empty of meaning, he hadn’t noticed that marred made no sense. It is a common error. In an article on electrical charging, someone on the Times had written that ‘the process of getting approval is marred in red tape’.