Mind your language

President Vladimir Putin of Russia remarked of Sergei Skripal, whom his agents tried to kill, ‘He’s simply a scumbag.’ Scumbag at least is how the press translated his words. I’m afraid that from my sheltered life I did not know the literal meaning of scumbag. Look away now if you’d rather not know and I’ll

My husband is enjoying Do No Harm, the arresting memoir of the brain surgeon Henry Marsh who was on Desert Island Discs last week. Having confronted the terrible consequences of human error in this alarming speciality, the author mentions the bathetic absurdity of an NHS training presentation by ‘a young man with a background in

Embolden is a word in a million. In other words it is quite common. Using data from Google Books, the Oxford English Dictionary has put it in a band of words that are used with a frequency of between 0.1 and 0.99 per million. About 11 per cent of words fall in this band. The

A detective superintendent has been placed on ‘restricted duties’ while the Independent Office for Police Conduct investigates a complaint that he used the phrase whiter than white at a briefing. An ‘insider’ told the Evening Standard: ‘It may have been a poor use of language but this is not what the misconduct process is for.’

If you’d like to buy a copy of Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light, published in 1704, there’s one on AbeBooks for £131,245.03, plus £12 P&P. Do people just click on such items, I wonder, and wait for the book to plop through the letterbox a few

‘I want my money back,’ said my husband. ‘This is from the 1880s, not the 1980s.’ He looked up from my copy of Soho in the Eighties by my neighbour at the other end of the mag, Christopher Howse (CSH of Portrait of the Week, who also recalls his drinking days in the Coach and

The Sun gave a sad picture of British loneliness recently in a report about the national yearning to play a board game like Monopoly, which could only be fulfilled about five times a year when someone could be found to play it with. In passing, the paper remarked: ‘Two-thirds of Brits would also relish the

I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather. Some things about it are awkward. Two Australians, Richard Thomas and Joy Bear, had been working for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation

My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to ‘follow the signage’. When do signs, he wondered, become signage? At the same level, I suspect, that rooms become roomage. Hardy wrote in his beguiling way: ‘When moiling seems at cease/ In the vague void

We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in rural Britain. There is, I think, a confusion built into the term, though language is capable of accommodating such inconsistencies. Most of the stuff in the papers and on television on the subject derives from

I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease, HIV or psoriasis. Perhaps I should describe myself as a person living with my husband. The formula is recommended by many Aids organisations that follow the ‘terminology guidelines’ of the UN Programme on HIV/Aids. Instead

‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked him what ideation suggested to him. Unknown to him, ideation has, since my husband’s day, made an unlikely leap from psychiatry to management theory. ‘Management gurus,’ wrote Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian, ‘seem inordinately obsessed

A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She said it reminded her of delft ware. That word has its own historical peculiarity. We used to call it delf, as you can find in Dickens and his contemporaries. That is because the town of

‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and the promise of ‘a new iteration of softer suiting’. Suiting in itself is a comical word when found outside the technical pages of Tailor and Cutter. In that respect it belongs to the same family

Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that I remember Macmillan using in the 1970s. But it was in 1908, a year after Kipling, that Eucken won the Nobel prize for literature. (Anyone read a book by him?) His belief was that truth

Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to unconscious bias what Roundup is to Japanese knotweed. ‘I have to say when you get to a certain stage it is not unconscious any more,’ commented Maria Miller on a decision to appoint the only

To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September 13, 1879. It carried a review of a new edition (encouraged by Dante Gabriel Rossetti) of Jones’s Studies of Sensation and Event, first published in 1843 and mercilessly mocked. Poor Jones had been so upset