‘Dampfschifffahrt!’ shouted my husband as though it were funny. I had been saying how strange it was that explosive gas in a coal mine should be called firedamp, since damp things burn with difficulty. Nevertheless, my husband was on to something, for the German Dampf, steam, is related to English damp. Damp in English originally
‘What are your intentions towards my daughter?’ said my husband, screwing an imaginary monocle into his eye. We had been trying to work out what intentional living meant, with regard to the Duchess of Sussex’s new brand of flower sprinkles and raspberry jam. ‘The collection is infused with joy, love, and a touch of whimsy,’
‘Here’s a piece of filth for you,’ said my husband encouragingly. He was ‘helping’ me, as a cat might help wind wool. He’d come across a letter to the Guardian from 2015, in which Pedr James, who had directed a television dramatisation of Martin Chuzzlewit, drew attention to the name in the book for the
In 1924 Geoffrey Madan retired, aged 29, and devoted himself to books. ‘A genius for friendship, selfless devotion to progressive causes, a deep and touching love of animals and of natural beauty – he would not have claimed for himself any of these so frequent attributes of the lately dead,’ said an obituary never published.
‘No, RFK didn’t have a tapeworm eating his brain,’ declared my husband in the rare tone he adopts when he knows what he is talking about. I’d asked him as a doctor about something Robert F. Kennedy (last week sworn in as America’s health secretary) had said in 2012, according to a report in the
To ‘kickstart economic growth’ is the first (‘number one’) of Labour’s five ‘missions’ to rebuild Britain. That is what the manifesto announced last year. The mission is not just economic growth, but kickstarting it. On 29 January, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in a speech that she was ‘going further and faster
‘My heart will melt in your mouth,’ said my husband gallantly, unwrapping some leeks from a copy of the Sun which bore this suggestion: ‘Create a special Valentine’s Day message for a loved one with this decorate-your-own gingerbread heart, £2, new in at Morrisons.’ Loved ones, even dogs and cats, are fair game for hearts
My husband was so delighted with the new-found term perigee-syzygy that he kept repeating it, until the syllables merged into his regular breathing and he fell asleep in his chair. The compound word means what the vulgar press call a supermoon. A syzygy is the lining-up of the moon, Earth and sun, producing a full
‘Why can’t you have legacy tomatoes?’ asked my husband. ‘There are plenty of heritage tomatoes.’ He might well ask. Heritage tomatoes, usually called heirloom tomatoes in America, are cultivars valued for flavour lost in many modern hybrids. They include the Black Krim from the Crimea and the delicious Raf, grown in Almeria, its name an
The language of sailing ships is as treacherous as a lee shore. Words seldom mean what they suggest or are pronounced phonetically. So if you climb the ratlines, you may reach the top by means of the futtock shrouds, unless you can use a lubber’s hole. When Sir Keir Starmer insisted last week that the
The Philip Larkin Society has sponsored a pew in the huge medieval church of Holy Trinity, Hull. Larkin died 40 years ago and in 2017 the church was given the title Hull Minster. Eighteen churches have acquired the honorific minster since 1994. Most are historic civic piles: King’s Lynn and Rotherham, Doncaster and Leeds. The
My husband said ‘A.J. Balfour played the concertina’, which is perfectly true, though he did other things, even as prime minister. The concertina was inessential to what I thought was a neat way of sorting out the meanings of naturalism. The word is used quite a bit these days, with four main meanings. My mnemonic
I have set my husband a Christmas game. He wins a small chocolate sprout each time he spots a word in my list of Twelve Days of Christmas Hates. He does not like chocolate sprouts but Veronica’s children do, so they will be pleased by a goodly heap of them by Boxing Day. 12. Outside
‘Har-!’ exclaimed my husband, ‘Har-! Har-!’ It is not easy to exclaim the syllable har– without sounding like a walrus, and I can’t say that he succeeded. But he was not wrong. I had read out to him a letter from a reader in Hertfordshire and I had pronounced the t in the county. One
John Prescott, so Dominic Sandbrook observed last week, ‘infamously exchanged punches with a protestor in full view of the cameras’. My husband has just chipped in to say that it was the best thing he ever did: he’d had an egg thrown at him and responded with a neat left jab. But even if one
I’ve heard people using back-to-back housing to mean terraces separated by back yards. But strictly, back-to-back houses are built against a party wall and face opposite ways. Byelaws after the passing of the Public Health Act 1875 prevented their continued construction. In Birmingham, four of the city’s former thousands of back-to-backs are preserved by the
An ‘apoplectic’ reader, Antony Wynn, writes to lament that ‘two much loved writers have been coruscating of late when they should have been excoriating’. In pursuing his tale of horror, I made a surprising discovery. Let’s start with origins. Coruscate comes from Latin coruscare, ‘to vibrate, glitter, sparkle, gleam’. Excoriate comes from Latin excoriare, ‘to
‘Shockin’!’ exclaimed my husband, almost biting a chunk out of his whisky glass. I had read to him an enquiry from Michael Howard KC, leader of the Admiralty Bar since 2000. ‘As your husband does not seem to have been enraged yet by the use of nestled as a (presumably) transitive verb in the passive
‘How old does he think you are?’ asked my husband when I told him my GP had asked me if there was any pain in my tummy. Such infantilising language has already made poo the normal way of talking about excrement. Now it’s tummy. Last week the manager of Arsenal admitted that choosing a team
‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of
