And Finally

“Don’t they speak English?” asked my husband, tossing over a copy of the Daily Mail as though it were my fault. The headline read: “Missing in action.” It referred to Dan Jarvis disappearing from view in his new job as Defence Secretary. The headline writers should know that, militarily, those missing in action are presumed dead. The Mail meant AWOL – absent without leave. In 2024, I remarked how odd it was that Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, should say about mob violence outside a migrant hotel near Rotherham: “It is organized, violent thuggery.” Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it.

When people ask me what my politics are, I have to explain that I support a dwindling faction you might call the Terry-Thomas wing of the Conservative party. This faction dominated the party in the 1980s – the kind of spivvy garagiste who, no sooner was your back turned, would knock down a row of medieval cottages to open a Hyundai dealership. There were probably a few too many of them in the 1980s. Today we need them back. Shakespeare depicts this archetype very well, possibly because (as a Brummie entrepreneur) he was one himself. He understood that you need a few chancers around to make things happen. Where are they now? I raise this point because, while we know that Britain is overly regulated, the root cause may be that we are also far too moralistic and judgmental.

“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 nonverbal 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.

“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.