And Finally

Playbooks are proliferating. In the past few weeks I’ve come across the counter-hybrid playbook, the wartime playbook, the Coldplay playbook, the preppy-meets-sporty playbook, Hitler’s playbook and the nepo-baby playbook. I used to think that the rather thumbed metaphor of playbook referred to a book of words containing the script or libretto. After all, book of words or book of the words has often been used figuratively to mean “the rules.” In Money in the Bank (1942), P.G. Wodehouse has Dolly Molloy exclaim: “There’s nothing in the book of the words to prevent Mrs. Cork having the bozo pinched and stowed away in the cooler.” In the medieval theater the literal playbook was looked after by the garnement man, the props man.

While last month’s majority vote by the inhabitants of Piddington in Oxfordshire to seek independence from Britain was a stunt – albeit one making a serious point about plans to house more than 1,000 asylum seekers in an army base near the village – further afield, there are more concerted attempts to establish real micronations. Prominent among these is the self-proclaimed autonomous territory of Liberland, which lies on a stretch of land on the Danube separating Croatia and Serbia. Unlike microstates, such as Monaco or the Vatican City, which are recognized internationally, micronations aren’t. Perhaps the best-known of its type today is the majority Russian-speaking rogue nation of Transnistria, a sliver of land which broke away from Moldova in 1991.

An intelligent reader is annoyed by whimsy. “Clothes, interiors, children’s birthdays...  it’s everywhere!” she exclaims. “What is whimsy anyway?” It is indeed everywhere. “Whimsy has been institutionalized,” wrote James Marriott in the Times, its symptoms including Larry the Downing Street cat and the saintly Paddington Bear. This recognizes a modern side to whimsy that is sentimental and twee. But to me its historical side acquires interest from a remark in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Whimsy may be related to whim-wham as flimsy to flim-flam.” Flim-flam was only one such reduplication with a vowel variation expressive of contempt.

Error sticks to the word taxi like an ant to an echidna’s tongue. I once heard a cabby on the wireless explain that the word taxi came from its German inventor, whose name was Thurn und Taxis. This blunder swarms all over the internet. “At the end of the 18th century,” goes one version, “the Thurn und Taxis family, who managed thousands of carriages and horses with which they distributed mail, decided to diversify their business, using their network and their vehicles also for passenger transport… Their name, Taxis, may have inspired the modern term taxi…” But it didn’t. The Thurn und Taxis family did run international postal services. Their family names meant Tower and Badger, but they did not invent those either.

Q. I have a good relationship with a neighbor. She has a labrador and I have a Jack Russell. If I cannot walk my dog she will do it and vice versa. Yesterday my daughter visited unexpectedly and was at the top of the house when she heard my neighbor open the front door and call my dog for his walk. Five minutes later she heard the dog being returned to the house. I don’t want to fall out with my neighbor but I would always walk her labrador for at least 45 minutes and my dog needs a proper walk every day. How should I proceed? N.B., Stockbridge A. Fitness trackers for dogs are all the rage – attached to the collar, they count steps and provide GPS tracking.

I was looking at a photo of my great-grandfather the other day and admiring his beard. A magnificent spade-shaped affair, it reached halfway down his chest. He was a Victorian, of course, and his era was, above all, the century of the beard. All the eminent Victorian males, such as Darwin, Dickens, the Earl of Salisbury and Prince Albert wore them.  When Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth decreed recently that all US military men should be clean shaven, it struck me that, had that rule been around in the 1860s, the American Civil War would never have been fought, since all the leading generals on both sides were endowed with substantial forests of facial hair. One Union commander, Ambrose Burnside, was so notably hirsute in this respect that he lent his name to sideburns.

The older and more plutocratic among you may remember the unlamented business-class airline seat of the 1980s and 1990s. Every few years, major airlines would proudly announce the wondrous extra legroom available in their long-haul business class and the increase in the recline angle of the seat. And each time the experience got worse. You see, the person sitting in front of you now invaded ever more of your airspace when they reclined their own seat. You then had no choice but to follow suit to regain the lost territory. The resulting Nash equilibrium meant everyone on board was forced to spend the entire journey leaning backwards at 45°. Getting to the lavatory required playing an involuntary game of Twister with the person sitting by the aisle.