English

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

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

‘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. It’s a word that has been used

‘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?