Etymology

‘Spook or spoof?’ asked my husband, throwing a copy of the paper over to me, and only missing by a foot. When I’d picked it up, I read the headline: ‘Fully Chinese-made drone spooking Ukraine air defence.’ Then I read the introduction of the report: ‘A new Russian decoy drone used to spoof Ukrainian air-defences is made up entirely of Chinese parts.’ Well, to spook a person or an animal is to frighten them. It has been in use in America since between the wars and comes from the Dutch for a ghost. Spoof is a more mysterious word. Since the 1970s, to spoof has acquired the meaning ‘To render

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often it turns up in sporting contexts, considering it is a mangling of a metaphor from cricket, ‘off his own bat’. In Trollope’s novel from 1869, He Knew He Was Right, in which a brittle-sounding character is called Glascock (which I suspect is pronounced Glasgow), a lesser hero, Hugh Stanbury, asks an old servant of his

The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on which its proposed measures are drawn up for the OBR to score. The analogy is with the cricket field rather than the ballroom. The OBR score indicates its forecast for spending, receipts and public debt. It also takes into account knock-on effects of a policy change. This is called dynamic scoring. I had to ask

‘Am I housebound?’ asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role in life. ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.’ Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank in worth with the years, following the same path as boor, churl and peasant. Whereas I as a housewife enjoy a comparatively transparent label, any husband’s title is obscure. It is simply a house-bond, but the first element of husband, hus-, no longer seems like house, and the -bond element is often mistaken for a

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically. But I was wondering whether the Prime Minister was aware of the connotations of his claim about being in lockstep. The Merriam-Webster dictionary gives the meaning ‘in perfect or rigid, often mindless, conformity’. An image might be the scene in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927), where the overalled workers change shift, their heads bowed, their

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would be amusing. But it is true that the political wrangle over personal independence payments would have been harder to popularise without the cheery abbreviation. Some of us remember Denis Healey’s promise to ‘squeeze property speculators until the pips squeak’. He might also have made similar promises about the rich in general. His inspiration was Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1917. ‘We will get everything out of her that you can squeeze out of a lemon,’ he said of Germany in December 1918. ‘I will squeeze

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a Hugo le Cuint in 1208 and a Richard le Queynte in Hampshire in 1263. The name would relate to quant or quaint, meaning ‘clever’ or ‘cunning’, and derived from Latin cognitus. The varied spelling overlapped with the word Chaucer used for a woman’s private parts, which comes from a completely different Latin word. Such is

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime minister, Rishi Sunak promised to ‘put rocket boosters’ under construction in areas that were already built up. Usually rocket boosters are put under things, but Sir Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, was more anatomical in his thoughts, praising a youth mobility scheme that would ‘put rocket boosters up businesses in London’. Even so, in

Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon ‘has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews’. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: ‘give permission’ and ‘enact a penalty to enforce obedience to a law’. The latter sense was extended after the first world war to cover economic or military action against a state as a coercive measure. That is the use we daily find applied to action, or the lack of it, against Russia. The diverging meanings both

On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: ‘babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped’. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It turned out to have been put together with the help of an online device called Penguin Classics Cover Generator, which allows you to use your chosen picture to design a paperback. The site has no connection with Penguin. But ‘Wake up, babe, new [something] just dropped’ is a catchphrase or meme that has been around

With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his expulsion from the Sephardic community in Amsterdam. An American professor of philosophy, Yitzhak Melamed, asked the Portuguese Jewish synagogue there for permission to film some footage. The rabbi pointed out that Spinoza had been excommunicated ‘with the severest possible ban, a ban that remains in force for all time’. So, no he could not visit

‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not sure Nigel Farage is a Flashman. What kind of viper did Mr Lowe mean? Presumably one in the bosom – not like Cleopatra’s asp, but one thawed out by a man who pitied it, only to be bitten when the creature warms up. It’s a fable of Aesop with which Cicero was familiar. Hence, in

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a permanent or habitual quality. I suppose the people who wrote the news bulletins wanted to make it clear that the existence of the conclave was not a secret. But that is not how secret would be used. After all, we benefit from the secret ballot in Britain, but it is not the holding of the

‘Six!’ cried my husband, waving his notebook as he monitored the by-elections. He wasn’t counting Reform wins but the ways of pronouncing mayoralty. The most inventive seemed to be Jonny Dymond on Radio 4, who called them mayoralities, introducing an i, as in words such as realities or moralities. Although mayoralities wasn’t exactly the required word, it sounded much better than the popular but hideous method of basing its pronunciation on mayor as if it consisted in two syllables, may and or, with the second stressed. It is not as though mayoralty was invented in the 21st century along with the vogue for elected mayors, beginning with poor old Ken

‘I regard this as a single-sex space,’ said my husband as I perched in his study, on the arm of a chair which was piled with books, trying to find out if he’d eat monkfish if provided with it. I doubt the Supreme Court will come to his aid, but gender frenzy has left some puzzling wreckage in the language. The Times recently reported that a drunken architect took a meat cleaver and pursued a teenager, ‘who locked themself into the bathroom’. The writer did not want to specify the teenager’s sex, but did want to keep him or her singular. Another author in the Guardian wrote about ‘how an

‘Is it connected to plant-based?’ asked my husband, as though we were playing Twenty Questions. ‘Anything to do with Homebase, drum and bass, Prisoners’ Base?’ I was trying to interest him in the 21st-century meaning of based, of which he had never heard. The New York Times never stops trying to give a new etymology for based, according to Jeff Bercovici, who is co-head of the newsroom of the San Francisco Standard. His actual words were ‘trying to retcon the etymology’, but I didn’t know that retcon means to give ‘retroactive continuity’ to a thing, as Dallas did by saying that Bobby Ewing’s death was just a dream. On Twitter

‘If they cancel you,’ said my husband, ‘will I be cancelled too?’ He may well ask. But I’m not sure how I’d tell if I had been cancelled. I don’t make platform appearances, so it is not so easy to deny me a platform. A popular way of doing people down is by means of something that Renée DiResta in the Guardian called the Transitive Property of Bad People, ‘which connects people and institutions in a daisy chain of guilt by association’. I think the metaphor of a transitive property derives from American elementary education. The property appears in statements such as: if A is bigger than B, and B

‘Oh no, darling’ said my husband, stirring from torpor in his armchair, ‘only about seven ounces of you is bacteria – about the same amount as those little bottles of milk we had at school.’ I had been talking about billions, trillions and quadrillions and had suggested that our bodies’ cells were outnumbered ten to one by bacteria. But since 2016, apparently, the reliable estimate is of 30 trillion human cells with 38 trillion bacteria wandering about inside us. The language of those large numbers remains ambiguous. In 1974 Harold Wilson, the prime minister, refused a request by a Tory MP for ministers to use billion only in its British

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex have been troubled by two verbal peculiarities in a week. The Duchess corrected a friend who called her ‘Meghan Markle’ on television. ‘It’s so funny, too, that you keep saying Meghan Markle. You know I’m Sussex now,’ she said. ‘This is our family name, our little family name.’ Well, yes and no. Her children were registered as Mountbatten-Windsor at birth. That was a name invented by a declaration in the Privy Council in 1960. But Archie and Lilibet are prince and princess now and need not have a surname. The trouble is that other descendants of the late Queen made up surnames for their

My husband has been telling me, at some length, about the Gamages Christmas catalogue that fired his childhood imagination and boyish avarice. One item promised infinite entertainment in a box: the Compendium of Games. Fundamentally it was a folding board, squared for chess and draughts on one side, marked for backgammon on the other. Its ludic capability depended on two dice and an accompanying booklet of rules. And now I come across a quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrating the use of the word compendium: ‘Guide to the compendium of games. Comprising rules for playing – backgammon, besique, chess…’ The dictionary estimates the date as about 1899, which is