Language

The government jargon-turning mills must have rung to cheers of delight when the phrase breathing space was minted afresh, all shiny and unworn. Its glory is to suggest a dawn in which it is bliss to be alive, but without tying anyone down to vulgar sums. The Chancellor has said the Budget will give households more ‘breathing space’. Is that breathing space on a wide sunny upland or is it a dark, uncertain air pocket in a capsized yacht? I was surprised to find how old the phrase is. George Joye, who believed he lived that in the age of Antichrist, was consoled in the 1540s that God (not the Chancellor) ‘at some certain season giveth a little breathing space to his chirche, making the fyerce seas cawme for a little tyme’. There, space denotes time.

In his dark T-shirt speech on the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June), Andy Burnham, not yet prime minister, promised ‘good growth in every postcode’. Indeed he used the word postcode six times. There are about 1.8 million active postcodes in the United Kingdom covering 29 million addresses. One is allocated to Father Christmas, who gets thousands of letters each year. Will he enjoy ‘good growth’? In England and Wales, the average was about 15 addresses per postcode in 2021. About 55,540 full postcodes in England and Wales contain only one household. So, in 2011, Devon had 2,370 single-household postcodes, but Gloucestershire only 919. The Office for National Statistics won’t pinpoint where they all are, lest individual people have their privacy trampled upon.

‘The festive decoration of my childhood Christmases,’ wrote Geoff Cunnington (Letters, 26 September), ‘featured a concertina-like, bell-shaped paper object which my mother called a “whim-wom”.’ This fits in with the use of whim-wham as ‘a trifling ornament’ (12 September). That was in the 17th century, but it has survived in a deliberately obscure context: an answer to children asking what you are making. In the form a wing-wong for a goose’s bridle, it was investigated by the brilliant Michael Quinion in his World Wide Words blog. Subscribers reported its use in Australia, though it was not invented there. Since the original term whim-wham was unfamiliar, it was sometimes turned into wigwam.

Playbooks are proliferating like cookbooks. In the past fortnight or so I’ve come across: the counter-hybrid playbook, the wartime playbook, the Coldplay playbook, the preppy-meets-sporty playbook, Hitler’s playbook, the Ben Stokes 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 theatre the literal playbook was looked after by the garnement man, the props man.

The present Lord Howard de Walden’s first name is not Howard. It’s Peter, for the 11th Baron is the film-maker Peter Czernin. In 2004, the barony of Howard de Walden was called out of abeyance in favour of the 9th Baron’s eldest daughter, who married Joseph Czernin. All this spoils it for the Financial Times, which refers to peers according to this pattern: Lord Peter Mandelson. That is not English. Lord Peter Mandelson would be the son of a duke or marquess, like Lord Peter Wimsey, the younger son of the Duke of Denver. My husband has been driven to incoherent rage by wireless announcers talking of Lady Victoria Starmer, the wife of the former PM, and making things worse by referring to her as the First Lady. In America the First Lady is the wife of the head of state.

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 institutionalised,’ wrote James Marriott in the Times, its symptoms including Larry the Downing Street Cat and the saintly Paddington Bear. This recognises 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.

‘It made me sick to think of the work that must go into the making of such a thing,’ George Orwell declared in Homage to Catalonia when he came across ‘a kind of harrow that took one straight back to the later Stone Age. It was made of boards joined together, to about the size of a kitchen table; in the boards hundreds of holes were morticed, and into each hole was jammed a piece of flint.’ He’d got it wrong. It wasn’t a harrow but a threshing-sledge, to be pulled by oxen or mules, to separate wheat from chaff. It was easier than beating the corn with a flail. The threshing could thus be done by old people and children riding on the sledges. The sledges, now seen in museums, are called trillos in Spanish.

Error sticks to the word taxi like ants to an echidna’s tongue. Ten years ago I wrote here that I’d 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 under the Habsburgs. Their family names meant Tower and Badger, but they did not invent those either.

I swear Rod Liddle was smiling down on me last week, as I found myself tussling with an editor. I’d written a sentence containing the word “Chinamen.” She wanted me to remove it, because, she said, “Chinaman” is widely acknowledged to be a racial slur. In my view, words have no single intrinsic meaning. Within limits, they can mean a variety of things, differing according to context – not least the tone of voice in which they’re delivered. Even “Yes” can mean “No,” when said by an Englishman trained in the subtle art of oblique speech.

‘Well, we all have areas of ignorance,’ said my husband with a little too much relish, I thought. He was responding to my admission that I had reached a ripe old age without realising that the words yoga and yoke had the same origin. Yoke has been used in English for more than 1,000 years and yoga only since about 1785, but it had been in use in Sanskrit since the first millennium bc. The meaning of yoga was held to be either the yoking and reining in of the senses, or the yoking and joining oneself to the Prana (life force), the Om (absolute) and the Universe.

Modern Toss was invented in 2004 as the label for a series of cartoons by Jon Link and Mick Bunnage. Many use foul language and some are very funny. Under the category of Work, a man says to a person sitting at a desk: ‘I think I’ll go home. I’m a bit bored.’ As often in satire, reality has imitated art. I assume the title Modern Toss coincides in meaning with an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary from 2007 giving an ‘additional sense’ for toss. An illustrative quotation came from Viz for 7 December 1990: ‘See this book Tom… Yes, I’ve read it actually. Yeah. Me n’all. Right load of toss, isn’t it. But at 16 quid a throw, he must be coining it in.’ The dictionary, in suggesting an etymology, invokes a letter from 1915 by Lytton Strachey quoted in P.N.

When the King visited Oxford in September 1687, there was a bit of a shambles in the Bodleian, where they had laid out a banquet for his breakfast. He ate some mutton and pheasant, but, not inviting others to eat, he alone ate. When he had finished, there was a scramble for the many dishes left over. The University had paid £160 for this banquet or ambigue, noted the antiquarian Anthony Wood (1632-95). Ambigue, borrowed from French ambigu, meant a meal where all the dishes were served at once.

‘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. I mentioned this ignorant error here in 2022. 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 organised, violent thuggery.’ Now Hilary Benn, the Northern Ireland Secretary, is at it.

My husband’s task was a simple one: to buy a couple of bottles of water from the Morrisons opposite the station in case there was no buffet service on board (which would have made a waterless three-hour journey torture). If the train had left on time, he’d have missed it, but he came puffing up the steps full of talk about a ‘meal deal’ and proffering some Walkers crisps. Luckily for him he had also bought water, but what caught my eye was the labelling on the crisps: ‘Grab bag.’ I was aware of the term meaning an emergency bag containing food, water and first aid supplies, which would be kept near the door in emergency or war. A packet of crisps would hardly be a substitute.

‘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 non-verbal 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.

‘Italians are not inventing any new words,’ the head of the Italian language academy told the Telegraph. ‘They’re not creating anything. They take everything from English.’ Professor Paolo D’Achille is the head of the Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1583. Crusca means ‘bran’, which is what the academy wants to keep out of the fine flour of Italian. English is of course bran. There was a big hoo-ha in Italy a decade ago when a recruiting poster appealed to young people: ‘Be cool and join the navy.’ I suppose there’d be a bigger hoo-ha in Britain if a recruiting poster was printed in German. These things have their degrees of unacceptability.