Language

‘Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,’ said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – ‘his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office’, according to another source of the Daily Mail’s. Every young person tries to convince their chosen ‘uni’ that they are passionate about law or sport science. ‘When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,’ observed Marie-Louise Eta,

When my husband wants to do something I won’t like, such as getting tickets for Henley, he hangs about, plucking up courage, while I’m busy in the kitchen. Normally he sits idly by. It’s the loitering that is unsettling. He might get a job, if he could fly, as a loitering munition. These drones hover or circle until they detect a target. In 1988 an article in the American Air Force Magazine mentioned unmanned aircraft being developed to ‘loiter on high and then swoop down’. In 2022, Britain declared it would send ‘hundreds of loitering aerial munitions’ to Ukraine. Loitering, in use since Chaucer’s day, comes from a Dutch word

The public disturbances in Clapham, achieved by social media link-ups, have their precedents. ‘You can imagine what an exhilarating week this has been,’ wrote Harold Nicolson in 1945, ‘The surrounding of Berlin; the link-up with the Russian armies.’  Link-up, first recorded from 1945 by the Oxford English Dictionary, has since been applied chiefly to military connection and that of spacecraft. On the same day as the first Clapham disturbance, three ‘flash mobs’, as they called themselves, were honestly busy in Slough High Street, doing little dances and holding up placards calling for the place to be named UK Town of Culture 2028. This outbreak belonged to a slightly old-fashioned trend

‘The creep of “AI slop” in writing on the arts is everywhere,’ complained the Telegraph’s music writer Ivan Hewett the other week, and it’s up to us readers, he says, to stop it. For others, it means weirdly disjointed videos of anthropomorphic cats. But where did the forceful term AI slop come from? For prisoners, slopping out meant emptying chamber pots in the morning. For two centuries slop has been swill or food for pigs. At the same time it could be dirty household water. Long before that, it meant unappetising, semi-liquid food. Sloppy Joes were, from the 1940s, a kind of mushy hamburger (and also a loose-fitting sweater). I

I little thought in 2023, when writing about dire straits, that we’d so soon be pushed into them by trouble in the Straits of Hormuz. In discussions of these on the wireless, I find that even the best-informed commentators begin by referring to this geographical feature as the Strait of Hormuz but before long fall into calling them the straits. Insisting on the singular strait seems sterile pedantry. The Oxford English Dictionary has got the usage pretty straight: ‘When used as a geographical proper name, the word is usually plural with singular sense, e.g. the Straits of Dover, the Straits of Gibraltar.’ A pleasant piece of naval slang 100 years

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

‘That’s really meta,’ said my husband, attempting to imitate a stoned hippie at a festival, but only achieving his usual character role of a tipsy retired major in a Hampstead saloon bar. I had been trying to pin down what people think they mean by meta. The dominant element is the self-referential, as in a review in the Guardian of James Acaster playing a tribute act to James Acaster and ‘making meta-merry in a carnival of self-satire’. Before we get there, I think we must clear the ground with a brief visit to metaphysic. This was first found in a translation made in 1387 by the estimable John Trevisa, the

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

‘It’s lunchtime and it’s raining. Both things can be true at the same time,’ said my husband, putting on the face that makes him look like John Betjeman on a windy day. The use of this gnomic formula has grown so popular that not many minutes go by without encountering it. Danny Fortson, in the Sunday Times, wrote: ‘If the question is “is AI ‘real’ or a bubble?”, the answer is “yes”. Both can be true.’ A leading article in the Times observed that ‘violent crime has dropped to historic lows, yet a rise in antisocial behaviour has made many Londoners feel less safe. Both phenomena can be true at

‘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

Misuse of myself ‘should be a capital offence’, suggests Oliver Duff, the editor of the i Paper. ‘As reflexive pronouns, myself and yourself require a prior subject (I, you),’ he says. I applaud the prospect of a general massacre of abusers of the English language, but by Mr Duff’s criterion, Shakespeare and Richardson, Ruskin and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson himself should have been slaughtered. Historically, myself began not as a reflexive pronoun but as an emphatic, and as an emphatic it is often still used. Other constructions allow it too. In a letter in 1782, Johnson wrote that ‘both Williams, and Desmoulins and myself are very sickly’. There it

‘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?

In October, Nicolas Sarkozy took with him to prison a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo. Its hero, Edmond Dantès, was imprisoned in the Château d’If for 14 years. Mr Sarkozy was in for 20 days. In his instant memoir, Journal d’un prisonnier, he says the food was horrible. Yet, ‘neither wishing nor knowing how to cook’, he left the hotplate in the cell untouched, even though a former chief of staff had taken the trouble to provide written instructions on how to boil an egg. He relied on yoghurt, cereal bars, apple juice and ‘quelques douceurs sucrées’. These are translated into English as ‘sweet treats’. I have an

My husband made a noise which he thinks is like a klaxon but sounds as if he is choking on his whisky. Even though I was in the middle of making a roux, I had to hurry from the kitchen to make sure he wasn’t. The klaxon was to signal that he had found in the paper a cliché that had led to complete nonsense. ‘Sir Tony’s position on the board was marred in uncertainty because of his role in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,’ someone said in the Telegraph. The cliché he was aiming at was mired. But, as clichés are empty of meaning, he hadn’t noticed that marred

‘They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,’ said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. The Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer. ‘Language has moved on and changed,’ the government says, since 1970, when legislation was drafted. One problem is having to keep changing terminology. No one, even my husband, should be called a cripple. No one should be called handicapped. Now no one should be called disabled, but rather a person with a disability. These changes are paralleled in the languages of our neighbours.

‘Why doesn’t anyone do what you ask them to?’ enquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the subject, I should have thought. He was referring to a plea I made three years ago to people I’ve never met to stop sending emails that begin: ‘I am reaching out to you.’ But it has grown worse. Using the expression makes it sound as though the emailer is deranged. Reach out has for more than a century meant ‘to offer sympathy, support or assistance’ to people. Correlatively it can mean to seek those things. As Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer has acquired the habit of issuing a Christmas message.

Everyone has been declaring which words are too rude to utter in public. Shortly after breakfast, Radio 4 happily discussed by name the book by Cory Doctorow called Enshittification. But on Radio 4’s Feedback it proved impossible to say the word that shocked some listeners when they heard it on a dramatisation of a work by Doris Lessing on Rhodesia in the 1940s. It had to be called the N-word. One formerly taboo word still does sterling service as an intensifier. Kate Winslet, on Desert Island Discs last month, said: ‘You lot who were in my year at school, you were bloody horrible to me.’ Bloody, said the OED when