Language

I’d seen The Gruffalo in Latin, so I was delighted when Veronica showed me a version her daughter had been given, in Doric. It begins: ‘A moose tuik a dander ben the wid./ A tod saw the moose, an the moose luiked guid.’ (I take it that every mother knows The Gruffalo by heart. The original starts: ‘A mouse took a stroll through the deep dark wood./ A fox saw the mouse, and the mouse looked good.’). Although Gaelic (Ghàidhlig) is the distinct language of Scotland, few bother to learn it, and the English-speakers there give the name Scots to various dialects of northern English. Sometimes they call it Doric,

Revisers of OED have made a pig’s ear of pelican pie, I fear. I’ve been reading for pleasure Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (reviewed last week). I’m up to 1904, when James Murray complains he ‘could have written two books with less labour’ than it took to compile the entries for pelican and penguin. Pelicans enjoyed life for centuries without the British seeing one. John Trevisa, a sort of 14th-century John Aubrey, wrote in 1398 that there were two kinds: one a water bird, the other loving the wilderness. He got this indirectly from St Jerome’s commentary on Psalm 102: ‘I am become like a pelican in

My husband told me with glee that Nicholas Byfield had a great big stone ‘like flint’ in his bladder, weighing 33 ounces, which ‘exceedingly afflicted’ him for 15 years, until it killed him in 1622, aged 44. It did not stop him writing about the Epistle to the Colossians and remarking that Christ’s divine nature is ‘incircumscriptible in respect of place’. This is doubtless true, but most interest has focused on the length of the word. In 1900 James Murray, the great editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (to the new history of which by Peter Gilliver I keenly look forward), completed the section I–Infer. ‘Those who are interested in

Are we seeing the end of dustcarts? I don’t mean that those noisy, noisome vehicles will cease roaring at the dawn and blocking traffic in the afternoon rush-hour. But the name of the thing is now often given as bin lorry, or, in full American mode garbage truck. ‘Climb in the cab of the garbage truck and get to work!’ urge the Danish makers of the Lego City Garbage Truck (£12). ‘Drive around Lego City looking for trash.’ Calling the dustman a binman used to be a northern trait, as Paul Johnson, long of this parish, observed while making different complaint in Enemies of Society (1977): ‘Dustmen (or binmen in the

Veronica has become quite an addict of Twitter, just as the rest of the young are forsaking it. ‘It’s easy to hide from the trolls and death threats,’ she tells me encouragingly, ‘but there’s one thing that annoys me.’ The one thing is a cliché serving as click-bait for fellow twitterers. It takes the form of the exclamation: ‘Wow! Just wow!’ The hyperbole seldom lives up to expectations, and even when it does, it is diminished by having expressed the emotion in second-hand language. I was surprised to find that wow does not belong to the 20th-century world of Batman’s Pow! and Bowie’s son Zowie. It far predates the ‘wow

What is a bee? ‘A well-known insect,’ says the Oxford English Dictionary, passing the buck rather. Similarly, an ash is a ‘well-known forest tree’, an ass is ‘a well-known quadruped of the horse kind’ and asparagus is ‘a well-known delicacy of the table’ — not caviar, which is ‘eaten as a relish’. Being well-known is an unreliable category. One man’s Kim Kardashian is another man’s Lyndal Roper. I remember encountering caracoles on a Spanish menu and being told that by the waiter that it was a kind of animal with horns. It took me a long time to get from that to ‘snails’. When the OED says that an aucuba is ‘a

In the same song where the brilliant lyricist Ian Dury gave the world the couplet, ‘I could be a writer with a growing reputation/ I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station’, his narrator speaks of ‘first-night nerves every one-night stand’. Perhaps we are now more accustomed to one-night stand referring to a casual sexual liaison, but in the less metaphorical sense, dating from the 19th century and was later used by Bernard Shaw, it simply means a one-night musical engagement, or gig. Gig is first recorded in 1926, in Melody Maker. By 1939 it had given rise to the modern-sounding gigster, someone who plays gigs. Now in our

Bustle, an online newspaper ‘for and by women’, has published ‘six common phrases you didn’t know were sexist (that you’ll now want to ban from your vocabulary)’. One of them is ‘Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater’. By chance this phrase was used by Sir Ernest Gowers, the enemy of officialese and cliché, in his book H.W. Fowler: The Man and his Teaching. ‘We can,’ Sir Ernest wrote, ‘rid ourselves of those grammarians’ fetishes which make it more difficult to be intelligible without throwing the baby away with the bath-water’. That would annoy someone called Julie Sprankles, a writer for Bustle. ‘The most popular theory is that in medieval

‘One referendum, two referenda,’ chanted my husband. ‘No, no, it’s a gerund. The English plural is referendums,’ interrupted Veronica, red in the face. It’s odd no one can agree — not about the politics, but about the word. Part of the trouble is that it’s newish, never used in English before 1817. Since then, like foot and mouth, it has come in spikes. One spike was in 1898–99, when the six colonies of Australia tried to federate. Referendums held in 1898 failed, because New South Wales had required a minimum of 80,000 votes in favour, and only 71,595 were forthcoming. So in 1899 everyone wore ribbons printed with ‘Federation Yes!’

I was humiliated in trying to make out the meaning of eight hard words. See how you do: claustration, edulcoration, eidolic, idoneous, infraction, straticulate, tergiversation, velleity. The little list was included in his edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage by the late R.W. Burchfield in 1996. He made the point that the first four of these Latinate words did not appear in the Concise Oxford Dictionary. Yet one man’s hard word is another man’s fodder for daily discourse. I wouldn’t count infraction as hard. But I failed on idoneous, which the Oxford English Dictionary (in 1899) called ‘now rare’. It means ‘fit, suitable’, as for public office, though Robert Boyle, the

‘Like eating in the street,’ said my husband. Astonishing! He’d said something not only coherent in itself but also connected to a remark I’d been addressing to him. I had just said that at school I had been taught that the use of the exclamation mark was vulgar or rude. Observant readers will have noted that I have already used one exclamation mark in this column. My defence is that I exclaimed. I agree that exclamation alone does not constitute conversation. On Twitter, a new and annoying cliché, often appended to a photograph, is the bare exclamation: ‘Wow! Just wow!’ It usually belongs to the genre ‘clickbait’, disappointing the reader