Language

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 aversion to the jangling phrase sweet treat.

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 made no sense. It is a common error. In an article on electrical charging, someone on the Times had written that ‘the process of getting approval is marred in red tape’.

‘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. The Paris Métro had seats reserved for mutilés de guerre. The term was replaced by personnes handicapées.

‘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. For 2025 he said: ‘At this time of the year, which celebrates love and abundance, loss or hardship can feel even more acute. Reach out. It can make a huge difference.

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.

‘Do you know what vibe coding is, darling?’ I asked my husband. ‘What do you take me for?’ he replied. ‘Or 67?’ ‘Ah, I do know that the Prime Minister had to apologise for leading a classroom of little children in a series of hand moves to that one. But I’ve no idea what it means.’ Thus was my suspicion confirmed that most ‘words of the year’ are far from general concern. Vibe coding, some sort of AI software development, is Collins Dictionary’s new Word of the Year; 67 (pronounced ‘six seven’), which has no agreed meaning, is Dictionary.com’s. To me, a far more interesting word is fudge. It is not new, but its entry in the Oxford English Dictionary was revised this year.

The Alibi bar in Altrincham, Cheshire, caused a hoo-ha last week by banning single entrants after 9 p.m. The landlord, Carl Peters, explained: ‘Sometimes, if you let people in on their own, the reason why they’re on their own is that they’ve got no one to talk to, so they start mithering other groups.’ Mithering is a familiar word in the north-west. Mrs Gaskell, who was brought up in Knutsford, nine miles from Altrincham, used it in Mary Barton (1848): ‘Don’t mither your mammy for bread.’ Mr Peters had other things on his mind, too. His quite chatty sign on dress code specifies: ‘No sportswear/trackies. No Stone Island. No ripped/frayed jeans. No baseball caps. No roadman vibes.’ I asked my husband whether any of these items would be acceptable in his club.

I heard on the wireless a reference to the growing number of small political parties getting funds from short money. I’m afraid I let it slide past me as one of the many things about money that I don’t understand. Short is an extremely productive element in English vocabulary. Shorthaul journeys preceded by decades the invention of aeroplanes. The unlikely-sounding shorthorn carrots have been with us since the 1830s. The lightweight Americans favour short hundredweights, which are only 100lb instead of the Imperial and godly 112lb; worse, their standard ton is consequently a short ton of 2,000lb, a long way off the metric tonne, to which British tons approximate.

‘Pop goes the weasel!’ my husband exclaimed, expertly muddying the waters. We had just been listening to another news bulletin that referred to the Chancellor of the Exchequer being expected to ‘break her pledge’ in the Budget. It seemed to me that the ink on pledges were scarcely dry before they became aspirations that came to nothing. We are told that not raising income tax was ‘a key manifesto pledge’. Why don’t we imitate the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of our forebears and resort to frithborh or frank-pledge? It was a system making each householder of a tithing (ten households) responsible for the other nine. This fits in with the root meaning of pledge – a hostage held as security for the fulfilment of a promise.

Are you a survivor? We are not, luckily, all Gloria Gaynors. She declared in 1979: ‘I’ve got all my life to live, and I’ve got all my love to give/ And I will survive.’ She has so far made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. ‘She would be earning a good living somewhere… The Mary Taylors of the world were natural survivors,’ wrote P.D. James in Shroud for a Nightingale in 1971. Now, even a new biography of Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509) is subtitled Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker. But what of those poor people who have gone through the misery of child sexual ‘grooming’? Are they victims or survivors? Or should they be neither?

‘“I am not screwed,” replied the Caterpillar, solemnly. “Whisky and potass does not agree with everybody; but I am not screwed, not at all.” So speaking he sat down rather suddenly.’ By screwed he meant ‘drunk’ of course. The Caterpillar is not the one in Alice in Wonderland but the nickname of a fifth-former in a book you might not wish your wife or your servants to read. It is The Hill by Horace Annesley Vachell (1905) about boys at Harrow, more particularly the love between them. Surprisingly it caused no outrage at the time. The Caterpillar was drunk on whisky, then sometimes mixed with potassium bicarbonate water. In Doctor Claudius (1883) by F.

‘Oh, no!’ cried my husband from the other room in the tones of one who has upset the goldfish bowl on to a rare book. I rushed in, despite previous experience, and found the problem was that the BBC had just referred to ‘Princess Catherine’. To take his mind off it, I told him about Bedfordshire putting its foot down on the spelling of one of its villages. In future, when a road sign needs replacing, it will refer to Yelden – not Yielden or even Yieldon. There had been an attempt to resolve the uncertainty in 1998 when villagers were asked what they thought the village was called. Thirty said it was ‘Yielden’, but 44 said ‘Yelden’. The Royal Mail used the spelling Yielden but the Victoria County History (1912) had no doubts about calling it Yelden.

‘It’s got to be greenlighted,’ said my husband, as though saying so made it true. I had been complaining of the vogue for using greenlit in the sense of both gave the go-ahead and given the go-ahead. In an obituary, the Times noted a low moment in the career of the film executive Frank Price, when ‘he greenlit a sci-fi comedy about an alien duck who finds love on Earth with a singer named Cherry Bomb’. The Observer looked back on the recent history of the National Gallery, when ‘the Sainsbury Wing revamp was greenlit’. My husband’s reasoning was that when referring to the means by which things are illuminated, one says moonlit, sunlit, lamplit, firelit.