“They should ask me. I’m a complete cripple,” said my husband, heaving himself from his chair with great determination to reach the whisky. Britain’s Department for Transport is asking disabled people whether the term invalid carriage in legislation should be changed and what term they might prefer was used instead. “Language has moved on and
“Why doesn’t anyone ever do what you ask them to?” inquired my husband, who is something of an expert on the question, I should have thought. He was referring specifically 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.”
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. Short-haul journeys preceded by decades the
It may most often be used now as an echo of Parker
“What fresh hell can this be?” Dorothy Parker would ask if the doorbell rang. Now fresh hell has been freshly added to the Oxford English Dictionary. But was Parker the onlie begetter of the phrase? The hunt has been on to find earlier examples. The OED quotes a ghostly story within The Pickwick Papers (1837)
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.” Gaynor has, so far, made good on her promise. Surviving afflictions unscathed is not always an unmixed virtue. “She would be
“‘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 the nickname of a pupil in The Hill (1905) by Horace Annesley Vachell about
The compound word describes what the vulgar press calls a supermoon
The history of the word is fearfully complicated and obscure
We never used to use the term in speech
The hash has grown in importance since 2007 when Twitter introduced the hashtag
To own occupies a semantic field which turns out to be a Grimpen Mire
A surd number or quantity is irrational, such as the square root of two
Whatever spick and span reminds us of, it is as an idiom with a cheery meaning of its own
I was put in mind of lounging by video conferencing, which allows conferees to attend to their visible top half while wearing lounge pants below
I started at the word gifting like a horse shying at a plastic bag caught in the hedge. Why didn’t I like it?
Scots has been used as a spoken and a literary language
‘Shock’, from the French ‘choque’, began as the word for a collision of armies
