Dot Wordsworth

‘That’s nice,’ said my husband, taking a Nice biscuit with his coffee. It was his little joke. The biscuit is named after the French city, though no one knows why. Like the trainers, the city was named after the goddess Nike when it was founded by Greeks in the 4th century bc. Nice, as in

In Kyiv they have voted to change the names of some metro stations. Heroes of the Dnieper is to become Heroes of Ukraine. The station was named after the street outside, and there’s nothing wrong with the river Dnieper, which winds its S-shape through Ukraine like the Grand Canal through Venice. The trouble was that

‘It’s not as nice as it looks,’ said my husband, not leaving time to look it in the mouth before wolfing down the lemon and sultana Danish that I had thoughtfully bought him, reduced on account of its age. ‘Every day in this store,’ the till at Marks & Spencer’s had told me in a

I saw in last week’s Spectator that the tractor MP had applied for the stewardship of the Manor of Northstead. After only a few days, the Chancellor of the Exchequer granted him this office of profit under the Crown, which disqualifies him from continuing as an MP. These days, when it is hard to book

Are we living in a new pornocracy? The first one spanned six decades of the 10th century, during which there were 12 popes. Their elections were much influenced by Theodora, wife of the powerful consul Theophylact, and her daughter Marozia. The idea of loose women running the papacy so excited Edward Gibbon that in The

‘What’s that?’ asked my husband, looking at my laptop. ‘Fibonacci fossilised?’ His question made no sense, but I saw what he meant. I was looking at a diagram of ‘the fabulous semantic engine, a sort of virtual sausage machine’ that I mentioned last week. The diagram was circular, like a compass-rose with 37 points. Each

To evade algorithms that hunt down forbidden words, users of platforms like TikTok employ cryptic synonyms. So dead becomes unalive, and the pandemic becomes panini or Panda Express. A technology journalist in her mid-thirties, Taylor Lorenz, drew attention to the trend last week in the Washington Post, calling the vocabulary ‘algospeak’. But why should anyone

The man who invented gifs, Stephen Wilhite, has died, aged 74. Controversy survives him – over how to pronounce the thing. A gif was a format that, from 1987, allowed graphics to be shared by otherwise incompatible computers. The name came from the initials of Graphics Interchange Format. That was not decisive, for the word

I never cared much for the word sibling, though I hardly knew why. The reason must be that it was introduced by a scientist, Karl Pearson, who in 1900 wrote of the ‘inconvenience of our language having preserved no word for either member of a pair of offspring of either or both sexes from the

‘Half! Half! Half!’ exclaimed my husband like a performing sea lion. Not that sea lions perform any more, but you get the simile. He was emphasising the pronunciation of the first syllable of Hertford, which, as he rightly said, has no T sound. He had worked himself up because on Twitter there was a froth

In 2019, Boris Johnson hit out at ‘the doomsters and the gloomsters’. I was surprised then to find that the doublet doom and gloom dated only from 1947, in the play Finian’s Rainbow. Three years after the 2016 referendum, Project Fear was still being applied to Brexit. Since then, to buy time in combating coronavirus,

The most emboldened man on earth must be Vladimir Putin. Everything seems to embolden him. Treating Russia as a pariah state could embolden him, wrote someone in the Telegraph, but Barack Obama’s previous attempts to engage with him had just emboldened him, wrote someone else. Liz Truss on a visit to Kiev last month, insisted

‘This will interest you,’ said my husband, looking up from the smeared screen of his telephone. For once he was right. It was a Twitter post about a memorable remark during the invasion of Ukraine. Snake Island is a small, bare outpost in the Black Sea near the Danube Delta. When a Russian cruiser invited

A strange crisis has befallen like. It had long been an object of obloquy and vilification in two functions. The first was as a filler, of the same kind as you know: ‘He was, like, my favourite guy.’ Then it evolved into a formula for reporting; so, in place of ‘I was surprised’, we find:

In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4 broadcast them separately from the soap opera, in which the village policeman has been driven to conversion by playing Jesus. My husband, commenting on all this, said that ‘of course’ the word mystery meant a

A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked and last month failed in his appeal. A reader wrote to me saying he came across the word pikeys in the 1970s in Oxfordshire and ‘understood it to mean dishonest low-life characters, though not necessarily

‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a play on the German Spätkapitalismus, ‘late capitalism’. There is also a German wine category called Spätlese, ‘late harvest’, and another, when the grapes are exposed to noble rot and allowed to wither on the vine,

‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the Summa Theologiae. There aren’t all that many jokes in Thomas Aquinas’s survey for beginners in the field of theology. As it’s such a large field, his summary runs to 1,800,000 words. (Incidentally, just as Dan