Dot Wordsworth

‘We’re not throwing man overboard overboard,’ says the Royal Yachting Association. ‘It’s a universally recognised term that we want people to use in an emergency.’ It has little choice, since man overboard is incorporated in international treaties. So the association recommends its use only when following safety procedures, ‘until this is able to change’. Until

Dame Anna Wintour, with her rather marvellous bob hairdo, this month became chief content officer for Condé Nast. I had forgotten that a couple of years ago she was appointed a Companion of Honour – one of those interesting people the King likes to have for lunch. And I couldn’t remember whether I’d written here

Just before the earth opened up, Sir Keir Starmer said of his deputy: ‘Angela came from a very humble background, battled all sorts of challenges along the way, and there she is proudly.’ We all know what pride comes before. Humble seemed a genteel word to use. Deprived would have sounded harsh; poor too Victorian;

‘Do you know how many people Hallmark cards employs?’ asked my husband. I didn’t, and nor would he, had he not just looked it up on Wikipedia. ‘Seven?’ I replied. ‘No.’ ‘A million?’ ‘Now you’re just being silly.’ The reason that the birthday card people had come up was because James Heale began his column

‘That’s a boy cow,’ said a woman in the train to a little girl, adding in an aside to an adult companion: ‘I didn’t use the other word because it’s too much like…’ The other word must have been bullock and the word it too much resembled was bollock. Bollock used to be spelt ballock.

When this century began we were complaining (or I was) of the ubiquity of absolutely to signal agreement. The interjection has been around for 200 years. (It occurs in Jane Eyre, 1847.) It became objectionable by overuse. At least it was amenable to jokey tmesis by inserting a suitable expletive: abso-bloody-lutely. But now I reach

I spent some time looking for the connection between the ancient city of Canopus and the English canopy. Nelson won the Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay. The bay was named after the city of Abu Qir, which was named after a Christian martyr, St Cyrus. Abu Qir stands on the site of the

‘Spook or spoof?’ asked my husband, throwing a copy of the paper over to me, and only missing by a foot. When I’d picked it up, I read the headline: ‘Fully Chinese-made drone spooking Ukraine air defence.’ Then I read the introduction of the report: ‘A new Russian decoy drone used to spoof Ukrainian air-defences

During the last Olympics, Jane Edwards from Worcestershire wrote to the Times observing that Mrs Malaprop herself would have found stiff competition from commentators saying: ‘Edging their bets’, ‘Having a conflab’, ‘In one fowl swoop’ and ‘Off his own back’. The Olympic legacy has certainly included ‘off his own back’. It is curious how often

The courtship rituals of the Treasury and the Office for Budget Responsibility last ten weeks. The consummation is a fiscal event, such as the Budget coming in the autumn, if we survive. Eligible young ladies used to have dance cards on which to enter the names of their suitors. The Treasury has a scorecard on

‘Am I housebound?’ asked my husband as I was discussing with him the complicated history of the name for his role in life. ‘No, darling,’ I said. ‘You’re the one in the house who just is or lives there.’ Only later did I tell him that the word bond, behind the -band of husband, sank

‘She and I work together, we think together,’ said Sir Keir Starmer of Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. ‘In the past, there have been examples – I won’t give any specific – of chancellors and prime ministers who weren’t in lockstep. We’re in lockstep.’ ‘Sounds like you and me,’ said my husband sarcastically.

‘What larks!’ exclaimed my husband archly, assuming that a connection between personal independence payments and Pip in Great Expectations would be amusing. But it is true that the political wrangle over personal independence payments would have been harder to popularise without the cheery abbreviation. Some of us remember Denis Healey’s promise to ‘squeeze property speculators

The FT headline said: ‘Man Group orders quants back to office five days a week.’ I didn’t know what quants were and all my husband could say was: ‘Complete quants’, as though it were funny. Of course I kept thinking of Mary Quant, and I suppose her name was French in origin. There was a

Sir Keir Starmer said the other day that he wanted to put rocket boosters under AI. It’s not the only thing he wants to put rocket boosters under. In September he said that ‘new planning passports will put rocket boosters under housebuilding’. He wasn’t the only one. When it was his turn to be prime

Sir Keir Starmer said ‘he could “not imagine” the circumstances in which he would sanction a new referendum’ on Scottish independence, the Times reported the other day. The Mirror said Amazon ‘has agreed to sanction businesses that boost their star ratings with bogus reviews’. So we find sanction being used with completely opposite meanings: ‘give

On X, that old-fashioned site still used by people like me, someone called Henri tweeted: ‘babe wake up Waste Land new hard as hell cover just dropped’. Appended was a Penguin Classics cover illustrated with an apocalyptic picture which I think was a work from 2010 called The Harrowing of Hell, by David Adams. It

With surprise, I heard from a Jewish friend that a Hebrew term for a heretic is epikoros, apparently derived from the Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-270 bc). The word cropped up recently in a row over a film on the life of Baruch Spinoza, showing that he is not forgiven more than 360 years after his

‘Farage is no leader,’ said Rupert Lowe MP. ‘He is a coward and a viper.’ Cedric Hardwicke immediately came to mind. As Dr Arnold in Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1940), he exclaims to Flashman: ‘You are a bully, a coward and a liar. There is no longer any place for you at Rugby.’ But I’m not

During the conclave the BBC headlines kept on calling it ‘secretive’. The effect on my husband each time was much like that of a child kicking the back of his seat on an aeroplane. He was annoyed. I could tell by the way he shouted. Secretive is a pejorative adjective. The ending –ive implies a