One can push many things — a pen, one’s luck or (up) daisies. But the MP Dominic Raab told the Daily Telegraph last week that Theresa May and Boris Johnson ‘are demonstrating courage in pushing the diplomatic envelope’. Since the most famous envelope recently enclosed Mrs May’s letter to Donald Tusk, this figure of speech
‘It has become something of a King Charles’ head, or should that be a King Charles’s head?’ said my husband, laughing, as though he had made a joke. By ‘it’ he meant the apostrophe, which forces its way into any discussion of grammar, just as the head of the King and Martyr forced itself into
Everybody’s saying it, even though the latest research declares that only 6 per cent of the population is given to the habit. I mean saying an historic. Sir John Major, though a Knight of the Garter, is proud of his origins in Brixton and Worcester Park, but started the present vogue at Chatham House in
Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to put in the ointment. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ he said. ‘They were told about it years ago.’ He was not referring to medical matters but to the spelling of the hospital’s name, attached to the building in
Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a pirate radio station. Last week he got into hot water when he said on the radio that his wife was ‘utterly dedicated to her job, as indeed are the other girls in my office’. Before
Don’t tell my husband, but I have been having doubts. (He never reads this column, so our secret is safe.) The doubt is about meet with. I always regarded it is a pleonasm, and a rebarbative one, being of American origin. Theresa May made a mark, one way or another, by meeting President Trump. She
What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m glad he supplied an answer, for I know no Yiddish and less Hebrew, and the Oxford English Dictionary is reticent. Kippah first appeared in the OED in 1997, with the bare etymology ‘from Hebrew’. Philologus
I have long pondered the motive with which Michael Wharton, for long the author of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple column, gave a memorable detail in his second volume of memories, A Dubious Codicil, about the habits of his rival Colin Welch: ‘He had a habit of picking his nose, occasionally tasting the extracted mucus
The number of things I don’t know is infinite — or infinite minus one, if such as number exists, since I discovered something the other day: the most unlikely origin for a common phrase. I could hardly believe it at first. A perfectly current idiom in English is to talk of people currying favour, in
‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much like rocket salad and wishes all supplies had perished along with the lettuces of Spain. So as a distraction I tried telling him that rocket leaves were connected with street urchins, caterpillars, caprices and hedgehogs.
A law I’d like to see passed would exact severe penalties for the use of the word trope. It is as welcome in our language as toxic particulates are in the air we breathe. I saw a piece in the Guardian about a dramatic monologue called The Encounter offering ‘a recognised narrative trope: the white
Waiting for my husband in a Rome hotel, I was reduced to reading some of the weekend newspaper supplements. The Italians think themselves highly fashionable, and using words from English cements the image. La Repubblica’s weekly magazine called D has two sections with English names: Beauty and Lifestyle. Coverage of Paris Fashion Week was headlined
‘This carnage stops here,’ declared the headline in the Daily Telegraph, quoting President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech. My husband tried to make little jokes about it. ‘Would you buy a used carnage from this man?’ was probably the best, by which you can imagine the standard of the others. I wondered when I first read
‘Look, darling, a spelling mistake,’ said my husband, looking out of the window, as he had been for minutes, like a lonely old woman. Sure enough, a van was parked in the street with a word painted on the side: Carillion. Now, an unpleasant collection of bells hit automatically by hammers is called a carillon.
The title of America’s first woman bishop was claimed in 1918 by Bishop Alma White, leader of the Pillar of Fire Church, noted for her feminism, anti-Semitism and anti-Catholicism, for her alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, and for her nativism. I was puzzled by the word. After all, Native Americans are what we used
Here are eight invasive Americanisms to continue annoying us in 2017. Running for office. Liz Kendall was ‘running for the party leadership last year’, the Times said. In Britain she should have been standing. Standing in line. A mother was ‘standing in line at the Post Office to collect her benefits’, said the Daily Mail.
Here are the first 50 words in the order that they were learnt by a child called Will: 1 uh-oh; 2 alldone; 3 light; 4 down; 5 shoes; 6 baby; 7 don’t-throw; 8 moo; 9 bite; 10 three; 11 hi; 12 cheese; 13 up; 14 quack-quack; 15 oink-oink; 16 coat; 17 beep-beep; 18 keys; 19 cycle; 20 mama; 21 daddy; 22 siren
My husband has an irritating habit of holding his hymn book open at the right page but obviously not referring to the text as he belts out carols. He is perfectly happy growling, in what he thinks a light baritone, the Latin version of ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’, even the fourth verse, beginning: ‘Ergo
‘When I asked the bank,’ said my husband, ‘they were no help at all.’ My attention was distracted from his Kafkaesque predicament, which is both typical and too complicated to explain. Instead I was pondering the reference to the bank as they. This is well established in British English. The bank, Sainsbury’s or England (the
There’s something suspicious about the name for a fear of clowns which was on the shortlist of words of the year compiled by Oxford Dictionaries. This phobia, coulrophobia, oddly enough illustrates the meaning of Oxford’s eventual chosen winner: post-truth. Post-truth applies to a circumstance ‘in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion