Dot Wordsworth

John Hutton, before he settled down to the blameless task of reporting on public-sector pensions, was accused of writing poetry. He did not deny the practice but did reject the authorship of a verse about Gordon Brown, when he was still prime minister: ‘At Downing Street/ Upon the stair/ I met a man who wasn’t Blair./ He wasn’t Blair again today./ Oh how I wish he’d go away.’ Mr Hutton said: ‘I would write better poetry.’ But I have not had the pleasure of seeing any of his since. One politician who has published poetry recently is Herman Van Rompuy, the Belgian who is President of the European Council. In Britain he is mocked on those grounds alone, but even more for having a funny name — something many foreigners have.

The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word. The squeeze that the middle classes are enjoying in this frenzy of cuts and taxation is not what the middle classes once liked to mean by the word. In mad King George’s golden reign, a squeeze was a thronged party. ‘The heads of all the Norwich people are in a whirl, occasioned by the routs which have been introduced amongst them this winter,’ wrote the bluestocking Anna Laetitia Barbauld in a letter to her brother in 1779. ‘Do you know the different terms? There is a squeeze, a fuss, a drum, a rout; and lastly, a hurricane, when the whole house is full from top to bottom.

Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph hours after his election. Is there a new Labour language from the new Labour leader? It is not always easy to identify a politician’s dialect, because his speeches and articles may be written by others, but presumably Ed Miliband got as far as approving the first sentence of his first article, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph hours after his election. ‘Yesterday,’ he wrote, ‘the Labour party committed to start the long journey back to power.

Sounding, in this respect alone, like a High Court judge, my husband asked: ‘What are HobNobs?’ Sounding, in this respect alone, like a High Court judge, my husband asked: ‘What are HobNobs?’ For once I felt like agreeing with the assumption behind the question: that there are names for foodstuffs that we cannot be expected to keep up with. Of course I knew what a HobNob was, though I admit to being vaguer on cheese string, or is it string cheese? Veronica is past the age for such things, and none of us ever saw a Turkey Twizzler. Only when leafing (or paging as some writers suddenly prefer to call it) through the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Word Origins (edited by Julia Cresswell, £9.

‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen. ‘Quick, darling, you’re missing the last taboo,’ shouted my husband from the drawing-room with the television on, as I was working in the kitchen. He is a collector of last taboos. Once, it was death. Since there’s been geriatric sex (when he loudly complained of the misuse of geriatric), sex-change surgery live, The Vagina Monologues, Tourettism and Joan Bakewell. Yet linguistic taboos about race, sex (‘gender’) and disability have multiplied, despite the popularity of ever more ingeniously obscene slang. On the same principle as Wikipedia, these swell the online Urban Dictionary weekly.

Mr Peter Andrews writes to tell me that he was told by a lawyer with whom he used to be a school that a moot point is not one that is debatable, but one that has already been decided. This is not news that has reached the Oxford English Dictionary, which happens to have revised its entry on moot only a few weeks ago. Originally, a moot point was one proposed for discussion at a moot. A moot, in the legal sense, was either ‘a discussion of a hypothetical case by law students for practice’ or ‘a hypothetical doubtful case that may be used for discussion’.

Every time he hears the words Big Society on the television or radio, my husband shouts out ‘Pig society!’ I am unsure whether he is inspired by George Orwell or the Earl of Emsworth’s Empress of Blandings. Every time he hears the words Big Society on the television or radio, my husband shouts out ‘Pig society!’ I am unsure whether he is inspired by George Orwell or the Earl of Emsworth’s Empress of Blandings. But if the Big Society is a great idea and not just a big idea why should it not be the Great Society? After all, we live in Great Britain, not Big Britain. I know that people watch Big Brother, eat Big Macs and sell the Big Issue or apply for grants from the Big Lottery Fund.

I have never seen the point of quiche, so I noticed with equanimity a hole where the quiche should be on the shelves of my local Sainsbury’s. I have never seen the point of quiche, so I noticed with equanimity a hole where the quiche should be on the shelves of my local Sainsbury’s. ‘Due to production issues,’ said a sign, ‘availability across quiche has been affected.’ Issues was to be expected, since mass-amnesia has lost the word problems. But the sign represented a new high-point in the rise of across. I suppose here, in the world of quiche, it meant ‘of all kinds’.

Mr Nick Clegg attracted some mockery recently by using the words cuts and progressive in the same sentence. Mr George Osborne, in his Budget speech, said: ‘We are a progressive alliance governing in the national interest.’ Some accused them of using the word progressive because it meant nothing. In reality progressive means several things. Usage slides from one to another. Thus Mr Clegg had spoken in the same interview about reduced taxes for the poor (or, rather, ‘people on lower incomes’). Taxation which increases according to income is called progressive taxation. This appeals to progressive-minded people. The latter sense is the most slippery. Fortunately, the Oxford English Dictionary last month updated its entry for progressive.

A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’. A reader has written to complain that a contributor to The Spectator used the construction ‘I was sat’. Veronica has also shown me an article in the Daily Mail about sex tourists in Thailand, which says: ‘Sat at a crowded bar at 2 a.m. is Peter.’ This is a most unaccountable usage, rolling over us unstoppably. Yet when I turned to The Spectator (no relation) written by Joseph Addison for July 20, 1711, I found this: ‘The Court was sat before Sir Roger came; but notwithstanding all the Justices had taken their Places upon the Bench, they made room for the old Knight at the Head of them.

That nice Tristram Hunt, the meteorologist’s son turned MP, was on Newsnight Review and used the word mitigate. That nice Tristram Hunt, the meteorologist’s son turned MP, was on Newsnight Review and used the word mitigate. ‘You mean militate,’ cut in Germaine Greer. And he did. We all commit malapropisms. The brain fumbles for a ready-made phrase and picks up the wrong one. On the same programme the clever Phillip Blond kept using phenomena as a singular, and I thought, with a little surprise, that he must know no better. But later on, after Dr Greer’s schoolmarmish intervention, he managed a phenomenon or two without strain.

My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments. My husband and Alfred Lord Tennyson have much in common — not a poetic soul, it is true, but a tendency to reach for the decanter and to mutter offensive comments. At a dinner attended by Gladstone, Holman Hunt, Francis Palgrave and Thomas Woolner in 1865, conversation turned to the rebellion at Morant Bay, Jamaica and its repression. As Gladstone expatiated on the cruelty of the white man, Tennyson was heard to provide a sotto voce obbligato: ‘Niggers are tigers; niggers are tigers.’ No doubt the poet laureate was moved as much by the sound of the words as their meaning.

Disney has, I hear, decided to rename its animated film Rapunzel (due at cinemas in time for Advent) Tangled. It is thought that little boys would not want to go to see a film named after a heroine. But since Rapunzel herself is named after a root vegetable, they might perhaps have called the film Rampion instead. It has a manly sound, as if it were the name of a television detective. In the story that we vaguely remember from the Brothers Grimm, a man steals some rampion from an enchantress’s garden because his wife says: ‘If I can’t eat some of the rampion which is in the garden behind our house I shall die.’ Why the woman should want rampion, goodness knows.

There is an apparently successful book called Here Come the Tickle Bugs! by Uncle Sillyhead III. Its audience is among three-and-a-half-year-olds. ‘When children are silly, no kisses or hugs. Only tickles from the Tickle Bugs!’ At this point the adult reading the story is meant to tickle the child. I can see the attraction, from the child’s point of view. Veronica loved being tickled, for a bit. Sometimes, though, it made her feel sick. My husband says that in 1897 a couple of American psychologists called G. Stanley Hall and Arthur Allin came up with a distinction between two kinds of tickling, knismesis and gargalesis.