The learned Peter Jones, who always surprises me by how young he is, considering his almost first-hand knowledge of the ancient world, invited or challenged me to explain how sycophant, which to the Greeks of old meant an informer and false witness, came to mean a flatterer. I foolishly thought I’d found out after a
The word panjandrum has been popping up recently. I have noticed it from the pens of Andreas Whittam Smith, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Brian Sewell, Simon Hoggart and funny old Roy Greenslade. It sounds like a proper word, one with an ancient etymology, although it is fairly widely known that it was invented in 1755 by Samuel
In email addresses we find a punctuation mark /. There is a widespread and strong feeling against calling this a forward slash or just slash. The / once languished like the @ on the typewriter keyboard, seldom used except by the billing department (‘To one gross wingnuts @ 1/3 a dozen … 15/-’). It was
You know how you can tell a Frenchwoman or a Spaniard in a crowd without hearing them speak a word? Well, a friend of my husband’s who is interested in anthropology refers to that bundle of cultural characteristics as the jizz. It was not a word with which I was familiar outside a fairly grubby
I have been surprised by a doctor, an event I had thought impossible after all these years not being surprised by my husband. But then, the doctor admirabilis, Dr P.C.H Schofield of Croydon, goes so far as to admit being ‘astounded’. This episode of being astounded was accomplished during a viewing of The Merchant of
More on treacle, thanks to Mr Christopher Couchman of Bath, who sends a lovely recipe for Venice treacle, taken from the English Dispensatory of John Quincy (who died in 1722). My husband, before going off on some pharmaceutically funded freebie, said he remembered the book but hadn’t used it recently. I love strange lists, but
I think that, like a hosepipe ban, we might just be spared the permanent establishment of the term 7/7. After all, some people were inexplicably fond of the phrase Y2K, meaning 2000, and it seems as ridiculous now as platform soles for men. I find 7/7 distasteful. It is non-native, and it makes claims for
To Sir John Hall, Bt (not to be confused with the other Sir John Hall, Bt, the magician), I owe the most satisfying defining statement I have seen for a long time: ‘The chief use of vipers is for the making of treacle.’ Sir John did not write that sentence himself, for his subject was
As his contribution to Anglo-Islamic understanding, my husband asked me what the connection was between genius loci and the genie in the bottle. I couldn’t say that I knew, although I don’t suppose Osama bin Laden knows either. Genius is complicated semantically. I think it has gone a step further than the OED suggests, now
‘It’s a Welsh rare bit,’ said my husband carefully, staring at some toasted cheese on toast. What, I asked him, would a ‘rare bit’ be like that wasn’t Welsh? He was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer. It is strange that people not only insist on spelling Welsh rabbit as Welsh rarebit, but
A glory of British packaging was the Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup tin depicting a dead lion under what appeared to be a cloud of flies. If the tin was kept in a damp larder long enough, spots of rust would spread through the sticky deposit round its rim. Next to the dead lion was
A recent cartoon in the Los Angeles Times showed a punkish teenager saying to a more conventional youth, ‘I’m bored. Can I shave your head?’ Ho, ho. But then the paper published a letter from ‘Merrill’ from Nova Scotia saying, ‘Would you please explain why nobody here knows the difference between can and may? In
‘Have you noticed,’ asked Kim Fletcher, a man, at a party to launch his brilliant new Journalist’s Handbook, ‘how people say testament when they mean testimony?’ I couldn’t quite say I had, yet a nagging feeling in my brain suggested he was on to something, so I looked through the newspapers to examine their testimony.
I have been enjoying in a way a book my husband gave me for my birthday called Shop Horror (Fourth Estate, £10). This compilation by Guy Swillingham of colour photographs of the ‘best of the worst in British shop names’ shares something of the spirit of Martin Parr’s Boring Postcards, which were, of course, not
An unquiet correspondent sends a ‘breath of rage’ all the way from Burrum Heads, Queensland. ‘I do wish you could manage to educate some of your fellow columnists,’ barks Mr Geoff Baker, adding a few paragraphs about ‘ignorance’, ‘solecisms, ‘disappointment’, ‘Bad English’, ‘after-hours adult education’. Goodness! What have we done? Why, we’ve used ‘or not’
This week: the mystery of the missing banister. But first an example of equable temperament, compared with many inquirers into language, from Dr Sylvia Moody. She mildly wonders why we sometimes say ‘a friend of the family’ and sometimes ‘a friend of the family’s’. The latter construction (like ‘a habit of mine’, ‘a play of
‘What does SIM mean?’ asked my husband, looking up like a sulky sunset from a mobile-phone instruction booklet. Well, I knew what it was, but not what the acronym stood for. This independence of word and significand allows the tiresome multiplication of new labels for new technological gadgets, but it also teaches old words to
I was surprised by the number of people who disliked the Daily Telegraph’s headline on the election of Cardinal Ratzinger to the papacy: ‘“God’s rottweiler” is the new pope’. I don’t think it was meant to be as rude as many thought. But what puzzled me was that I had never heard anyone refer to
‘He has just had a lunch of eels and is in good spirits,’ wrote Mr Alistair McKay of Mr George Melly, in the Scotsman. ‘If he finds it tiresome to talk about himself, he does a fine job of disguising it. But the stories are worth waiting for and the louche music of his voice
Usher, who is no relation of Poe’s unfortunate family, has, I hear, decreed that jeans and trainers are not enough. Usher is an African-American singer, with a new interest in gentility. He is shocked by people not saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and he is disgusted by ‘profanity’. Profanity in this context is language of