Dot Wordsworth

I was just looking up malarkey when my husband called out in the tones of a man who has found a glass eye in his porridge. 'Looks like yours,' he said, fishing a bit of paper out of the first volume of Phineas Finn as if with tongs. He was not wrong, it had my writing on it, and I wish I had found the note before, when Sir Ned Sherrin wrote about morning meaning 'afternoon'. For here in chapter four Trollope writes, 'He called at Portman Square at about half-past two on the Sunday morning. Yes, – Lady Laura was in the drawing-room. The hall-porter admitted as much, but evidently seemed to think that he had been disturbed from his dinner before his time.

Mr John Ross, a reader from Derbyshire, was struck by the strange juxtaposition of two phrases of different flavours in the second chapter of Scott's Kenilworth. On the same page the host says 'I wot not' and another character, Mr Goldthread the mercer, says in answer to a question, 'That I have, old boy.' Mr Russ associates old boy with public schools, not with the England of Elizabeth I. Scott is a far from reliable authority on the historic use of language. He was writing fiction, after all, and he sprinkled the page with god wots and forsooths on a suggestive rather than an accurate principle. His magpie antiquarianism sometimes tempted him into error, though never in such a spectacular way as Browning with his celebrated misapprehension of the meaning of twat as 'a nun's headdress'.

A kind-hearted reader wondered whether Chinaman might not be a derogatory term. I used it the other week. If you believe the Encarta dictionary, it is not just derogatory – it is offensive. But then, the (mainly Zulu) Encarta (as I like to think of it, in memory of the BBC World Service's invariable phrase each time it mentions the homophonic South African party Inkatha) opines that Montezuma's revenge is offensive, to the shade of Montezuma for all I know. The thing itself can certainly offend. It is hard to know why Chinaman should be offensive. There seems to be a general reluctance to call foreigners by anything too concrete. Thus Spaniard sounds a bit rude, and so does Jew. 'A Spanish person' or 'a Jewish person' is much more refined.

Veronica has been playing Hail to the Thief, I won't say non-stop, but as obsessively as one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn't got a big enough run and keeps pecking at its reflection in its water-can. She is revising simultaneously. I'd have thought she was too old for this sort of thing, but apparently Radiohead yokes the generations in a sort of spirit of the Blitz. Far be it from me to criticise the music of Thom Yorke and his chums, but what of the lyrics? Remember when Bob Dylan was compared to Keats. Absurd; Keats is a feeble lyricist – fancy using been as a rhyme-word in the first quatrain of 'On first looking into Chapman's Homer'.

'If you dial 1471,' writes Dr Roger James, a reader, naturally, 'you are likely to be told by a recorded female voice that "The caller withheld their number." This is an example of the difficulties that our language gets into because it lacks a word that means "his" or "her". Years ago, she would have said, "The caller withheld his number," but political correctness has taboo'd that way out. What should the recorded operator say?' What, indeed? I think I prefer 'The caller withheld their number' to 'The number you have dialled knows you are waiting', which is not true literally or figuratively. The loss of he as a sexually neutral pronoun is certainly a nuisance, more often awkward than the loss of man in the sense 'anthropos' or 'homo'.

'Of course Gladstone was 20 times cleverer than you,' said my husband. 'Much more, most likely. Why should anyone think different?' '"Differently", darling. Anyway, they don't mind my saying "cleverer than you". It's "cleverer than me" they don't like.' My husband is easily defeated and went back to his Famous Grouse and his Herwig's Art of Curing Sympathetically. Some chance. Yes, I had written 'cleverer than me' (5 April), not of conscious purpose, but because the construction must have entered my mental syntax replication machinery. It all hinges on whether than is a conjunction or a preposition. If it can be the latter, I'm in the clear. It did not take me long to find an eminent ally in Dr Robert Burchfield, the editor of New Fowler's Modern English Usage.

My husband has just been to a professional conference in La Rioja. Why do doctors feel they confer better in places renowned for wine? I was allowed along for the ride, although it meant that even when we had a delicious dinner (those bream with gold-painted noses and bits of animals that would make Digby Anderson's heart glow) it was to the accompaniment of conversation about ventilation and macabre things done with butterflies. There was a poor Chinaman at a neighbouring table with never a grain of rice to be had unsteeped in milk and cinnamon, and I began to experience the sense of the alien that he must have felt when we ventured into the nearby Basque country. Wales I can cope with; one soon learns that tacsi means 'taxi'.

Sir Ned Sherrin is beautifully vindicated by Mrs Beeton. He had wondered (Mind your language, 15 March) whether 'morning performances' of plays mightn't, like other morning social activities of the mid-19th century, have been undertaken in the afternoon. His particular interest was the matinée performances staged by Squire Bancroft at the Prince of Wales's Theatre, which he took over in 1865. This theatre, later named the Scala, was in Tottenham Street, near Tottenham Court Road, London, and was in the later 1860s the sharp end of new, realistic drama by playwrights such as Tom Robertson.

I was trying the other day to find out who first came up with the term moral equivalence, and so I turned to Twentieth Century Words, edited by John Ayto (Oxford). He doesn't list it, though he has Moral Rearmament (1938) and Moral Majority (1979). Dr Ayto arranges his words by decade, and gives the first year in which each word is recorded. In most cases examples might still turn up from slightly earlier years. One of the mistakes people make in using dictionaries is not to realise that when the Oxford English Dictionary gives as its earliest citation a word used by Milton, say, it is not suggesting that he invented the word. Even the intelligent Geoffrey Madan, I think, made this mistake in his Notebooks. Anyway I soon found myself lost in the 1940s.

Mr Peter Bonnett from Downham Market, Norfolk, appeals to me as 'The Spectator's custodian of language'. God forbid! I have troubles enough! Mr Bonnett is worried about the prevalent confusion between deprecate and depreciate, and I had just written down my deprecatory exclamations when what should I come across in the fat OED but a quotation from 1631, from proceedings in the Court of Star Chamber: 'My Lord Keeper answered with a deprecation: God forbid that Norfolke should be divided in custome from all England.' Well! Koestler, thou shouldst be living at this hour! I have now used up my allowance of exclamation marks for the year. Deprecate, barring obsolete usages, means either 'pray against evil' (to ward it off) or 'to express earnest disapproval of'.

A curious piece of information came the other day from my friend Patrick Williams, the chef and flute-player, accompanying a very English set of photographs of the people of Canterbury observing preparations for the Enthronement of Dr Rowan Williams as Archbishop. Mr Williams told me that he'd seen a programme dated 1862 for an 'Enthronization' in the cathedral. Well, I thought, perhaps that was for the American market, although transatlantic tourists must have been rare then. The event must have been the enthronement of Archbishop Longley. The ceremony had been revived by his predecessor Archbishop Sumner in 1848. Before that the last archbishop enthroned in person was Wake in 1716.

'What do you mean, "gapering"?' asked my husband during a pause from shouting at the television. 'Is it like capering?' He wasn't following, because he had been busy excoriating a television reporter for invoking global warming on the local news. (Local news means uninteresting things that have happened near you. It is even worse in London, since a lot of real news happens there, so the criterion is to save the chaff for the local bulletin. I only have it on while waiting for the weather forecast.) Before picking up my husband's dropped stitch, I'd like to apologise to Dr Christopher Heneghan, the anaesthetist barrister, for spelling his name wrong. Secondly I'd like to show off a card from Sir John Keegan, which is now pasted in my autograph album.

Veronica tells me she is 'against the war'. At least she hasn't joined up for the Baath party. While she was making a placard or two on the kitchen table, I have been puzzling over a letter from an anaesthetist. But before that, may I mention a couple more figures of speech that the war has thrown up? One comes out of an incident near ad-Diwaniyah where an American marine was killed and another wounded by fire from Iraqi irregulars. A marine officer, Lieutenant-Colonel B.P. McCoy, described the engagement as 'blue-collar warfare'. At first hearing, this was grotesque, but I suppose that the metaphor means 'workaday', which is accurate enough. Worse is a new humorous acronym: KI/CAS, standing for Killbox Interdiction/Close Air Support.

I've just been reading with pleasure a facsimile of a little book called Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World, by Johannes Amos Comenius, as published in London in 1672. Dear old Comenius (1592-1670), a Bohemian by origin, sought a universal sharing of knowledge, hoping that 'scarecrows may be taken away out of wisdoms Gardens'. His picture book, first published in 1658, with its captions in Latin and native tongues, would, he thought, 'entice witty Children to it, that they may not conceit a torment to be in the School, but dainty-fare'. Poor Comenius had the misfortune to get caught up in the Swedish-Polish war, suffering the destruction of his books and manuscripts in 1656.

Dr C.M.W. Tang writes from Georgetown, Guyana, to say that an English lady professor of his acquaintance was perplexed when she was admitted to a hospital there and had to tick her race as 'Caucasian'. She wondered what connection she was supposed to have with a mountain range. She might well. We are all familiar from American cop shows on television with Caucasian as a racial label. But as far as I can tell, a German was to blame for the category. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) thought that the 'white' races came from the Caucasus region, and he was acknowledged as the founder of physical anthropology. Actually, that is what a late-20th-century edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica said. The 11th edition (1911) calls him the founder of anthropology, not physical anthropology.

The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, 'If I'd have known that...'. At first he wondered if I'd here stood for 'I would/should' or 'I had'. Then he heard someone say, 'Had I have known that.' Mr Norman thought people might be using in the protasis the formula that should apply only to the apodosis. But it is a question not of repeating the auxiliary would but of inserting a redundant have. I pondered it for some time before thinking to look it up in R.W. Burchfield's New Fowler's.

Mind your language In They Came to Baghdad, a topical-sounding novel by Agatha Christie, the heroine, Victoria Jones, finds 'all was above board, mild as milk and water.... Various dark-skinned young men made tentative love to her.' Or so I am told by Mr Bruce Harkness from Kent, Ohio. He also has, on occasion, to write footnotes explaining Conrad novels, and for Almayer's Folly he found he had to explain the following phrase: 'whether they made love under the shadows of the great trees or in the shadow of the Cathedral or on the Singapore promenade'. The problem was that readers took make love to mean 'engage in sexual intercourse'. Mr Harkness wonders until how recently writers could use the phrase in the more innocent social sense.

I am excited by a letter from Kensington, but before that let me notice a fearful symmetry between Martin Bashir's interview with Michael Jackson and the advertisements that punctuated it. These were intended to appeal to young people. One, for the Disney rehash of Treasure Island called Treasure Planet, has the animated Jim Hawkins saying, 'How cool is that?' - not a sentence of Stevenson's. I mentioned this phrase a fortnight ago, and so I was bound to notice it all over the place. But I didn't expect it to be quite so ubiquitous, for, immediately after the commercial break, we heard poor old Jacko remark, 'How ignorant is that?' about people who accused him of having plastic surgery or spending the night with children or something.

'Are you interested in penises, darling?' I asked my husband. 'Not really, dear. Wrong end of the market for me. I did once do the week after Christmas in a pox clinic when I was young. Busy and dull. Why do you ask?' The reason I asked was that I had become unconscionably irritated by a tired old joke resorted to with ever-increasing frequency by journalists, often in headlines. It is to write 'Size does matter' or some variant in an article that is not about sexual performance. Oddly enough, the Guardian, which one might think would be sensitive to silly sexist sniggering, is given to this sort of thing.

I have, I discover, had a letter on the kitchen table for many weeks. Its vintage is indicated by the plum juice which somehow found its way on to the lower part. It is from Mrs Olga Danes-Volkov, from Kent, and it is about cusha. Mrs Danes-Volkov has taken to calling to her two heifer calves (which must be grown-up by now) using this word because it is pretty and because she was prompted by a nursery rhyme in a Victorian book: Cushy cow bonny, let down your milk And I will give you a gown of silk; A gown of silk and a silver key If you will let down your milk for me. Iona and Peter Opie in their admirable Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes record this rhyme from as early as 1805. The version they give has tee for key, and tee is a 'cow tie'.