Mind your language
the vs The
I complained mildly seven years ago that the Court Circular, the official source for the doings of the British monarchy,…
Overthink
Sometimes when I ask my stertorous husband in his armchair whether he is asleep, he replies with a start: ‘Just…
Living with
T.S. Eliot adopted a method of criticism that I am not aware of any other writer using: he imagined what…
Might
‘I’m with the King,’ said my husband. The king in question was Kingsley Amis, whose choleric The King’s English was…
Cancel culture
The cancel culture wants to obliterate people who do, or more often say, the wrong thing (for example, that there…
Deadweight
I was trying to understand what they meant on the wireless by deadweight costs. These were something to do with…
Love
It is 17 years since we began to hear McDonald’s: ‘I’m lovin’ it.’ This was always annoying, but most of…
Swathe
At Glastonbury in 2017 ‘a whole swathe of young people had a political awakening’, chanting ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’, said the…
Ventriloquising
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Gaslight
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Take the knee
That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici…
Hashtag
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls…
Scaffold
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the…
Spick and span
I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband…
Floor
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…
Pasture
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…
Odd
‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank…
Furlough
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to…
Stir crazy
My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard…
Ramp up
My husband is fond of an old pub in Northumberland called the Red Lion, once a drovers’ inn, it says.…
At home
My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He…
Barley
‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood…
The Green Book
I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like…
Behaviours
‘Somebody loves me,’ said my husband, waving a copy of The Spectator above his head as though pursued by wasps.…
Elbow
Before the Covid-19 scare I never thought that one particular Spanish proverb would come in useful. It goes: ‘Los ojos…
