Mind your language
Petrichor: an awkward word for a pleasant phenomenon
I’m not too sure about the word petrichor, invented in 1964 as a label for the pleasant smell frequently accompanying…
‘Crest’ and the absurd language of heraldry
A friend of my husband’s, yet a well-educated man, said in conversation as we walked to Tate Modern: ‘Is that…
Signage
My husband, in company with a similarly superannuated medic on the unfamiliar London Underground, was bidden at Baker Street to…
Mind your language: County lines
We are suddenly all expected to know that county lines are to do with the selling of illegal drugs in…
‘Living with’ is now a thing – usually followed by something nasty like Alzheimer’s
I’m not at all sure about the formula a person living with, followed by something unwelcome, such as Alzheimer’s disease,…
Has Boris brought ‘turd’ back into polite society?
I have never lost my admiration for Boris Johnson’s summary of British ambitions over Brexit as ‘having our cake and…
Ideation, from suicide to management speak
‘Suicide!’ yelled my husband, while performing an inappropriate mime of a hangman’s noose. That was his reply when I asked…
The origins of the famous blue tiles of Portugal’s buildings have been misunderstood
A friend sent a nice postcard from Portugal showing the outside of a church covered with old blue tiles. She…
‘Iteration’ has escaped from the computer shops
‘They should say, irritation, not iteration,’ exclaimed my husband as a voice on the wireless spoke about men’s fashion and…
When ‘activist’ used to mean ‘Nazi supporter’
Rudolf Eucken had a beard and a way of tucking the ends of his bow tie under his collar that…
Unconscious bias: is Starbucks like the old Met Police?
Starbucks closed its 8,000 American coffee shops for half a day to give staff unconscious bias training. Training is to…
Like ‘gammon’, ‘spasmodic’ was a term to put down a despised tendency
To find out why the poetry of Ebenezer Jones was thought execrably bad, I turned to The Spectator of September…
Similar to (as opposed to like, as with, such as)
I’m often annoyed by like being misused in different ways. (In place of as, for example: ‘Like I expected, he was…
Is Donald Trump really bonkers?
John Kelly, the White House Chief of Staff, has a way with words. During the invasion of Iraq in 2003…
Paranoia and The Woman in White
I sat up with a jerk, after contemplating the wallpaper in the television dramatisation of The Woman in White, when…
Terf wars and the ludicrous lexicon of feminist theory
Fiore de Henriquez, a sculptor, had a wonderfully high-windowed studio at the bottom of Cadogan Square, where I sometimes visited…
When is an aubergine not an ‘aubergine’?
In the warm weather, I had an al fresco hit with my mad-apple bruschette. Mad-apple shows the tangle to which…
That Beano word ‘scoff’ was first coined in the mid-19th century
Scarcely a sober breath has been drawn in my house all week for celebrating the 90th anniversary of the completion…
Around v about: British English v American – not to mention across
Crooning is I think the word to describe what my husband was doing to the lyrics of a Beach Boys…
He, they, fae, fer or ze? Check your pronouns
Jay Bernard won the Ted Hughes Award last week. I managed to hear a snippet of the winning poem on Today…
Word of the week: dot
With the sensation produced by hearing one’s name, I jumped when I saw mine on a poster advertising an Amazon…
Why should the body be immune from being hacked about?
A 72-year-old Australian called Stelarc, the BBC reported, has an ear growing from one arm. He hopes to connect a…
We’ve been saying ‘wrap up warm’ for a thousand years
In June 1873, Oswald Cockayne shot himself. He was in a state of melancholy, having been dismissed by King’s College…
Trahison des clercs — a phrase that dates back all the way to 1927
I had long associated the phrase trahison des clercs with the writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft, though I can’t put my finger…
From Jeeves to Johnson: language and literary references in Boris’s speech
In Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, Bertie is moved to reward his inestimable valet for solving the unsolvable. Before requesting the…
