Mind your language
England
Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question…
Mistakes
I enjoy Poetry Please, but was shouting mildly at the wireless the other day when a northern woman poet was…
Lumpen
A publisher, Kevin Mayhew, has written to The Tablet, which is not a computer journal but a weekly magazine of…
Out
I managed to grab the TLS last week before my husband stuffed it in his overcoat pocket and lost it…
Challenging
‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen. ‘I don’t…
No justice, no peace
The chant No justice, no peace by supporters of Mark Duggan, the drug gangster shot dead by police in 2011,…
In store
How do you play the lottery? The National Lottery website has a handy guide. Step No. 1 is: ‘Go into…
Roll
If Manchester University is to be believed, last year saw a creeping advance of effete southern language into the gritty…
Twankydillo, tweets and twerking
The Widow Twankey first appeared on stage in 1861. At that time daily papers listed on Boxing Day dozens of novelty-stuffed…
Push back
Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I…
Reverend
‘Here,’ said my husband, chucking a folded-back copy of the Daily Telegraph to me, ‘this’ll interest you.’ For once he…
Aunt
Catching up with the excellent biography of the 3rd Marquess of Bute (the man who built Cardiff Castle among other…
Believe
‘Believe in Magic & Sparkle,’ says the Marks & Spencer television Christmas advertisement. The phrase is meant to suggest the…
Collagen
I saw an advertisement for Active Gold Collagen, and I realised I didn’t know what collagen means. My husband just…
Pull & Bear
‘This’ll make you laugh,’ said my husband, sounding like George V commenting on an Impressionist painting. ‘Someone in the Telegraph…
Mind your language
‘Bare? Extra? What does it all mean?’ asked my husband, sounding like George Smiley in the middle of a particularly…
C-word, N-word
The BBC is to broadcast what is now referred to as the ‘C-word’ in a drama about Dylan Thomas. ‘It…
Hard-working
In his New Year message for 1940, Joseph Goebbels complained that the ‘warmongering cliques in London’ hated the German people…
Bare ruined choirs
I am shocked to find that William Empson, famous for his technique of close reading, was no good at reading…
Blazer
‘It’s not right, is it?’ said Veronica, pointing to a poster for H&M women’s blazers at £17.I agreed. But she…
Capital letters
One man’s grammatical nicety is another man’s grotesque solecism, I thought, as I perused a report in the Gulf News,…
Squee
Oxford Dictionaries have been adding some rather silly words to their online resources, such as phablet (‘a smartphone with a…
Self-whipping
Isabel Hardman of this parish explained after last week’s government defeat that a deluded theory among the party leadership had…
Vikings
‘What’s he saying now?’ asked my husband in a provoking manner when an actor read out a bit of the…
Hopefully
There was outrage last week when it was found that the Oxford English Dictionary had listed one sense of literally…
