Mind your language

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26 February 2022 9:00 am

A strange crisis has befallen like. It had long been an object of obloquy and vilification in two functions. The…

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In The Archers, Ambridge put on its own set of mystery plays dramatising the Nativity and Passion. BBC Radio 4…

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A policeman sent a colleague who was house-sitting for him a WhatsApp message: ‘Keep the pikeys out.’ He was sacked…

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‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a…

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29 January 2022 9:00 am

‘What’s so funny?’ asked my husband, accusingly, as I made an amused noise while relaxing with a copy of the…

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22 January 2022 9:00 am

‘Nurse! The tenaculum!’ exclaimed my husband in the manner of James Robertson Justice playing the surgeon Sir Lancelot Spratt. I’m…

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My husband is forever being sent magazines from his Oxford college inviting him to give it money. I suggest he…

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8 January 2022 9:00 am

‘Lashings of ginger beer?’ asked my husband when I mentioned backlash. He thought the phrase came from Enid Blyton, though…

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18 December 2021 9:00 am

Cis

Based

11 December 2021 9:00 am

My grown-up friends don’t use based in its new slangy sense, so I asked Veronica (whom I still think of…

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‘There once was a curate of Kew, / Who kept a young cat in a pew,’ began my husband when…

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27 November 2021 9:00 am

Language change outdoes nonsense, just as misbehaviour outdoes satire. In Through the Looking-Glass Alice mentions to the Gnat that, where…

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I had thought there were two pronunciations of Uranus. My husband, still capable of distinguishing the anatomical from the planetary,…

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13 November 2021 9:00 am

‘When they posted the closing-night notice for his first Broadway play, Comes a Day, he went into a drunken rage,…

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6 November 2021 9:00 am

‘You say scallops and I say scallops,’ sang my husband in his best Ginger Rogers accents. Since we both pronounce…

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30 October 2021 9:00 am

‘No, darling, I certainly wouldn’t call you a witch,’ said my husband. ‘You’re not thin enough.’ The Oxford English Dictionary…

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23 October 2021 9:00 am

The BBC made a documentary about a man sent to prison for being the ‘most prolific rapist in British legal…

Mind your language

16 October 2021 9:00 am

There’s a rude gesture in Pickwick that I don’t quite understand. Mr Jackson, a young lawyer’s clerk in conversation with…

Festive season

9 October 2021 9:00 am

‘Here you are, darling,’ I said to my husband. ‘These lines might have been written for you: “Drinke, quaffe, be…

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2 October 2021 9:00 am

When my husband’s whisky glass fell off the little table next to his chair on to next door’s cat, which…

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25 September 2021 9:00 am

In its coverage of the shuffled cabinet, the BBC added a note: ‘BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) is a…

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18 September 2021 9:00 am

I was rolling out some pastry that had been cooling its pudgy heels in the fridge when voices on the…

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11 September 2021 9:00 am

When Peter Quennell was sent down from Oxford for consorting with a woman called Cara (by Evelyn Waugh’s account), he…

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4 September 2021 9:00 am

‘This crossword is problematic!’ exclaimed my husband, tossing aside the folded newspaper marked with a ring where his whisky glass…

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28 August 2021 9:00 am

Language is used in a weird way in the victimhood war, where those who see themselves without agency bravely speak…