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Mind your language

The strange rise of ‘watch on’

8 March 2025

9:00 AM

8 March 2025

9:00 AM

‘Here’s a piece of filth for you,’ said my husband encouragingly. He was ‘helping’ me, as a cat might help wind wool. He’d come across a letter to the Guardian from 2015, in which Pedr James, who had directed a television dramatisation of Martin Chuzzlewit, drew attention to the name in the book for the proprietor of a ‘boarding house for young gentlemen’, Mrs Todgers.

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