Mind your language
The inappropriate history of ‘ventriloquising’
‘What! No one told me,’ my husband shouted when I explained that the Hebdomadal Council at Oxford no longer existed…
Was Priti Patel really ‘gaslighting’ MPs?
Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own…
Where did ‘taking a knee’ come from?
That sympathetic physician, Sir Thomas Browne, thought himself austere in conversation. ‘Yet, at my devotion,’ he confessed in Religio Medici…
The French have made a hash of the hashtag
‘So my poor wife rose by five o’clock in the morning, before day, and went to market and bought fowls…
What’s the difference between ‘scaffold’ and ‘scaffolding’?
Whenever I turned on the news last weekend, my husband took to humming the March to the Scaffold from the…
The link between spick and span, spanking and spoon
I Hoovered on Saturday (or vacuumed as they say in newspapers eager to avoid using a trademark) while my husband…
Do we wrestle coronavirus to the floor – or the ground?
In the game of ‘U’ and ‘Non-U’, begun by Alan S.C. Ross (1907-80) and popularised in Nancy Mitford’s volume Noblesse…
From milk to prayer: the curious connections of ‘pasture’
‘We can now see the sunlight and the pasture ahead of us,’ said Boris Johnson on our escape from a…
How ‘odd’ became normal
‘Is this not the oddest news?’ Harriet Smith exclaimed to Emma Woodhouse, on the news that Jane Fairfax and Frank…
How ‘furlough’ became mainstream
In July, in its ‘Guess the definition’ slot, next to the day’s birthdays, the Daily Mail asked its readers to…
What does it mean to go ‘stir crazy’?
My husband left a copy of The Spectator open on the table by his chair, next to the little cardboard…
The animal ferocity of ‘ramping up’
My husband is fond of an old pub in Northumberland called the Red Lion, once a drovers’ inn, it says.…
Why my husband is throwing socks at the TV during the Covid-19 crisis
My husband has special ‘throwing socks’. They are a rolled-up pair of woolly hiking socks. He does not hike. He…
How ‘barley’ cropped up
‘Why can’t you write about something wholesome?’ asked my husband, in a flanking move. He was in a bad mood…
How to judge a book by its colour
I pictured the Green Book (which Rishi Sunak has been urged to tear up) as a matt card-bound thing like…
Why we can’t count toast
‘Somebody loves me,’ said my husband, waving a copy of The Spectator above his head as though pursued by wasps.…
What do elbows have to do with fighting coronavirus?
Before the Covid-19 scare I never thought that one particular Spanish proverb would come in useful. It goes: ‘Los ojos…
How did being connected become ‘connectivity’?
Facebook recently told readers of the Sun that satellites could ‘bring broadband connectivity to rural regions where internet connectivity is…
The Streatham stabbing is being investigated at pace. But what does that mean?
In Arnold Bennett’s Tales of the Five Towns, a young dog called Ellis Carter takes a girl for a drive…
Is Billie Eilish really in shock over James Bond?
Billie Eilish, who has just won five Grammys, is also singing the theme song for the next Bond film. ‘James…
Did Harry and Meghan step back, step down or step away?
At this time of year in Colorado the crime of puffing is widespread. It is so cold that in the…
Rebecca Long-Bailey is right: hyphens come and go
When Francis Hurt inherited the Renishaw estate in 1777, he changed his surname to Sitwell. His eight-year-old son and heir…
Pansexuality has been around longer than you think
When an MP announced she was pansexual I didn’t know what she meant. Indeed I didn’t know what she could…
What is a ‘tergiversation’?
Last year, someone at US dictionary Merriam-Webster noticed that lots of people were looking up the word tergiversation online. It…
What were the words that defined 2019?
‘Come off it,’ said my husband when I told him that upcycling was the word of the year. His response…
