Mind your language
Trooping the Colour
Language is a weapon to do down others. ‘He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!’ said Estella disdainfully of Pip…
Not bloody likely
In My Fair Lady, which came out as a film in 1964, 50 years after Shaw’s Pygmalion, they decided to…
Reference
When Dickens wanted to buy a house in 1837, he wrote to Richard Bentley, who had started the magazine in…
Goof
Susie Dent has been trying to make us love Americanisms on Radio 4. Now Miss Dent knows far more about…
Anniversary
‘It’s like Pin number,’ said my husband, drifting into lucidity. So it is, in a way. The construction under discussion…
Progressive
I laughed, in a sympathetic way I hope, when I read a letter in the Daily Telegraph pointing out that…
Compliance
Ralph Bathurst was accused shortly after his death in 1704 of being ‘suspected of Hypocrisy and of mean Complyance’. I…
Jane
‘What are you laughing at?’ asked my husband in an accusing tone on Monday morning last week as he unloaded…
Envelope
One can push many things — a pen, one’s luck or (up) daisies. But the MP Dominic Raab told the…
King Charles’s head
‘It has become something of a King Charles’ head, or should that be a King Charles’s head?’ said my husband,…
An historic
Everybody’s saying it, even though the latest research declares that only 6 per cent of the population is given to…
St Thomas’s
Everyone praised the staff of St Thomas’s Hospital during the terrorist attack. My husband of course brought his own fly to…
Girls
Sir Roger Gale sounds like an old-bufferish knight of the shires, but he once worked as a disc-jockey on a…
Meet with
Don’t tell my husband, but I have been having doubts. (He never reads this column, so our secret is safe.)…
Kippah
What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m…
Kippah
What, asks the columnist Philologus in the online magazine Mosaic, is the difference between a kippah and a yarmulke? I’m…
Pick
I have long pondered the motive with which Michael Wharton, for long the author of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple…
Pick
I have long pondered the motive with which Michael Wharton, for long the author of the Daily Telegraph’s Peter Simple…
Curry favour
The number of things I don’t know is infinite — or infinite minus one, if such as number exists, since…
Curry favour
The number of things I don’t know is infinite — or infinite minus one, if such as number exists, since…
Rocket
‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much…
Rocket
‘It is rocket science,’ said my husband waving a pinnately lobed leaf snatched from his restaurant salad. He doesn’t much…
Trope
A law I’d like to see passed would exact severe penalties for the use of the word trope. It is…
Trope
A law I’d like to see passed would exact severe penalties for the use of the word trope. It is…
Trope
A law I’d like to see passed would exact severe penalties for the use of the word trope. It is…
