Language
Are exclamation marks still vulgar? Yes!
‘Like eating in the street,’ said my husband. Astonishing! He’d said something not only coherent in itself but also connected…
The true meaning of Sadiq Khan’s claims to virtue
The new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said he wanted ‘the most transparent, honest and accessible administration London has ever…
The dirty jokes that tell us how Shakespeare spoke
Sir John Harington told a story in 1596 about a lady at court asking her gentlewoman to inquire which Mr…
The Archbishop of Canterbury and the shifting meaning of ‘illegitimate’
‘The Archbishop of Canterbury has discovered he is the illegitimate son of Sir Winston Churchill’s last private secretary,’ Charles Moore…
Mind your language: From body fluids to ‘gender fluid’
Benjamin Franklin thought that an excess of electric fluid gave rise to positive electricity, and a deficiency of the fluid…
Britain to have ‘special status’ in the EU? Careful what you wish for…
‘Special status?’ said my husband. ‘You mean like executioners, butchers and undertakers in Japan?’ I hadn’t suggested that, but had…
Does creaky voice make you a female yuppie – or an updated Vicki Pollard?
My husband, not surprisingly, finds it extremely annoying. It, in this instance, is the use by women of creaky voice.…
Beware of misusing ‘be aware’
My husband pointed with his stick, which he carries not to steady himself but to cudgel pedestrians out of his…
How ‘Not even a thing’ became a thing
Last summer Kim Kardashian, who already had a daughter called North (surname West), announced that she was expecting a boy.…
Are we at peak ‘peak’ yet?
Near Victoria Station in London they began to build a tower-block advertised as ‘The Peak’. I expected it to resemble…
The words The Spectator gave the world
When the much missed Frank Johnson (1943–2006), once editor of The Spectator, wrote in 1980 that ‘the peculiar need for…
Mind your language . . . on commit
My husband struck out with his stick at an advertisement in the street that said: ‘Commit to winter.’ He doesn’t…
Worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them
We should worry less about what to call Isis, and more about how to fight them
The rise of the man bun, the Mancan and man boobs
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ said my husband, as though he had learnt to laugh by reading Twitter. ‘Now they’ve got falsies.’ He…
Is ‘female’ still an insult?
‘More deadly than the male,’ said my husband archly. He was knowingly quoting Kipling, though I don’t know why he…
How we ended up ‘cisgender’
‘That’s not how you spell “system”,’ said my husband triumphantly, pointing with his whisky glass at a placard inveighing against…
Barry Humphries’s diary: My war with ‘Wow!’
I’m counting ‘Wows!’ Suddenly everyone is using this irritating expletive expressing incredulity, amazement and nothing at all. I’ve heard it…
Should we just stop using ‘fulsome’?
It’s funny that two much misused words end in —some: fulsome and noisome. Noisome is the less often used at…
I invented ‘virtue signalling’. Now it’s taking over the world
I invented the term ‘virtue signalling’ in The Spectator. Now it seems to be taking over the world
The weird truth about the word ‘normal’
‘Is Nicky Morgan too “normal” to be the next prime minister?’ asked someone in the Daily Telegraph. That would make…
I was wrong to criticise using ‘critique’ as a verb
I lost my husband on the way from Malabar. He is easily lost. We had been talking about the verb…
The remarkable discovery of Roger Fuckebythenavele
A great discovery has been made by Dr Paul Booth, a fellow of Keele University. It is a 14th-century example…
Why would Jeremy Corbyn want to be credible when he can be incredible?
In a wonderfully dry manual of theology on my husband’s bookshelves, written in Latin and printed in Naples in the…
Think ‘migrant’ is an insult? ‘Refugee’ can be too
Al Jazeera, the Qatari broadcaster, is going to use refugee instead of migrant in its English output. ‘The umbrella term…
‘Asexual’ used to mean something even creepier than ‘Edward Heath’
There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on…