Knee-jerk
A little joke by Paddy, Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon, turned upon something to be shunned. Conservative ministers, he said, had ‘indulged in a spasm of knee-jerking which would have made even St...
View ArticleNever
He won’t be remembered as Lord Bannside, but Ian Paisley will be remembered for shouting: ‘Never, never, never, never.’ The fourth never was hardly a shout, by his standards, but merged into the roar...
View ArticleMark Reckless
When I first heard ‘Wonderwall’ being played in a public house, in 1995 I suppose, I thought it was some unreleased Beatles record that had been just been discovered. The song appeared on an album,...
View ArticleDull
At least I’ve got my husband’s Christmas present sorted out: the Dull Men of Great Britain calendar. It is no doubt intended ironically, as travelling the country photographing old pillar-boxes, for...
View ArticleWhat’s sauce for the goose…
‘Goosey, goosey gander,’ my husband shouted at the television, like someone from Gogglebox. It’s not so much that he thinks the television real as that he thinks himself an unreal part of the...
View ArticleEbola
It should perhaps be called Yambuku fever, since that was the village in Zaire (as it was then, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) where it was identified in 1976 by Peter Piot, a scientist...
View ArticleReem
Joey Essex is a celebrity who appeared in the ‘scripted reality’ programme The Only Way is Essex, named not after him but the well-known county. He is 24, born in Southwark, and his main attractions...
View ArticlePlurals
Someone on Radio 4 said she had heard about the sexism of Grand Theft Auto on ‘Women’s Hour’. It is called Woman’s Hour, though the other is possible, on the model of Children’s Hour. But I was struck...
View ArticleParenting
‘Not still War and Peace!’ exclaimed my husband on 1 January during the all-day Tolstoy splurge on Radio 4. In reality he was glad to complain, as if it made him superior to the broadcasters. I...
View ArticleGet over yourself
You know how it goes with corporate speak. A strange new habit grows and spreads, creeping largely unnoticed into the language, until one day you hear a sentence so bizarre, so divorced from...
View ArticleProlific
I read somewhere recently of a Soho artist who was a ‘prolific drinker’. The meaning is clear, but hasn’t the word been taken for a walk too far from the neatly hedged semantic field where it was...
View ArticleLapsing into a comma
Typical mother-to-mother email, January weekday, 2015: ‘Thanks so much for helping out yesterday, Jamie had a great time with you all, thanks also for bringing his games kit home, let me know if you...
View ArticleColoured
Benedict Cumberbatch apologised at length: ‘devastated’, ‘shaming’, ‘offended’, ‘inappropriate’. What had he done? Been caught in a compromising situation or stolen from a shop? No he had used the...
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Twitter style
I don’t know if you tweet — No! Don’t turn over, I’m not going to get all techie. I do not tweet, but my husband does, voluminously. I won’t betray his rather strange handle and avatar. Those are...
View ArticleRobust
‘Heart of Oak are our ships, Jolly Tars are our men,’ shouted my husband unconvincingly. He has taken to doing this every time someone on air says robust, and that is pretty often. On this occasion it...
View ArticleAnniversary
‘You must promise to be with us for our silver wedding D.V. which will be in four years,’ wrote Queen Victoria in February 1861 to her daughter Vicky in Prussia, where her husband had just become...
View ArticleNegatively impacted
Maureen Finucane of Richmond, Surrey, wonders whether there is any branch of public service not infected by Orwellian Newspeak. In a letter to the editor (Spectator, 28 February), she explained that a...
View ArticleScobberlotcher
Hilary Spurling found a certain blunting of the irregularities of John Aubrey’s language in Ruth Scurr’s vicarious autobiography of the amiable man (Books, 14 March). It is true that his vocabulary...
View ArticlePoop
Danny Alexander recounted in the Diary last week his daughter’s efforts in making unicorn poop. This is something of a historic marker. Most members of the cabinet in previous generations have been...
View ArticleThey
I’ve been having a lovely time splashing about in the new Fowler. It has been revised by Jeremy Butterfield, an OUP lexicographer. There’s a new usage in it that I want to talk about, but first a word...
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